Kenyon Farrow

Sorry I been gone. I’ve been busy with my job, my other projects, and family shit. But I have been keeping up with what’s goin on in the world.

So one of the things I have grown anxious about is how crime is going to be used in the upcoming election. Listening to Barack’s victory speech in Texas, which he said “As Commander in Chief, my job will be to keep you safe. And I will not hesitate to strike against any that will do us harm.” So now he’s gotta look as tough on national security as John McCain. Pity. It’s this part that is making me a little queasy.

So if Obama nabs the nomination, not only will his ability to “push the button” be called into question, but he will also be scrutinized for how tough on crime he is. So far, his talk about crime has been about how he led mandatory taping of police investigations in the Illinois legislature, and his support of death penalty, racial profiling and mandatory minimum sentencing. But a look at his Senate page on crime is much more frightening. It includes, as his accomplishments, legislation to increase restrictions and surveillance on “sex offenders” to increasing the capacity of local police officers to use technology—I guess for better surveillance. (Talk Left has a great blog entry on Obama and criminal justice issues).

Sigh.

But I hope that he can figure out a way to get through this without using “tough on crime” rhetoric as a selling point. Regardless, there are several high-profile reforms coming down the pike that I hope can move us away from such draconian practices and reduce the numbers of people in prison.

The New York Times reported on a new program in the city to provide young people with therapists who work with the families to help get at the root of the issues instead of sending them to prison:

“When Jacob Rivera, 15, was resentenced in May on an assault conviction, he felt he had received a “blessing.”

Only months earlier he had been sentenced to a year in state custody, and he had already spent weeks bouncing between a juvenile detention center in the Bronx and a residential treatment campus upstate. Two of his older siblings had spent time in those facilities and, he said, had “come out a mess.” He could see his future.

But the court gave him a second chance because his case had not been properly reviewed for inclusion in a new alternative sentencing program, which the city started in February 2007. The program, called the Juvenile Justice Initiative, sends medium-risk offenders back to their families and provides intensive therapy.

The city says that in just a year, it has seen significant success for the juveniles enrolled, as well as cost savings from the reduced use of residential treatment centers.”

Mother Jones has a pretty good news analysis of the fight on the federal level to end mandatory minimum sentencing for crack cocaine:

“Speaking before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Gretchen Shappert warned that shorter crack-cocaine sentences will cause a “loss of the public’s trust and confidence in our criminal justice system”—a possibility that is only slightly less troubling than Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s claim that reduced sentences will mean that “1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide.”

These statements are scare tactics aimed at reversing a decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the agency responsible for setting sentencing rules in the federal courts, which has pegged March 3 as the first day federal prisoners doing time for crack offenses are eligible to petition for reduced sentences. This countdown comes just after the Commission’s introduction of less-harsh crack-sentencing standards in November, and the December announcement that this reduction will be applicable to inmates currently incarcerated as well as future offenders. The Justice Department, citing “public safety risks,” is trying to overturn the rule. But giving inmates the chance to obtain shorter sentences won’t spur a mass prison exodus: Judges will still decide which inmates deserve a reduction and which don’t. No one is guaranteed an early release.”

Mother Jones is the shit. They also have a great story on a corporate prison executive whom Bush is appointing to be the trail court judge in Tennessee.

The star power behind Obama’s campaign is almost dizzying. From the Kennedy’s-Ted, Caroline, and Maria Shriver, to Oprah and Black Eyed Peas lead will.i.am have been campaigning in different ways for the candidate. Will.i.am produced this song and video with the help of a whole bunch o’stars for Obama that’s been circulating the net the last few days (thanks for sending it my way Aishah!). Most impressive is will.i.am saying he did this without prodding from the Obama camp, and made this all happen in 48 hours.

And then there’s Oprah, who first spoke on behalf of Obama in December in South Carolina. But she delivered an incredible speech this weekend at UCLA. Agree with the contents of her speech, Oprah is one hell of a public speaker.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like the movement to elect Barack Obama. Like it or not, like him or not, he has touched something in people unlike anything I have ever seen in the American political landscape. People simply go crazy at his rallies it seems, and the energy is palpable through the telly or online, and I haven’t even seen him in person.

Now I am clear that part of the attraction is his charm and good looks. I mean, I wasn’t really following him until I saw him about a year ago on Oprah, and I found myself swooning from my living room sofa. I think if he were unattractive the “energy” around him, sapped of that sexuality, would we be so caught up?

Also I am aware that a lot of his efforts to “de-racialize” his campaign has given a lot of white people (liberals and conservatives alike) the idea that electing him would put to bed issues of systemic anti-black racism in our society so “we can all just get along,” and get on with it. They are sick of feeling guilty and are really hostile to Black people, and may in some ways see him as a way of shutting down Black political concerns around racial justice (To be fair, I heard Barack say recently that just because he decided to run a campaign that didn’t focus on his race as a candidate did not mean that the issues facing America did not have institutionalized racism at their very core.). It is this issue that I think unnerves alot of Black folks about his campaign.

But I think that it is not only whites (or I guess I should say, non-blacks) who want to stop talking about racism, I think that many black people are tired of talking about racism too-and I think this is a particularly new phenomenon we will need to grapple with. We know that Black conservatives are on that tip-Ward Connerly and the like-but that’s not who I am talking about. I think a lot of masses of Black people want to get beyond the conversation of race too. This is complicated, but I think it makes sense, whether I agree or not.

First, I think that many Black people may feel somewhere, that organizing our political issues squarely around race has failed. Nevermind the reasons why, but given the conditions the Black community currently faces, many people may feel it simply has not worked. Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, as Cathy Cohen, Angela Davis and Tommie Shelby have pointed out, the black community has not been able to successfully mass-mobilize around causes because they mostly affect particular aspects of the community we have never really organized to protect specifically-women, queers, poor people, youth, etc.

Secondly, I think being the most segregated and marginalized of all groups has meant that the community is not really in any position to organize solely on the basis of race. And I think a lot of Black people-because of our particular social/political isolation-want to feel apart of something beyond their race, whether it’s really possible or not-the desire is there. We also have to admit that we had help (albeit often problematic) during the Civil Rights Era, and other communities just don’t seem very interested in racial solidarity with Black issues as a whole. Black folks are well aware racism still exists, but what does it mean when we feel so marginalized from each other that Blackness may not be the place to organize from around most issues adversely impacting Black people? We can get on board with nooses around a tree in the South, but we can’t when we gotta talk HIV/AIDS-cuz it affects queers and women and poor people who don’t make good “innocent victim” types for bullet-proof campaigns.

These of course, aren’t the only reasons Black people are supporting Obama, but I think that there are some things at work more than just supporting him because he’s Black. Consider that it took a big Iowa win (a state with a 4% Black population) for Black support for him to turn in the polls in his favor over Clinton. It reflects a new cynicism that Blacks folks didn’t feel comfortable supporting him until they new he stood a chance at winning. We, as a whole, have never been that invested in supporting our own just because they could win before. To be sure, the more he campaigned, the more people got to get a better sense of him, since he is fairly new to the national stage. But sometimes we supported other Black people out of sheer spite-even when we knew that the Black person was DEAD WRONG! (Does the name R. Kelly ring a bell? Marion Barry? Sharpe James? I could go on…).

So here comes Barack Obama — representing in different ways, the hopes of people to move beyond divisive politics, be it along racial lines, political lines, etc.-and interests that are sometimes conflicting. He is, in that way, like Regan-different groups get different messages all from the same messenger. And tomorrow, Super Tuesday, people will begin to cast their vote for that sense of longing-either for the politics of yesteryear in Hillary Clinton or the longong for something new in the promise of Barack Obama (although some would argue that the first woman President would also be a promise of something new, but I think that narrative is harder for Clinton to claim because people feel as though they know her so well after being such a public figure for the last 15 years). He is capturing something that people, albeit for very different reasons, want-to belong and feel that they are apart of something. American culture not only has become politically polarized, but even more psychically alienating, and the longing to be included is something that he rightly recognizes and is pursuing as his brand, and it is this that many people have on their hearts as they go to vote.

The Left has paid far too little attention to this aspect of life, by trying to win on “issues” and trying to connect those issues to people’s sense of longing-as my friend Suzanne Pharr has been discussing in recent years. So, to those who do not like Obama, and feels he is promoting a shallow and hollow rhetoric, that’s fine. But understand, people just don’t vote their economic interest, as time immemorial has proven. The Left has a big job ahead-figuring out how to transform, curtail or destroy American (western or white supremacist) domination is going to necessarily require a different engagement in the emotional alienation that people feel, and working to transform that.

With this framework in mind, I’ll be bringing a couple other thoughts about his candidacy this week.

Blogger Jonathan Stein over at Mother Jones beat me to the punch on this one, but that’s one of the tragedies of having a full-time job and trying to blog at the same time. But in all the back patting or weeping (depending on who’s side you’re on) over the South Carolina primaries, Stein at MJ and I are asking the same question: Did the Clinton camp intentionally lose SC to “niggerize” Obama to cut white support from under him?

I definitely think it’s a possibility. First off, the media has been referring to the SC primary as “the Black Primary” because it’s a 30% Black state, and 50% of the voting Democrats in the state are of African descent. With the nation already thinking about what would happen in SC as representative of Black people, here’s what occurred:

1. Hillary Clinton—in an attempt to pain Obama as some ragtag feel good community organizer and not presidential—used the analogy that while MLK mobilized people, it took LBJ to pass the Civil Rights Act. Black people took offense to that.
2. Bill Clinton appeared on radio to defend him, and called Obama’s campaign a fantasy.
3. BET founder Bob Johnson went off on Obama when introducing Senator Clinton at a rally in SC—basically insinuating that Obama was getting high on coke in Chicago while Hillary was serving the Nation.
4. Then Bill Clinton performed less like the spouse of a candidate and more like a running mate (He even appeared on television to essentially deliver her concession speech after she lost), by appearing all over the place making comments about Obama and using verbiage to link him to Jesse Jackson.

The niggerization campaign in full effect. I think this turned a lot of Black people off to the Clintons, quite frankly, who overwhelmingly (81%) voted for Obama in South Carolina. Even though Obama had a great deal of support of the white voters under 30 years of age, the fact that he won in the Black primary became the story.

The Obama camp has known for some time that they simply cannot run him as a candidate who is concerned only about Black America if they want to have any real chance of winning. But was the Clinton strategy to force Obama off of his “above the political fray and above racial politics” message done to permanently smear his image with white and Latino voters to lessen his chance of winning the states where she is more competitive on Super Tuesday?

I think this bears some thinking about.

What may be problematic for her is the fact that the political establishment that has remained neutral so far may begin to shift to Obama’s camp. Congressman James Clyburn of SC had some thinly veiled harsh words for the Clinton Campaign after Obama’s win, saying about the Obama win: “‘I’m not surprised at that at all…Because I really believe that in the last 48 hours the voters recoiled. They decided to reject the racial animus they seemed to be developing and I’m so pleased.’

This weekend (and today, Monday) it was announced that two Kennedy’s-Caroline and Senator Ted-endorsed Obama. And most surprising, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison endorsed Obama today.

Where this strategy may perhaps get her a nomination at the summer DNC, it may hurt her chances in the fall. Black people, if they feel Clinton played dirty to shut down the chances of the first Black President to be elected, may turn on her and simply not vote in November. Will it then have been worth it?

For more interesting commentary on Obama’s de-racialized campaign read an article from 2007 in In These Times from a person who knows him, and my good friend Kai Wright’s new piece in The Root (a brand new “Black” online publication—owned by the Washington Post. Henry Louis Gates is Editor-in-Chief.

It’s gettin hot in herr! The gloves are coming off, and people are now being forced to take sides. Senator Hillary Clinton has been trying to spin herself out of a whole she dug when she, at an attempt to dig at Senator Barack Obama, said that while he likes to compare himself to MLK, it took a president-Lyndon B. Johnson-to pass the Civil Rights Act.

The blacks are giving her hell over that comment, and on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” she said that the Obama campaign was “deliberately distorting” her comments.

Well I saw the interview when it aired, and no, no one is distorting her comments. She said something really politically foolish trying to one-up Obama, and she got caught out there. I thought at the time that that statement was going to come back to haunt her.

But it doesn’t end there. Saturday, Bob Johnson, founder of BET had the unmitigated gall to stand up in front of a crowd and act as the authority on Black people, and defend Clinton’s record with Black people. Johnson said

“To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues — when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book — when they have been involved.”

He later said he was not referring to Obama’s admitted drug use. As black as the Clintons think they are, they are white enought to not realize how many Black people actually despise Bob Johnson. Many of us blame him for cutting BET news programming (and firing Tavis Smiley), and turning the channel into a video channel replete with images of violent black masculinites, hypersexualized black women, with a hefy dash of homophobia. In fact, THE SAME NIGHT he made these comments, Black folks were protesting outside the taping of a BET Awards show in DC.

Johnson is also the sleaze bag who moved the show Comic View from Los Angeles to Atlanta, allegedly in order to avoid paying unionized rates to comics appearing on the show. Not that I care about that modern day minstrel show, but it was still a low blow.

To make matters even worse, I just saw a debate on PBS’ The New Hour between SCLC veteran Rev. Joseph C. Lowry (Team Obama) and Civil Rights vet Rep. John Lewis (Team Clinton). John Lewis had the nerve to defend Clinton on the basis that “The Clintons would never do anything to harm African-Americans.” I am not sure if that’s a direct quote, but it’s definitely not far off. He said it twice.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US?

I can definitely understand why black people may not necessarily be in 100% Barack’s camp, but I certainly cannot understand why some of us back Clinton over him-and completely uncritically.

But I said a few posts ago this election was going to help expose the tensions of the civil rights old guarde as they fall out of favor. Not because Black people are more conservative, but because they are now too entrenched in the machine to be effective as agitators. And their tacit support of the Clintons against a Black candidate generally more progressive than either Bill or Hillary, is quite telling. William Jelani Cobb has a great article in the Washington Post about this very issue.

The blogosphere is awash today with rumors that there were major voting irregularities in New Hampshire-paper ballots count Obama as the winner whereas Diebold electronic machines count Clinton as the winner of the presidential primary. I tried to cut to the chase and go to the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s website to see if the results were posted as such, and thus far, they haven’t posted the results all of the counties in the states. And they don’t list whether the ballots were hand counted or Diebolt AccuVote Machines (recently renamed Premier).

But here’s what’s being said.

Presscue.com:

Hillary Clinton’s victory celebrations in New Hampshire were short lived after Internet bloggers uncovered that the former first lady did better in precincts where the votes were counted by the much maligned Diebold voting machines, whereas in precincts where votes were hand counted, her rival Barack Obama was the clear winner.

Illinois Senator vying to become the first black President of the United States has already conceded victory and congratulated Clinton, but the blogosphere is buzzing with allegations of vote fraud directed at the Clinton camp.

Obama garnered 38.7% of the hand counted votes to Clinton’s 36.2%, but Diebold machines gave Clinton 40.7% of the vote against Obama’s 36.2%.

Bloggers have highlighted the fact that the candidate placed second from each method got exactly 36.2% of the vote. (view their handy chart showing the difference between the handcount and the voting machine count)

Today, Tribune Co. columnist Bob Koehler had this to say in his column today:

Did the Hillary campaign really defy the pollsters? She had been trailing Barack Obama by 13 percentage points, 42 to 29, in a recent Zogby poll, as election watchdog Brad Friedman pointed out. And the weekend’s “rapturous packed rallies for Mr. Obama,” as the New York Times put it, “suggested Mrs. Clinton was in dire shape.”

So when she emerged from the Tuesday primary with an 8,000-vote and 3-percentage-point victory over Obama, perhaps — considering the notorious unreliability, not to mention hackability, of Diebold machines — the media might have hoisted a few red flags in the coverage, rather than immediately chalk the results up to Clinton’s tears and voter unpredictability. (Oh, if only more reporters considered red flags patriotic.)

The fact is, whatever actually happened in New Hampshire voting booths on Tuesday, our elections are horrifically insecure. For instance, Bev Harris, of the highly respected voting watchdog organization Black Box Voting, recently wrote that the Diebold 1.94w optical scan machines used in some 55 percent of New Hampshire precincts (representing more than 80 percent of the state’s voters) are “the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)” a few years ago. They haven’t been upgraded; the security problems haven’t been fixed.

National, or at least media, denial about this situation doesn’t say much for the strength of our democracy.

Interesting. But not altogether surprising.

I’ve been obsessed with the election. I admit it. I guess that makes me a bad radical. Good revolutionaries (at least in America, for some reason) aren’t supposed to be concerned with elections and the political process (I think leftists in Venezuela, Kenya, and Iran-to name a few-would beg to differ.). But I have been somewhat bitten by the bug. My cynicism is somewhat on hold, and I am trying real hard to show some restraint and not run out and get one of those “Barack The Vote” hoodies I saw for sale. Maybe that’s what’s different here-elections as commodity, politicians as celebrity. But I am joining my homie The Black Snob and am allowing myself to get caught up. Fuck it!

Well, CNN and the Associated Press have just declared Hillary Clinton the winner of the New Hampshire primary. So I guess white people in New Hampshire got in that voting booth and pulled a stunt! Barack is now addressing the audience in NH. He asked them to give Senator Clinton a round of applause-did she do that for him when she lost last week?. He’s dreamy!

It’s interesting because he’s still using the “there’s something happening in America” line. Instead of using it to refer to his historic candidacy, he’s using it to talk about the new dawn of American politics that are about compromise and not about screaming matches. He is calling his voters, and America by extension, “the new majority.”

They clearly love him. They’re chanting O-ba-ma with such fervor! I do have to say it is interesting to see a candidate that inspires so much hope in people.

To my fellow readers, friends, admirers, comrades: I haven’t lost my mind. I don’t agree with everything he says, but hell, I don’t agree with half of what you all say or think half of the time! I am worried about what his role as “Commander in Chief” is going to mean in terms of militarism and policing and prisons and what not. But I do feel inspired by a vision of something less arrogant, less violent,. Can I have that, please? LOL! I feel like I am betraying the $11,000 debt I just racked up for J-school (so I guess I’ve officially given up a conventional career in journalism. The one progressive news outlet I was trying to write for, blew me off, so the hell with it) by publicly supporting a candidate, and betraying my leftist community by being involved in electoral politics, which is a movement faux pas, from what I understand.

He ends his speech with Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” The pundits on CNN seem to think it was a funny thing, given the fact that he didn’t take the #1 slot (he’s now only 2% points behind with 79% of the vote-not exactly a blowout) Clinton’s speech is good, but she’s not fire like Obama, who seems to be on nothing short of a mission.

Speaking of speeches? Wanna know something about the editor behind Obama’s speeches? Read this Newsweek story.

Last night I gathered with some friends in Brooklyn to watch the Iowa Caucus’ unfold. Mostly black queers, and mostly Obama supporters. We all talked about his candidacy, this election, and what the word is on the street from friends and family members about Obama.

Almost all of us shared stories of knowing other Black folks who thought it would just simply be impossible for him to win-that many white people would simply not vote for him.

Well that was proven wrong, in what can be nothing short of an upset: Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus. Not only did he win, but he beat the second place John Edwards by 8% points, and Hillary Clinton by 9% points. The fact that he won in a state with only a 4% black population is incredible.

According to the pollsters, it was the youth and Black vote that supported Obama in Iowa. The older you were on the Democratic side, the less likely you were to vote for Obama. There were apparently twice as many people who showed up to caucus than in the previous presidential election, and they carried some serious weight on the Democratic side. Also, more than 40% of independents voted for Obama. People forget Obama was an community organizer, and it seems as though his team’s strategy to turn out their voters was a huge success.

While it is true that no other Black candidate has been able to win Iowa and his victory is historic, I hated listening to the CNN anchors talk about his win. They talked about his being a “uniter, and not angry or bitter” which are code words for being the “right type of negro” who doesn’t threaten white people. They’re so glad that they can call an end to Black people being mad at them. NOTE: Listen to William Bennett’s commentary on CNN.

Well I hate that that’s the narrative he’s riding in on-being the person whose going to unite the country and all. But has he stated implicitly or explicitly that he is trying to distance himself from traditional Black leadership or struggle? Or is the media forcing that interpretation? Undoubtedly there is a schism happening in the Ole’ Civil Rights Leadership about Obama. Perhaps they resent the media’s notion that they’re just nagging white people about problems that are long ago solved. I have many problems with the old civil rights leadership and wish that most of them would just retire and get out of the way so some new work can be done (the only thing they love to do more than march is to gate-keep). But I can understand why they’d be pissed at hearing how everything their friends fought and died for is irrelevant all the time.

But I actually think some of their early support for Hillary Clinton is more insidious than that (I think the same can be said for the unions backing Clinton as well, but that’s another article entirely). I think they feel slighted that Obama doesn’t bow to them-the same thing has happened to me with that generation of movement men, and I know they feel that every Black person born after 1965 should kiss their ring and ask for permission to do any work. More importantly, they will actually hold on to power, and have continue to enjoy their place as interpreters for the race, which they do not have (I am assuming) with Obama. They see Barack, perhaps, not as the culmination of their work, but as the signal that their status as racial middle men is over. Integration, like it or not, meant that there’s a lot more Black people who’ve been socialized around white people. (It’ll be interesting to see how they all position themselves if Obama wins more states-especially South Carolina.)

But whatever they may think of Barack’s relationship to the Civil Rights Movement, his victory speech last night bore the distinct character of someone who’s been studying the rhetorical style of Dr. Martin Luther King very closely.

Want more analysis of the Obama win?

The Black Snob

Mother Jones

The Nation

New York Times

The Politico

Every few years, at election time, I feel very conflicted. I was raised to understand the importance of voting, and more directly, Black people lost their lives for the right for me to do so.

My mother made sure me and my sisters watched Eyes On The Prize on PBS. That documentary chronicled all the different ways Black people in the 1950′s & 60′s organized to fight desegregation (of which protecting/restoring their right to vote unencumbered was a part), and the myriad number of ways white citizens, the states and the federal government were involved in keeping them disenfranchised.

So with a heavy heart full of gratitude and sagging with the debt of my ancestors, I usually find myself treading into some mildewy church basement or pissy school gymnasium to exercise my God-given right pull the lever-an excercise meant to turn the tides of 500 years in one fell swoop.

And so here we are. It’s 2008 and not only can we now vote (mostly), but we have the first viable Black candidate running for president. Barack Obama’s ascendancy to this place, seems rife with all right thoughts of “fulfilling the dream” and “keeping America’s promise,” which has certainly been helped by his PR machine. That’s not to say he’s a phony or a fraud. I have never met him but I do, like most of the people who seem prepared to cast a ballot his way, seem to trust he believes what he says most of the time, which is more than I can say for any of the other frontrunners.

But there are others who feel that this very narrative, the Moses/Jesus/Lincoln/MLK-like prophet come to deliver the people and the nation, is the thing they despise about what he represents most. There are people who feel as though his election will say to the nation and the world, “The US is now beyond race (at least beyond the black & white paradigm). Racism is over. They’ve gotten the Presidency. Now, stop complaining and get to work. Come On, People!”

There are others who feel that he, whose “Black genes” trace most directly to Kenya and not Kentucky, is not Black enough to be even considered the first Black president.

There are more of us, knowing too well that he is Black, who feel he faces the certain and decisive bullet of an assassin if elected.

There are some of us who simply feel the US Presidency will never be a place to transform the United States. Some of us would in fact, rather undo it.

So, if his election may be fraught with such tension, hope, ambivalence or disillusionment for Black people in America, why should I vote? Why should any Black person in America vote?

I don’t honestly know the answer to that question. I don’t know why I do vote most of the time. But I know that there isn’t an easy answer to how the descendants of chattel slaves should position themselves trapped as we are in this strange paradigm. But as much as I feel-in the deepest core of my being-somewhat anxious about Obama and wanting to see him do well, I am under no delusion that his Presidency (nor Clinton nor Edwards nor any of ‘em) will save any of us.

And so I will watch the Iowa Caucus tonight, and all the other election broughaha over this year, with a good deal of hopefulness and anxiety, highly skeptical that freedom can ever be found in a ballot box, but knowing full well that budgets, laws, and public policy can shrivel or spread misery.

The choice is yours.

May the ancestors be with us.

The Associated Press published a story about Civil Rights veteran and Atlanta former Mayor Andrew Young going on an Atlanta show saying that he thought Barack should run for president in 2016, because he is too young to run for president and that he thought, essentially, the Clintons were as black as Barack. Here’s what they quoted from the Young interview:

“I want Barack Obama to be president,” Young said, pausing for effect, “in 2016.”

“It’s not a matter of being inexperienced. It’s a matter of being young,” Young said. “There’s a certain level of maturity … you’ve got to learn to take a certain amount of (expletive).”

Young went on to say that Obama needs a protective network that he currently lacks — a quality that could hurt him if he were to be elected. He said Hillary Clinton already has that kind of network, including her husband to back her up.

“There are more black people that Bill and Hillary lean on,” Young said. “You cannot be president alone. … To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion. His time will come and the world will be ready for a visionary leadership.”

I watched the interview on NewsMakers Live. Young did say those things. A lot of the issues I have with Young’s interview was the sexism in which he couched his views-”Clinton has probably gone with more black women than Barack.” Why does ‘how many black women you fuck’ make you implicitly a black man? That’s disgusting about what it says about black manhood and black womanhood both. Ugh. By this logic, Black women’s bodies are the only relevant as avenues for defining masculinity. That’s offensive as hell! And I am over that “Clintons are black” bullshit. Can we just really have a moratorium on that nonsense? I don’t care if they can huck-a-buck or Soul Train-line with the best of them-they’re not Black and there are countless ways the Clinton Administration sold black people down the river to save his own political career-Welfare reform act, Rwanda, massive prison expansion- hello! Lets not get political amnesia.

But what is perhaps most useful about Young’s comments, the AP report chooses barely to report. Young goes on for most of the interview to talk about how he’s worried about Obama’s (and his family’s) safety–even going so far as to say he wants Obama’s daughters to be older to deal with the way people are going to attack them.

After living through the Civil Rights Movement and what happened to King, Young is saying Barack has yet to develop the kind of insular network of folks to really protect him from the worst of what is sure to come. Essentially, he’s actually saying white racism is so fierce that Obama needs to develop more of aggressive tactics to be able to go after the forces that are most likely to undo him were he to win the presidency. And Young is drawing on the Civil Rights Movement and MLK’s experiences with violence and surveillance as the prime example. I question Young’s assertion that King sacrificed the most personally-what about Fannie Lou Hamer or Angela Davis, or a host of others who history has forgotten who lost life and limb fighting for freedom? That’s a hard thing to quantify, even if he knew King personally. He also has a silly analysis of why Barack would be great at foreign policy-because, as Young asserts, his experience with “the Chinese” and with “Islam” via his sister and childhood upbringing, will make him adept at dealing with China and the Middle East.

OK. That’s a stretch.

That aside, it’s a wonder how the AP reporter got away with filing this half-assed story that takes the most sensational things that Young said, and doesn’t comprehensively report Young’s concern and critique-which is really about Obama’s readiness to deal with the racist/violent backlash. The reporter only gets to at the end of the story when it is actually, in my book, THE story.

And journalists wonder why the public has lost trust in them.