Much is being made about BET founder Bob Johnson’s comments about Barack Obama in South Carolina. In particular, folks are fussing and bothering about whether or not he was referring to Obama’s teenage drug use when he said:
As an African American, I’m frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.”
Sounds just a bit like, “those folks were doing something in the bedroom with the door closed that I won’t say what they were doing, but…” with a silly follow-on rebuttal: “I meant that they were taking measurements for curtains.”
*snort*
It’s the reference to the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, though, that riveted me:
Moments later, he added: “That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, ‘I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ And I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.”
He sees Barack Obama as Sidney Poitier’s character (John Prentice)? Fascinating, since he’s the one who said (my emphasis),
You don’t even know what I am, Dad, you don’t know who I am. You don’t know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it’s got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight be off our backs! You understand, you’ve got to get off my back! Dad… Dad, you’re my father. I’m your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.
How surprisingly contemporary that passage seems, particularly when you realize that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was made in 1967, and that Poitier’s character was pushing against the prior generation’s entrenched defeatism and fear of rocking the white establishment’s boat.
And with sincere respect for our current “prior generation”, I can’t help noticing that for all their hard work and gains, they still seem to be every bit as afraid. For them, nothing has changed, and if Americans allow that view to drive this election, then what I wrote over the weekend will ipso facto be true: we’ll still be hopelessly broken.
There have been many veiled (and not-so-veiled) references to Obama’s not being “black enough”; because his personal history doesn’t include scars from the Civil Rights battles, he hasn’t earned his place in the political scene; because he has no slaves in his ancestral tree, he simply can’t relate to the suffering and perspective of “real” African Americans; that he’s the “Great White Hope” for the guilt-ridden.
Maybe what they’re trying to say is that Obama isn’t old enough? Because Bob Johnson’s inept and messy stomp into the political mud splashed up something that’s been alluded to and skated past: the post-Civil Rights generation has come of age.
And that generation includes Barack Obama.