Clareified

Kearns was so funny yesterday.
“I’m a young black guy who was raised by my grandmother and grew up abroad,” he said upon getting in the car, “I think I’m going to law school.” (We’re already working with the campaign slogan “KJ 2020:One more time.”) I offered to be his campaign manager and he said that while he would rely on my efforts during the primary, he would have to disavow me in the general.
“What? Bite me.”
“See, Dawn? That’s why I’m disavowing you.”
“Suck it.”
“And that.”
He’s kidding of course, the only reason he’d disavow me is because I’m black. Racist.
But he’s also a pretty smart cookie. “If Obama wins, Karol’s going to post about how there’s no more racism.” Ok, you didn’t need to be in MENSA to see that one coming. But then there was that quiet moment that passed between us after we dropped Mary off.
“He got 96 percent of the black vote! And there was record registration and turnout…can we admit it was all about race now?”
We both laughed. Yeah, it was a little bit about race.
Well, I should back up.
Both Kearns and I supported Hillary in the primary. We both thought she was the best person to win back the White House for the Democrats because there wasn’t no flipping way a black guy whose middle name was Hussein would be elected President. I mean, come on (with Arrested Development GOB’s intonation.) Last night we both admitted we were wrong wrong wrong.
But I think we were both equally uncomfortable with the “jokes” about the coming “midnight in America.”
Like the sketch on the Daily Show where the black guy walks in during Jon Stewart and Colbert’s banter and starts measuring the anchor desk and Jon Stewart goes “hey, what are you doing?” And the black guy goes “whatever, I want.”
Or the fact that I have NEVER. NEVER. IN. MY. LIFE. seen as many black men interviewed on cable news shows as I have in the last three days. MSNBC had TAVIS SMILEY on as their “expert,” I saw BISHOP TD JAKES interviewed for twenty minutes on CNN!! TD JAKES! What exactly makes a televangelist a political commentator? When the race was called for Barack Obama the first newsfeed shot came from Grant Park. The second shot? SPELMAN COLLEGE! WHA– Michelle went to Princeton. Obama went to Columbia. SPELMAN?? It’s not even a college in Illinois! The newsfeed from Obama’s elementary school in Indonesia made more sense.
Jeebus.
But what makes this sudden “chocolate city,” as Comedy Central has named its newest “fake news show” which premiered last month with host David Alan Grier, all the more…um…I’m going to go with disturbing here, is the relative silence about race during the campaign. Sure there was the “Bradley effect stories” and the Reverend Wright April speech where Barack Obama kissed our racial boo-boos and sent us to bed with a belly full of warm milk. Um chocolate milk. But for the most part — as I think I clumsily said one day — Obama’s face was wiped clean. He wasn’t a black dude; he was an intellectual elite snob — like that Frenchy John Kerry. You forshizzle didn’t see TD Jakes interviewed during coverage of the Convention, for instance.
But come last night? Whole nother story. Networks were combing through their old American History textbooks to find black men to interview — Vernon Jordan, Julian Bond, any and every remotely known dark skinned man was propped up in a chair and had a microphone put in their face. I think George Hamilton was a guest on PBS! It’s been full on put a black guy in a chair, ask them some questions and watch them tear up week in America.
Bizarre.
Almost as bizarre as the car full of black folks in a Toyota Rav4 last night blaring its horn as we drove down Broadway in Manhattan. Or the nods from the dirty hippies climbing on lamp poles in Union Square.
Leading me to warn that I will hit them with my car and not think twice about it. “Yeah, you and Kearns will be fine, but they’ll drag me out of the car!” Mary protested.
I laughed.
This is a weird place for me. My relationship with being a black person (never mind black woman) has always been a strangely tortured one. I spent the first twelve years of my education in predominantly black schools, but with all white teachers. I spent the last twelve years of my education in predominantly white schools, pretty much with all white teachers. My mother, as I think may be typical of her generation, didn’t particularly like white people, but she did believe that whatever white people had was inherently better. She’d buy all my school clothes at the Macy’s in Manhattan, instead of the Macy’s in the ECB because she assumed they sent the somehow defective merchandise, to ghetto. But the whole trip she’d bitterly complain about inattentive salesgirls and I’d have to dress up to go shop because she never wanted them to think we couldn’t afford to be there. I took a bus an hour every Saturday to go to ballet school in the all white Italian neighborhood, where my mother would then get pissed off because the dance school teacher called me and my best friend the little “chocolate chips in her cookie.”
Naturally, when I went off to Prep school, my mother was glad because she believed I was getting the best education that I could; but at the same time she never failed to remind me that I shouldn’t trust any of my classmates or teachers because I’ll never really be one of them.
I very early on rejected the temptation to adopt my mother’s anger at white people. Eh, I could be a chocolate chip — the rest of those girls all looked alike anyway, a chocolate chip would stand out at the recital!
“Who’s that chip,” they’d ask!
“It is I, Dawn Summers,” I would reply!
At Prep school I never fit in with the “black kids table.” Sad as it is to write this, the black kids table was all about track or football, sometimes music, and as a fat girl who only knew the lyrics to Jim Croce songs, well, I’d have to make my own way. And I did. And so they called me “oreo,” (black on the outside, white on the inside…of course, from my standpoint, I had now gone from chip to whole cookie, so’s their face.) I carved out my niche as “girl who happens to be black (black and latina if I was feeling in a particularly obnoxious stereotype breaking mood),” but who could obviously out-black whites and hispanics when necessary and could be completely raceless if I felt like it. And I think I would usually decide which tack I’d take depending on which would make me most different. In all black groups, I was a nerdy debating Model UN attending chess club President. In all white crowds, I was a black kid from the hood, what?
No doubt there was some element of that when faced with my choices during the Democratic primary (though in my defense, I did actually go out and hear pitches from the four leading candidates and then made my final decision). But I loved when people would be angrily debating how unqualified Barack Obama was and then look at me and say “no offense” and I’d be all “what? I’m supporting Hillary Clinton.” And then give them my racist face.
But now, I am a black person supporting the black guy. My vote was right there in the mix with the other 96 percent of voting black folks who voted for Barack Obama. When I went downstairs to ride my bike wearing my “ThatOne ‘08″ sweatshirt and got approving nods from passersby in Brooklyn, I wasn’t discerning political mind Dawn Summers slow convert to Obama; I was a black chick wearing the Obama shirt like I ‘m sposed to.
It feels like back during the OJ trial when I thought he was not guilty on the theory that RICH celebrities don’t kill people and I’d hate whenever people would assume that I thought he was not guilty because I was black and he was black. So I’d have to give my ten minute explanation, at the end of which I know they were still all “yeah, whatever, sorry about Rodney King.”
And so it would seem now we are all just black people. Even the half white, Indonesian/Kansas white lady raised Barack Obama. Colin Powell’s on board, Condoleeza got choked up, so what the hell, why not have the black guy from Law&Order on the Today Show panel giving reactions to the election results. Seriously, I’m not kidding.
It’s going to be a long, strange four years.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1:25 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.