IN LIVING COLOR: Republican congressional candidate and Saratoga Spring, Utah, mayor Mia Love addressed the second session of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night in Tampa, Florida. She was among several leaders of color to take the stage. (Photo: Mike Segar/Newscom)
The stage of the Republican National Convention that concluded in Tampa last night was a lot more colorful than the floor, at least when it came to skin color (and Clint Eastwood’s odd performance). With speeches by African Americans, Indian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, one might have thought the GOP was the party of color. But, Baratunde Thurston, author of How to Be Black, was in Tampa reporting for WNYC and Yahoo News, and decided to count how many black people were actually in attendance. He curated his count under the Twitter hastag #negrospotting. (That apparently got conservative fire-brand Michelle Malkin fired up.) His last count, reported this morning, was 238 African Americans among the 5,000+ attendees.
Condoleezza Rice
The high point among speakers of color, at least according to an unscientific survey of my journalist-heavy Twitter feed, was former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who gave a hard-hitting foreign policy speech Wednesday night. Even those who didn’t care for the substance of Rice’s speech conceded that her delivery was impressive, perhaps even presidential. “When the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history. That is the true basis of ‘American Exceptionalism,'” said Rice. “The essence of America — that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion — it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.”
Artur Davis
Former Democratic Representative from Alabama Artur Davis said we should have known better than to have been seduced by the hype surrounding Barack Obama back in 2008. “Do you know why so many of us believed?” said the former Obama supporter. “We led with our hearts and our dreams that we could be more inclusive than America had ever been, and no candidate had ever spoken so beautifully. But dreams meet daybreak: the jobless know what I mean, so do the families who wonder how this Administration could wreck a recovery for three years and counting. So many of those high-flown words have faded.”
Jeb Bush
Jeb Bush, the one-time Florida Governor whose wife is Mexican American, defended his brother George W. Bush’s record and talked passionately about educating children of color. “We need to set high standards for students and teachers and provide students and their parents the choices they deserve. The first step is a simple one. We must stop pre-judging children based on their race, ethnicity or household income,” said Bush. He then highlighted what he said are Florida’s achievements in improving academic performance, particularly for students of color. “Here in Florida in 1999, we were at the bottom of the nation in education. For the last decade, this state has been on a path of reform,” he said. Among African-American students, Florida is ranked fourth in the nation for academic improvement, among low-income students, the state is third, among students with disabilities, it is first, and, among Latino students, “the gains were so big, they required a new metric,” Bush said.
Susana Martinez
New Mexico Governor and former Democrat Susana Martinez delivered a rousing speech noting her own ethnic “first.” “As the first Hispanic female governor in history, little girls often come up to me in the grocery store or the mall. They look and point, and when they get the courage, they ask ‘Are you Susana?’ and they run up and give me a hug,” said Martinez. “It’s in moments like these when I’m reminded that we each pave a path. And for me, it’s about paving a path for those little girls to follow. No more barriers.”
Mia Love
Up-and-coming U.S. Congressional candidate and mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, Mia Love called President Obama’s version of America “a divided one — pitting us against each other based on our income level, gender, and social status.” She said the story of the American Dream is one “of human struggle” that has “been told for over 200 years with small steps and giant leaps; from a woman on a bus to a man with a dream; and the bravery of the greatest generation, to the entrepreneurs of today.” Love, like Mitt Romney, is also a Mormon.
Nikki Haley
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley defended her state’s controversial immigration law, calling it “innovative.” Said Haley, “We said in South Carolina that if you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed and you have to show a picture ID to set foot on an airplane, then you should have to show a picture ID to protect one of the most valuable, most central, most sacred rights we are blessed with in America — the right to vote. And what happened? President Obama stopped us.”
Throwing Peanuts and Racial Slurs
On the convention floor, meanwhile, a couple delegates made headlines for throwing peanuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, “This is what we feed animals.” Patricia Carroll, the camerawoman, was reticent about the incident, telling Journal-isms it could have happened anywhere, including the Democratic convention, but she was not surprised it happened in Tampa. “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South,” she said. “You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don’t think I should do.”
BeBe Winans’s “Bipartisan” Gospel Moment
Even PBS’s news anchors seemed to enjoy gospel singer BeBe Winans’s stirring rendition of “America, America.” Winans, who performed on the final night, told Essence magazine that he saw his reportedly unpaid participation in the convention as a display of bipartisanship. He was not unaware of how controversial it would be for him to sing there, he said. “The RNC realized this was something that could work to their advantage and I realized there is a master plan here,” remarked Winans. “And so my message to them and to the world is that we are all Americans before we are a part of any political party. It’s so simple and yet we make it so difficult.”
True. But, of course, by definition political conventions are neither the time nor place for bipartisanship. Rather, they are an occasion for creating a narrative for what each party believes America should truly be. And this party clearly wanted to be perceived as embracing a multi-racial future. The questions is: were voters convinced?
The Nominees
Oh, and in case you were wondering, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney accepted the Republican nomination for president and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan agreed to be his VP, if the people so choose.
Update 9/2: Baratunde Thurston clarified his post: “The final final count is in, and I spotted 238 Negroes during the RNC, 239 if I count seeing my own reflection in various mirrors and windows. I estimated no more than 60 of those to be authenticated GOP delegates or party members. It turns out the actual number of black delegates was 46.”
What do you think?
What were the high and low points of the GOP Convention?
With The King’s College president Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s Americaa runaway success after its first weekend in nationwide release, UrbanFaith sent yours truly to the theater to see why people are flocking to this film. I went with considerable trepidation, expecting a poorly produced Michael Moore style piece of political propaganda. Instead, I got a visually compelling film produced by Gerald Molen, the Academy Award-winning producer of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.
I was surprised when the film opened, not with President Obama, but with D’Souza’s own story of emigrating from India to the United States for college. He highlights cultural influences he has in common with the president to demonstrate an intimate understanding of the anti-colonial forces that he says shaped Obama’s father and explain the president’s policies.
It’s an idea worth exploring, but beginning with the allegation that President Obama returned a bust of “lifelong colonialist” Winston Churchill to Great Britain soon after taking office and ending with a barbed-wire bound Middle Eastern map of what he calls “The United States of Islam,” he oversells his vision.
For example, as ABC’s Jake Tapper deftly explains, there were two Churchill busts in the White House, one that was on loan for the duration of the George W. Bush presidency and another that is on display in the president’s private residency. (For more fact-checking of the documentary, here’s the Associated Press and Slate’s Dave Weigel.)
D’Souza asserts that President Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention would have played well in a room full of Republicans. He says the president was voted in on hope and because Americans wanted to vote for the nation’s first Black president and against our own racist past. “The reason he’s in the White House is because of his race, his blackness,” D’Souza says.
He asks what Obama’s dream is. Is it the American dream, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, or someone else’s dream? Shored up by the armchair diagnosis of a psychologist and conversations with relatives and friends of Obama’s parents, D’Souza concludes that Obama’s dream is the radical collectivist dream of his absentee father, who, in D’Souza’s mind, influenced him more than the Midwestern grandparents who raised him from the time he was 10 years old. Other than a description of Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, as a lefty who hooked his fatherless grandson up with Commie writer Frank Marshall Davis as a mentor, neither his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, nor his grandfather count for anything in D’Souza’s narrative.
While D’Souza quotes liberally from Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father, to sell Barack Obama Sr.’s significance in shaping the president’s worldview, he pulls a motive out of thin air to explain why Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, sent her son back to Hawaii from Indonesia to live with her parents. In D’Souza’s account, she wanted to “separate” him from his step-father’s “pro-Western influence.” But President Obama said in his memoir, which I read, that his mother sent him back to the U.S. for a better education than he could get in Indonesia. Even this is no good. The Hawaiian private school education was rich in “oppression studies” in the 1970s, D’Souza asserts without evidence.
Perhaps the most compelling and honest moment in the film is when D’Souza interviews the president’s half-brother George Obama in Kenya. He asks George if the president of the United States has been his “keeper,” implying that Barack Jr. is a hypocrite when it comes to caring for his own impoverished family members. George answers that the president has his own family to take care of and says he is a beneficiary of the president’s foreign policy. But then he says Kenyans were better off under colonialism and South Africans prospered because of Apartheid. This, D’Souza asserts in an August 16 column at Fox News, is why the president doesn’t intervene in his allegedly alcoholic half-brother’s life.
George apparently asked D’Souza to send him $1000 to pay for his sick child’s medical bills. The New York Times best-selling author obliged and then wrote the following: “George’s brother is a multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world. Moreover, George’s brother has framed his re-election campaign around the ‘fair share’ theme that we owe obligations to those who are less fortunate. One of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: ‘We are our brother’s keeper.’ Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help. So much for spreading the wealth around.” I wondered as I watched the film and read this column if D’Souza was equally concerned when President Clinton’s half-brother Roger was getting himself into trouble? I found no evidence that he was.
In what to me is the essence of this film’s failure, D’Souza concludes that after visiting his father’s grave in 1988, President Obama resolved to not be like him in his failures. “In doing so, perhaps he can become worthy of his father’s love, love he never got,” D’Souza says. In his rendering, the president is entirely a product of this one pain. No other influence ultimately matters, except those that magnify it. No independent development or grappling with ideas counts. Everything is as Freud would have diagnosed it. That’s a stunning perspective for a Christian apologist to advance.
As the film draws to a close, dark clouds, of course, emerge and the music grows ominous. A nightmare scenario of national “debt as a method of mass destruction” and the Mideast transforming itself into an Islamic super-power emerge. D’Souza says, “We did not know what change would look like. Now we do. Which dream will we carry into 2016: the American dream or Obama’s dream?”
This week, William Murchison reviewed D’Souza’s new book on the same theme for The Washington Times. He said, “I want to be as kind as possible, inasmuch as I admire Mr. D’Souza and his reliably intelligent witness over the past two decades to harsh truths about the corruption of liberal thought and praxis. All the same, I see various bones in need of picking. ‘Obama’s America,’ it seems to a pronounced non-fan of Mr. Obama — the non-fan writing these lines — is overequipped with extrapolation and inference, underprovisioned with restraint and delicate judgment.” The same things can be said of the beautifully produced documentary, which, by the way, relies heavily on scenes of abject poverty in India, Indonesia, and Kenya. Why is that? Is it meant to highlight the impoverished worldview to which the president supposedly adheres?
I have a question for Dinesh D’Souza: Which dream does he, as the president of The King’s College, carry into the future? Is it the dream of educating students “to lead with principle as they aspire to make America better” or is his a partisan dream in which it is acceptable for a Christian educator to stretch the truth in order to accuse the U.S. president of fomenting an anti-American nightmare?
WELCOME TO TAMPA: Some 200 protesters braved inclement weather from Tropical Storm Isaac today to rally against the presence of the GOP convention in Tampa, Florida. Protesters cried out against Republican policies on immigration, health care, and the economy. (Photo: Mladen Antonov/Newscom)
News that a Republican candidate is getting a low percentage of the black vote typically draws a yawn.
But prominent black Republicans, such as Romney-Ryan adviser Tara Wall, likely gasped at the new NBC-Wall Street Journalpoll that suggests the ticket is currently getting zero percent of the black vote. How do you get zero percent with all those #BlackConservativeForMittRomney tags on Twitter?
Truthfully, the poll’s results aren’t literal, being within the 3.1 percent margin of error. But there’s a link between the poll and Romney’s actions that should cause black Republicans like Wall to do some soul-searching.
Since May, Wall has been Romney’s senior communications adviser emphasizing African American outreach (UrbanFaith news editor Christine Scheller spoke to her back in June). Wall held a similar role with President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign where he gained 11 percent of the black vote. She’s among a group of black advisers who have been schooling (apparently not well) Romney on what black voters need to hear from him. They don’t expect to outpoint the nation’s first African American president, but want Romney to at least hold on to the 4 percent of the black vote that McCain received in his 2008 loss to Obama.
I interviewed Wall last week on my radio show and her comments about the poll were predictable: You can make numbers say anything you want. Obviously, black Republicans weren’t among those polled. Excitement for President Obama has dipped as people continue to struggle economically. Efforts to appeal to black voters are gearing up (at this writing there was no section on Romney’s website under the “communities” geared specifically towards black or Hispanic voters).
However, I was struck by Wall’s response concerning the GOP’s elephant in the room — its race-baiting tactics.
It’s often said that blacks, particularly black Christians, are as socially conservative (pro-life, pro traditional marriage) as the Republican platform claims to be. So why aren’t black voters aligned with Republicans over Democrats? The GOP’s racist bent is what keeps black voters at bay. Wall objected passionately.
“That’s false. I reject that notion,” she said. “… Racism comes in many forms. I think that is a discussion in a broader context that we as a community have to have on an ongoing basis. But to simply blanketly [sic] say that Republicans don’t speak out and are racist, I think that’s patently false. There are racist elements in society everywhere and in every party and in every place.”
TOUGH TASK AHEAD: Tara Wall is charged with shaping the Romney campaign’s communication strategy — including its message to the black community, which is presently showing no love for Mitt.
That last sentence is certainly true. Democrats play race games as well and President Obama has been tepid on addressing racism. However, it’s well documented that much of today’s Republican base is of the Dixiecrat tradition — anti-big government, pro-state’s rights, segregationists. In response to Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson signing civil rights legislation in the 1960s (Northern moderate Republicans urged him to), Southern conservative democrats began fleeing to the GOP. They were lured by the GOP’s “Southern strategy” during the Goldwater and Nixon years. To compete with Democratic gains, the GOP saw white southerners as fertile ground for new voters. Understanding the buttons to push, they stirred fears of big government and black people to win them over. No deep ideological motive, just money + votes = power.
Blue states turned red. The party of Abraham Lincoln took on the spirit of Andrew Johnson. Blacks fled the GOP. The legacy continues today.
Wall and other black Republicans know this history well. She has been among those critical of the GOP’s alienating minorities, especially in light of America’s “browning” as Hispanic populations grow. She has even produced a documentary about this titled, Souled Out that has apparently been tucked away for the moment.
As an independent who votes his interests, I admire black conservatives who are truly sincere in their beliefs to diversify the GOP. Think about it. If Romney beats Obama, who would be at the table of influence in the West Wing fighting for black issues? We need advocates in both political parties. Besides, there are sellouts on both sides who dine and grow fat as the masses of black people suffer from high unemployment, health disparities, incarceration rates, and wealth gaps.
The gentleman in me held my tongue from lashing out at Wall about the race baiting. I didn’t have to. The following day her boss, during a campaign stump in Michigan where he and his wife, Ann, were born, pulled a line from the Southern strategy playbook. Before an overwhelmingly white audience, Romney quipped: “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate; they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”
It was an obvious wink to the birthers who believe Obama is un-American, unqualified, and should go back to Africa.
In today’s economy, we hear a lot about the financial struggles of the country. But while we often debate issues of white-collar economics, the struggles of lower-income groups are disparaged.
It is nearly impossible for the average blue-collar worker to make a living wage to support her family. In most states, minimum wage is well below the living wage (there is a big difference) for most households.
There are serious consequences of this disparity. Workers skip meals so that their children may eat. Folks turn to loan sharks to make ends meet, which entrenches them in a spiral of debt. Families make tough choices to cut out “non-essentials” like medicine, clothing, and nutritious food.
When folks are desperate for work, they will endure any number of abuses or indignities. A friend of mine spends an hour on the bus to get to a potential job, only to arrive and find out he isn’t needed that day. Sometimes he’s able to work for a couple of hours, but then gets sent home. “Try again tomorrow.” And if he doesn’t show up for that chance, he knows he’ll lose the opportunity for later.
Or conversely, employees will be held at work hours after their shift is over, if that is what boss deems necessary. My neighbor needs to be able to be home when her kids arrive from school. But when her boss holds her late, she doesn’t dare risk losing her job by leaving at the scheduled time. And she is required to maintain open availability to be placed in a shift as is convenient for the company, but she is not told the schedule until the last minute, and so cannot arrange for child care or line up other jobs.
It also happens that workers are paid less than what they were promised. Or are given insufficient training and made to feel like fools when they don’t perform to standards. And yet, as more states put an end to collective bargaining, the wealthy receive a smaller tax burden now than they have in the last 80 years.
Take a close look at the words of Jeremiah 22:13-16. Woe to we that profit from injustice and gain economic security at the expense of others! We “who make our neighbor serve us for nothing and do not give them their wages.” Jesus himself urges that “the workers deserve their wages.”
Part of our problem is that we have a warped perspective of economic reality. Particularly since housing in the United States is largely segregated by economic standing, people look around themselves and feel that, on the whole, there is equal opportunity and prosperity for everyone.
Last year, PBS NewsHour conducted an informal survey, asking people to identify the sort of economy that exists in the United States. The findings were telling. Watch the segment below.
Also, in his ever-insightful way, Jon Stewart points out the huge economic disparities that most folks gloss over. His analysis of Warren Buffet’s crusade to close the wealth gap is both humorous and sadly revealing.
For even more insight, I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, or play this excellent interactive game to see what economic choices you would make given some stark realities about your circumstances. (If you do play, please share your thoughts about the experience in the comments section below.)
There’s obviously much more to this issue than I’m able to address in a brief blog post, but the important thing is having frank and honest conversations about the unjust situations around us. We may not be able to immediately see the inequalities in our midst due to our own privileged positions, but it won’t be long before those realities affect our own situations. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remarked in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail“:
All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
HE STILL GOT GAME?: Spike Lee’s new film, ‘Red Hook Summer,’ which explores religion and urban life in a Brooklyn neighborhood, is his first movie to be released during Barack Obama’s presidency. (Photo: David Lee/Newscom)
Director Spike Lee had not released a film during the Obama presidency until this week’s release of Red Hook Summer, just a couple months before the next presidential election.
Remember Spike Lee? This was the man who helmed groundbreaking, commercially successful films on race like Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, and Do the Right Thing. When he arrived on the scene with 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, he was hailed as a brave new voice in American filmmaking and the chronicler of the late 20th century black experience. As time has gone by, his films have become less urgent and far less racial. His only hit in this century was 2006’s Inside Man, a heist movie that happened to star Denzel Washington but was in no way a serious work on race. And in the last four years — since Obama has been president — he has not released a movie, period.
During his presidential campaign, Obama positioned himself as the first post-racial candidate. He made us believe that by voting for him we would usher in a new era in which labels like “black” and “white” would grow increasingly irrelevant. He was, of course, uniquely positioned to make this argument, given his background; the effect of his personal story and his rhetoric on this topic was intoxicating. He made affluent whites feel that by simply voting for him they were accomplishing more for black people than we had as a nation since the Civil Rights Act. With their vote, they would cleanse America of its original sin.
But despite that unspoken promise, many Americans remain in a state of de facto segregation. Most whites don’t know the black experience, and what they do know, they learn from the media. Electing a black president has not changed that. In some ways, it has made things worse, since the issue of race is barely discussed in public forums. When black issues are discussed, it is usually in a historically comparative sense. The civil rights era is used today as a point of comparison to discuss immigration issues or the rights of the LGBT community.
Despite the lack of conversation on the subject, there is no doubt that Obama’s election changed the way we look at and talk about race in America. Obama himself said it best in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention:
[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
In retrospect, that moment was the beginning of Obama’s ascendance to the presidency. It was also the first time he explicitly defined himself as a post-racial candidate. And lastly, it was the end of director Spike Lee’s career. For if there is no black America, what happens to the filmmaker whose job it has been to chronicle it?
The Mainstreaming of Racial Transcendence
Lee’s first true masterpiece was 1989’s Do the Right Thing, a drama that took place over the course of one sweltering summer day in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a predominantly black neighborhood. In a key scene, our black protagonist, Mookie, argues with a white colleague, Pino, about race. Mookie questions how Pino can admire some African Americans — like Prince, Eddie Murphy, and Magic Johnson — but disdain those that live in his community. Listen to his response:
The 1980s, when Prince, Eddie, and Magic reigned supreme, was the era in which the idea of racial transcendence was mainstreamed. And they were not alone. In that decade, black stars Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby were welcomed into the homes of middle-class, white Americans on a regular basis. Cosby eschewed serious discussion of race on his hit television show for fear of losing his audience. The problems that the Huxtables faced were those common in upper-middle class American families. Never did the show discuss poverty, HIV/AIDS, or serious drug use, each of them an epidemic in 1980s black America.
Jordan, the NBA icon, similarly protected his brand by staying mum on racial politics. When asked why he did not weigh in on a close Senate race in his home state of North Carolina that involved former KKK-member Jesse Helms, he responded, “Republicans buy shoes, too.”
The generation that grew up on The Cosby Show and Michael Jordan is the same one that elevated Barack Obama to the White House, and there is much evidence to suggest that they were subconsciously linked in the minds of voters. Obama, like Jordan, made his name in Chicago and exhibited in his campaign the same calm under pressure that made Jordan the best to play the game of basketball. Of course Obama, a big sports fan, never hesitated to bring up his fandom of the Bulls. As for the Cosby connection, many newspapers wrote, when describing Obama’s high polling numbers with white, suburban voters, of the “Huxtable effect.”
Even his future running mate, Joe Biden, said of Obama that he was the first African American candidate who was “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” In other words, he was not what Joe Biden usually thought of when he thought of “black.” The fact that Biden’s remark did not prevent him from becoming Obama’s vice-president should be evidence enough that Obama is more concerned with appealing to white than black audiences.
Ultimately, there is no industry that has been more eager to accept the notion of racial transcendence than Hollywood; it’s an idea that is useful to filmmakers who are increasingly pressured to make films with crossover demographic appeal. But this quest for widespread popularity has a dark side.
Lord, Help Our Blind Sides
The films of Obama’s first term portray racial disharmony in an antiquated, conclusory fashion, making everyone feel good about race without asking audiences to lift a finger or even have an uncomfortable thought. Two such films, The Blind Side and The Help, were not only massive box-office hits but also were nominated for Best Picture by the mostly white Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The Blind Side and The Help connect to white Americans because they reflect the feeling Obama created during the campaign — that America had done something important to help African Americans. Exposed in these films to the problems of black America, audiences leave the theater feeling that the drama in the film has been resolved — in each case by a white, affluent character.
In The Help, that character is Skeeter (Emma Stone), a young, ambitious Southern woman who breaks convention by writing a book that compiles the horrible, sometimes hilarious stories of local black housekeepers. Skeeter is, for all intents and purposes, a modern woman and seems completely out of place in early 1960s Mississippi. She wants to work, not marry. She despises any form of prejudice, which is odd because most of her friends are unbashed racists. Skeeter is an accessible and sympathetic entry point into the story for a modern, white audience, but the implication in her characterization is troubling. She helps an entire community of oppressed African Americans housekeepers by giving them a voice. She is, in a small way, freeing them. The implication is that the politics of today — represented in this modern woman — have rectified the politics of the past, and in this way, “The Help” asks us to believe that race is no longer an issue in America, as long as there are millions of young Skeeters out there.
It is a similar story in The Blind Side, which was based on true events. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, a strong, willful Southern housewife who takes Michael Oher, a poor black young man, into her home and teaches him to assimilate into white society, represented by a large football program at a southern state university.
We share Leigh’s sadness when we hear of Michael’s poor upbringing. But we are also asked to be thrilled when she takes the “street” out of him. A pivotal moment comes when he tells her that he hates being called “Big Mike,” the nickname he has been saddled with since childhood. He prefers being called “Michael.” In this moment, he transcends his previous existence in a poor, African American community. It is almost as if he is casting off his slave name.
In both films, the central African American characters are rescued from the bonds of the black experience, yet there is little care taken to relay what happens to them afterwards. The real Michael went on to play in the NFL, a profession in which ex-players are increasingly suffering from mental illness and suicide — due to the high number of concussions they suffer during their career. Given the opportunities afforded to him by living with Leigh Anne and her rich husband, perhaps a career as a modern-day gladiator was not the finest choice, but it is in reality the best choice for some who grow up in inner cities without education.
In the final scene of The Help, Aibeleen, the middle-aged housekeeper whose story we have been following, is fired by her boss. As she walks away from her home, she tells us that she feels free for the first time and that she never took a similar job again. But she never shares with us how she earned a living. It is as if not working for an oppressive white boss is enough; but what will she do with her newfound freedom? What other jobs exist for a middle-aged black woman with no education or experience? These are the questions that are not asked in a post-racial film, and they are questions that have not been asked enough by our current post-racial president.
Blacks continue to suffer from the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, obesity, death from cancer, and infant mortality. But Obama has done little to improve federal nutrition programs. He has stood idly by while Republicans cut food stamp benefits. He has extended the Bush tax cuts that favor the wealthy and refused to tackle a tax reform plan that does not continue to burden the poor. He has been nearly invisible on education. And he has been worse than that on “the War on Drugs.”
Of course most of these are not racial issues, per se. They are class and economic issues. And this is the problem with a post-racial president. Because of how he framed his candidacy, Obama allowed middle and upper-class whites to bump the issue of racism far down their list of urgent American problems and, in doing so, gave them the liberty to ignore the class issues that so disproportionately affect minorities.
Where Art Thou, Spike?
And so with the black experience so far from our minds these days, the skills of Spike Lee have just not been called for. In fairness, his problems getting funding for his films have not solely been the result of a post-racial environment. His most recent feature films about the black experience (She Hate Me and Bamboozled) have been wildly uneven and even more controversial than normal.
So instead, Lee took his talents to cable. In 2008, the year Obama was elected, Lee produced and directed When the Levees Broke, a powerful and urgent two-part documentary on Hurricane Katrina that focused specifically on how the disaster affected poor, black communities in New Orleans. It was an important film that exposed suffering that had been glossed over by the mainstream media. But he had to make it at HBO, which is not beholden to ratings or ticket sales, and it’s doubtful that a major studio would ever have sponsored such a project or that most of American has even heard of it.
That brings us to Lee’s latest film, Red Hook Summer, in which he reprises his role of Mookie from Do the Right Thing. But interestingly, the film is not about race. Its subject is religion, which may have replaced race as the divisive American institution of the day. Even Red Hook Summer has obtained only a miniscule distribution. You will have to live in a major urban area to see it.
And so Lee appears to be a casualty of post-racialism, albeit one that no one will cry any tears for. He has made his millions. But as a reflection of white perception of the black experience, his disappearance is a real loss. We have lost a powerful voice for the poor and a filmmaker who made visible that which society tries to hide. He could have been Obama’s counterpoint from the left, someone who pushed him away from his comfortable spot in the center. Instead, next year Lee is remaking Oldboy, a hyper-violent Japanese thriller. If it does well enough, maybe someone will give him a chance to make a serious movie again. In the meantime, we will wait patiently and simply hope that our original sin is not just hidden or dormant but truly redeemed by a single election.
This article originally appeared at Noah Gittell’s Reel Change blog.
URBAN YOUTH MINISTRY PIONEERS: In a photo that hangs in Bill Milliken’s office, Vinnie Di Pasquale (center) and friends walk the streets of New York.
A couple weeks ago, I received a book in the mail that was endorsed by music mogul Russell Simmons, Oprah Winfrey beau Stedman Graham, Morehouse College President Robert Franklin, and, among others, the actress Goldie Hawn. The author included this note: “Dear Christine, I thank God for you and your faithfulness!! I loved your mother and father!!”
After the foreword written by Newark Mayor Cory Booker and an introductory letter that the author addresses to his grandchildren, he opens with these words: “Vinnie De Pasquale and I had been waiting for this day for many months. It was June 17, 1960, and we were about to move into a two-room tenement apartment at 117th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York. Vinnie had recently gotten out of jail, and I’d just finished the second of what would be my three freshman years of college.”
Vinnie Di Pasquale is my father and the book is From the Rearview Mirror: Reflecting on Connecting the Dots. Urban youth ministry pioneer Bill Millken is the author. His memoir tells the remarkable story of how he, an affluent, but ne’er do-well kid from the suburbs of Pittsburgh had his life transformed at the same Colorado Young Life camp as my father. From there Milliken went on to establish Young Life’s ministry in New York City and later founded the Communities in Schools organization in Atlanta. His book says he has been an advisor to five U.S. presidents, but the highlight, for me, is how he frames the work he did with my father and others in New York City as the foundation of all his future endeavors.
It’s a deeply humbling experience, as the daughter of a high school janitor, to read such a thing. My father died of a heart attack at age 41 in 1975 and the only stories I’ve heard about his work with Young Life come from my mother’s memories. Those years were very difficult ones for her. As I wrote previously for UrbanFaith, she and my father met through Young Life. What I didn’t write is that after my sister was born with significant medical challenges in 1963 and my mother became seriously ill while pregnant with me in 1964, our family left New York City and urban ministry.
I had no idea, for example, that in 1998 a cover story about my father was published in the Young Life Relationships magazine. But last week, long-time Young Life leader Mal McSwain contacted me through UrbanFaith to say he wanted to send me photos and letters from my father that date back to 1957. The Relationships article was included in the package (along with an excerpt from Zondervan’s God in the Garden: The Story of the Billy Graham New York Crusade that tells a bit of my father’s story). In the article, McSwain talks about meeting Vinnie and his fellow Newark, New Jersey, gang members when he was a camp counselor in Colorado. Reflecting on the significance of that summer, he says, “We didn’t know what had hit us in ‘56. These guys were the real thing. This was only the beginning. It opened the door to Young Life’s urban ministry.”
I love reading these stories because my father died before I was old enough to hear them from him. But he never entirely broke free of his past, as all the narratives I’ve read about him suggest. Until the time of his death, he continued to struggle with the pull of behaviors he learned on the streets of Newark. And yet, he also never gave up on his journey of faith, or on his desire to reach out to young people and help them find a better way.
Milliken writes that through his work in schools, he came to learn how important custodians are to those communities. I distinctly remember my father’s mentoring relationships with students at the high school in Manasquan, New Jersey, where he worked. Those relationships were so significant that after he collapsed and died playing basketball there, the senior class dedicated its yearbook to him and honored him at its graduation ceremony.
What I loved best about Milliken’s memoir, apart from being reintroduced to my father through his eyes, is how he talks about his own lifelong need for healing. Mixed in with stories like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis arranging an internship for her son John Jr. with his organization are stories of his own brokenness and pursuit of healing. The final chapter has Milliken seeking medical treatment for post-traumatic stress symptoms and severe gastrointestinal distress brought on by decades of overwork in urban ministry. “I’ve spent the last three years trying to lead a more balanced life,” he writes, and then explains that the reason he’s confessing these things is that he wants readers to know that “the healing journey is never finished.” “All my hurting places, limitations, and shames aren’t just distant memories. They’re still with me, still clearly visible,” he says.
There’s a penetrating lesson for me in this. While I have wonderful memories of my father’s creativity as a photographer and craftsman, of camping trips on Cape Cod, and raucous get-togethers with his extended family, I also have memories of marital tension related to his struggles. The written story of his life sometimes seems to make him out to be worse than perhaps he was before his conversion and better than he was afterward. It’s a trend in conversion stories that we should rethink. We all live with ongoing brokenness and in perpetual need of God’s healing touch. Bill Milliken makes this clear in his memoir. It is true for him, just as it was true for my late father and my late son, both of whom affirmed their faith in Christ right before they died despite ongoing spiritual struggles. It’s true for me too, in part because of their untimely deaths.
God has a funny way of ministering healing though. Sometimes it comes through strangers who send packages via the U.S. Postal Service. In a letter to Young Life supporters from 1965 that McSwain sent me, my father wrote, “Three years ago I married a fine Christian girl named Carol. We have been richly blessed with two lovely daughters, Connie and Christine. We thank God every day as we see them grow physically, but our greatest hope is that they may grow up with God in their hearts.” Daddy, I’m happy to report that your prayers have been answered.
With The King’s College president Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s America 
But despite that unspoken promise, many Americans remain in a state of de facto segregation. Most whites don’t know the black experience, and what they do know, they learn from the media. Electing a black president has not changed that. In some ways, it has made things worse, since the issue of race is barely discussed in public forums. When black issues are discussed, it is usually in a historically comparative sense. The civil rights era is used today as a point of comparison to discuss immigration issues or the rights of the LGBT community.
What I loved best about Milliken’s memoir, apart from being reintroduced to my father through his eyes, is how he talks about his own lifelong need for healing. Mixed in with stories like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis arranging an internship for her son John Jr. with his organization are stories of his own brokenness and pursuit of healing. The final chapter has Milliken seeking medical treatment for post-traumatic stress symptoms and severe gastrointestinal distress brought on by decades of overwork in urban ministry. “I’ve spent the last three years trying to lead a more balanced life,” he writes, and then explains that the reason he’s confessing these things is that he wants readers to know that “the healing journey is never finished.” “All my hurting places, limitations, and shames aren’t just distant memories. They’re still with me, still clearly visible,” he says.