From TheAmericanProspect:

John McWhorter has a thoughtful response to my Root piece arguing that Wells Fargo’s targeting of black folks for subprime loans proves that there are still systemic issues of racism to be dealt with:

Namely, a key factor here was a lack of knowledge on the part of the people who took these loans. The “racist” analysis will naturally seem wisdom incarnate to many, and more “interesting.” But alone it carries a rather nauseating implication: that it is inevitable that poor black people will take mortgages that they can’t afford.It’s more of the subtly internalized inferiority complex that elsewhere leads to conclusions such as that if black people don’t do well on a test then the solution is to discount the test results.

John Bryant readily argues that part of what faces us is “financial illiteracy” and getting the word out to struggling people of color to not take such loans. This would be as effective a response to the problem as suing a bank.

John also writes that “discrimination today is of a radically different sort than what it used to be, not as central to what holds blacks back as it once was, and requiring different responses than what made sense fifty years ago.”

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From John McWhorter at The New Republic:

Barack Obama’s inaugural address was the first in a long time to resound powerfully enough to be worthy of marble. However, it was the first in the 220-year history of the custom in another way: its seasoning of black cadence. This was even more exhilarating in that the cadence played an integral part in the power of the oration.

Black English is a matter not just of slang, but of sentence structure and sound (why you can tell most black people’s race over the phone, which is proven in studies). Some blacks use all three; Obama is one of the many who wields mostly the sound. Listen to the way he often ends sentences on a higher pitch than, say, Tom Brokaw would, with that preacherly hang-in-the-air. Or the way he often pronounces “history” as “historih,” “ability” as “abilitih.” His rendition of the word responsibility was indicative: with a cadence typical of Black English, capped by a final “ih.” No President has ever intoned sentences in this way, because they were not black.

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According to a USA Today poll published today, two-thirds of Americans-far more than the 53% who actually voted for Obama -describe themselves as “proud” and “optimistic.”

This optimism extends to the future of race relations. Among blacks, the number who believe America will “eventually” work out “relations” jumped to 67%, up from 50% five months ago.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of Obama’s win. Among other things, it is the first major political victory experienced (and largely wrought) by the hip-hop generation. Like the victories won by the previous generation-the passing of Roe v. Wade, the end of American involvement in Vietnam, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts-it has the potential to galvanize us for years to come.

Our landmark experiences, until now, have largely been losses and setbacks: the Rodney King verdict, the Amadou Diallo shooting. Psychologically and emotionally, the memory of Obama’s victory will be something to store away for inspiration, for our children and ourselves.

And yet, the backlash we knew to expect is here too.

Obama’s win is already being trumpeted by conservatives as proof that racism is no longer an issue-or, as they would have it, an “excuse.” Before the electoral results were even tallied, William Bennett was spinning them ceaselessly on CNN; the next morning, the Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter picked up the baton.

A friend of mine, a black academic, reports that no less than two middle-aged white men started conversations with him on an Amtrak ride from Ohio to Boston the morning after Election Day. Both of them advanced the theory that Obama’s election constituted proof of a new “post-racial” America.

Why, if it is so post-racial, they felt the need to talk to a black man about it, is unclear. One might also wonder why they both picked the best-dressed black man on the train to address their remarks to-and I feel certain they didn’t also strike up chats with any doo-ragged black teenagers.

Obama’s election presents us with a singular opportunity for progress, but it will have to happen not just on the level of spectacle (though the sight of the president-elect’s beautiful daughters walking across the Grant Park stage with their father, and the thought that these girls will be part of America’s new public face, was as moving as anything else about Tuesday night). Progress must also come on the level of policy.

More important than the symbolic renewal his presidency represents for a badly-diminished America is the question of what he will do to end the epic incarceration of black men, revamp an educational system that re-inscribes racial and economic disparities, and address institutional bias in all its insidious and well-quantified forms.

Certainly, Obama’s victory should make us optimistic, but we must also quickly return fire when the Bennetts and McWhorters of the world make use of it to further their project of obscuring structural racism.

And when giddy white liberals use it as an excuse to continue ignoring the realities of racism, we must be swift in explaining that nothing has yet been solved-and do our best to alchemize their excitement into a commitment to recognizing and fighting against institutional prejudice.

But even the ‘post-race’ backlash presents possibilities.

Professional talking heads like Bennett and McWhorter are simply continuing to do what they do, but for rank-and-file whites to strike up conversations about racism-or even the alleged vanishing thereof-is something new. For this sentiment to be aired publicly, whether it is long-held or newly acquired, is a good thing.

It may not be intended to incite dialogue, much less disagreement, but it does offer an opportunity for an empirical response: No, Obama’s election is not proof that racism is over, and here’s why. Given the tremendous atmosphere of goodwill now suffusing the country, it is a conversation that might actually get somewhere.

Watch Bill Bennett spin Obama’s victory on CNN:

Adam Mansbach is the author of the novels The End of the Jews and Angry Black White Boy. He is the New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.

Who could blame them? McWhorter, a former linguistics professor at Cornell University and the University of California – Berkeley, is the author of 12 books and reads 13 languages. He has been outspoken about hip-hop in his New York Sun column, lectures and media appearances.

He’s also a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute whose fellows in the past have published books like The Bell Curve, Coloring The News: How Crusading for Diversity has Corrupted American Journalism and McWhorter’s own Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. With the publication of All About the Beat, hip-hop joins the hit list.

The mainstream image of hip-hop is already so negative that it’s easy for just about anyone to critique it. McWhorter has been given a national platform to do so, hawking All About the Beat on CNN, Fox News, C-Span and on several morning shows. But in attempting a book length analysis on hip-hop culture and the political organizing efforts connected to it, McWhorter bit off more than he could chew.

Instead of a scholarly investigation of this emerging movement, McWhorter relies solely on hip-hop’s negative public image to carry his thesis: young people are misguided if they believe they can connect hip-hop to any political effort.

This would make an interesting argument, if McWhorter actually engaged young activists involved in meaningful grassroots political organizing around the country. He could have scratched the surface with Global Policy Solutions founder Maya Rockeymoore, Milwaukee Campaign Against Violence head Rob Biko Baker, and Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Rosa Clemente, to name a few.

Or he could have begun with national efforts like the League of Young Voters, The Young Voters Alliance, and The National Hip-Hop Political Convention (Full disclosure: I along with three others initiated the Convention, which brought over 3000 young people to Newark in June 2004). He doesn’t.

To the contrary, he gives us cynical rants that suggest supporters of hip-hop politics believe popular rap stars will lead a movement—a conversation that hasn’t gained traction in hip-hop circles since the 1980s. In doing so, McWhorter misses the real point of hip-hop’s effectiveness as a political force: hip-hop’s cultural arts movement has created a national infrastructure of various youth collectives, a unified youth culture that hip-hop organizers are tapping into to organize youth politically—much the same way the Christian Coalition did with radical right-leaning churches in the 80s.

Rather than analysis, this book is a mean spirited attempt to deter these young activists from working toward their own visions for change in their communities—especially as they depart from his Black conservative impulse.

He seems hell-bent on discrediting them in much the same way the Right attacked Sixties radicals, defining them as outfits with no agenda beyond “hating whitey,” a phrase that McWhorter repeatedly uses throughout the book to describe hip-hop political thought. That much of hip-hop activism is multi-racial and engaged in cross-racial organizing escapes him.

McWhorter refuses to address altogether the impact of this group of grassroots organizers on the national election scene in recent years.

The 2004 presidential race marked a turning point for Democrats. They logged incredible voter turnout among youth—an increase of 4.6 million 18-29 year-old voters from 2000. This surge laid the foundation for rising youth turnouts in 2006 and again during the primaries earlier this year.

What is particularly frightening to conservatives about these often left-of-center organizers is that they don’t leave the battlefield after presidential campaign euphoria dies down. Day in and day out, they remain in the trenches still planning and growing organizations until the next national election rolls around. The Hip-Hop Caucus and Hip-Hop Congress for example, weren’t major players in 2004. This year, they are among the most innovative groups the watch.

McWhorter may not have done his homework, but someone on the Right followed the money trail from Democratic party big donors and their array of 527s to on-the-ground hip-hop efforts—even if they didn’t clue in McWhorter.

Democrats may be conflicted about their success with young voters. But if there is anything to be learned from this book—a major publication on hip-hop in a presidential election year by a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—it is that those on the right are clear about the new danger.

Watch John McWhorter respond during an interview here:

Bakari Kitwana is co-editor of the forthcoming Let’s Get Free: Strategies for Organizing the Hip-Hop Voting Bloc (Third World Press, September 2004)

Senator Obama’s challenge is obvious. In the political mainstream hip-hop equals sex, violence, misogyny and criminal behavior. And no matter how fiercely it’s defended, this message doesn’t get explained away. Obama’s opponents (Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham leading the pack) are eager to link Obama with Ludacris. To do so, they imagine, is to associate Obama with hip-hop and thus tarnish his image.

If hip-hop is the problem with American moral values, the logic goes, then a vote for Obama is to vote against family values.

To be sure, those advancing an Obama-Ludacris connection as a political scandal hope to siphon votes from Obama –either from those on the fence or from hip-hop generationers who feel he doesn’t have their back.

Like many seemingly harmless issues that evolved into huge media obsessions this year, the Ludacris backlash is driven by traditional political elites, banking on old racial fears. Most can’t get past Ludacris’ “paint the White House black” lyrics, which pundits translate to this: if the president is Black quality of life will increase for Black Americans, but only at the expense of whites.

This push echoes the vetting of Black presidential candidates, and of Barack Obama specifically–denounce this, denounce that. He’s denounced Farrakhan, his former minister Jeremiah Wright, his former Church, a Catholic priest who spoke at his former church and now Ludacris. The object of his disaffection is increasingly becoming more tangential, but the impetus is always the same – since Obama is Black, he must prove that he won’t use the presidency as a bully pulpit for Black political interest.

Obama will likely weather this storm even easier than the previous ones. But what the Ludacris controversy reveals for the hip-hop activist community is much more profound: the baggage presented by hip-hop’s public image compromises the hip-hop activist community’s attempts to place its issues on the national agenda.

Hip-hop’s critics, like Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter, use mainstream hip-hop music’s association with criminality and sex to dismiss three things:

• the political analysis offered by some hip-hop lyrics,

• the important political work of activists on the ground from The Ella Baker Center and The League of Young Voters to Industryears.com and Hip-Hop Against Police Brutality,

• and hip-hop activists’ legitimate concerns about the state of American youth.

Thus, issues like the need for affordable and effective education, housing and childcare, the inherent racial injustices of policing and prisons, and the lack of living wage jobs don’t receive serious consideration.  Neither do the solutions that hip-hop organizers are proposing for them.

Such issues were raised last week at the annual conference of the Hip-Hop Congress, an 80 chapter strong national organization of independent hip-hop artists and grassroots activists that has been functioning for the last decade. They will be raised again this weekend at the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention, gathering in Las Vegas August 1-3. Reverend Lennox Yearwood, who heads the The Hip-Hop Caucus that recently partnered with rapper T.I. to kick-off a voter registration effort targeting youth, is also raising similar questions.

All three organizations, should do themselves and their movement a favor by articulating loudly and clearly hip-hop’s moral center: that hip-hop political organizers are concerned about the negative representations of women, that criminal lifestyles aren’t something youth should emulate, and that young Black, Brown and poor people are concerned about the future of their families and are committed to placing the interest of children first.

To do so will align this emerging voting bloc with Black political movements before them and win allies in the process. But perhaps more important, it will go a long way in helping distance their noble cause from the profit motive of the music industry. It will also distinguish them from the few individuals willing to peddle hyper sexual and violent imagery at the expense of those fighting for an America where young people have a bright future.