I can't keep giving them out to angry and violent white men, but that does give me an idea for an "Angry White Man Award of the Week". That will just get boring though. So....Dr. West gets the honors this week. Though he should be sharing it with Smiley and Dyson - which I'll get into below. This is for his penchant for wanting to spend time in the Crack House vs. the White House as per his statement via TWIB:
"That's not my calling. Yeah, brother, you find me in a crack house before you find me in the White House. I'll go into the crack house before I ever go that far inside.
Really?
Seriously.
Is this what an Ivy-League education produces....and reproduces? Like when does he actually travel without a car service and what does he know about standing on the corner in the 'hood? He'd rather immerse himself in a dangerous environment with people caught in the demonic throws of drug addiction instead of speaking to the President about possibly doing something that would eliminate the need for a crack house to exist?
Idiot!
This is why I was gently admonished by a reader for lamenting about why some Black female bloggers can't come to a consensus. Unless it's for some external cause like fighting the great white oppression many of us have absolutely nothing in common and we shouldn't expect to.
So he, Michael Eric Dyson and Tavis Smiley, whom I'll dub the "Triumvirate of Ego & Stupidity" keep harping on the President for the sake of being argumentative - not for any serious policy discussion. Just. Walk. Away. It's more pseudo-intelligentsia childish temper tantrums. I have yet to see any of these men spearhead one major campaign where they support or defend Black women on any issues of importance. They are the flip side of Reverend Co. (you know Sharpton, Jackson, et al) who have never met a Black male criminal they won't defend or rubber chicken dinner with money left under the plate they won't attend. Perhaps I'm being extra hard on Jackson, Sr.
No...don't think so!
Dr. Melissa Harris Lacewell took them to task for this last week in her piece, Don't Hold Obama Accountable to a Race Agenda" where she says:
On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of Smiley's accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled "Stand." Recycling Spike Lee's Million Man March film, "Get On the Bus," Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.
Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. "Stand" was an enormous disappointment.
Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.
The film and its participants (two of them my senior colleagues at Princeton University) appropriated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans. They used King's images and speeches, gathered on the balcony where King was assassinated, and explicitly asserted their desire to play King to Obama's LBJ, and Frederick Douglass to Obama's Lincoln.
Seriously.
Shudder.
We've got a serious domestic terrorism problem brewing where a few angry white men are going to Set It Off and this is all these "esteemed" men can talk about? Perhaps that's the point. If they keep saying these childish and foolish things we'll keep talking about them. Not Obama. Which is just they way they'd like it. For that - they get the SLAP!!!!
