By Emilia 1956

As we know, our First Lady, Michelle Obama, recently answered back in an interview about the latest Obama gossip book, where she’s less-than-overtly portrayed as the ubiquitous embodiment of an “angry black woman.”

It’s been interesting to see how the public have responded to that interview; indeed, that the book should be taken with any credence at all is mind-boggling, because – as a friend of mine says – it’s all third party hearsay. The people directly involved weren’t interviewed at all.

Gotta love them pesky, little third parties! They do more damage than good.

Subsequently, I hope to do a piece on what MSNBC’s resident expert on black people and black voices (yes, I’m looking at you, Joan Walsh) had to say about Mrs Obama’s recent interview and the book in general, but first, I thought that some African American and Afro-Caribbean women should give voice about the “angry black woman” epithet, themselves. And they did so in The Guardian – two Brits and two Americans, one of whom – like me – married a Brit for her sins.

First, the British ladies:-

From Hannah Pool:-

I’m not so much an angry black woman as a livid one. I live in a state of perpetual rage, only ever one news story away from flying off the handle. I start most mornings shouting “racists” at the radio, and end many of my days shouting “sexists” at the TV. When I’m not bawling at inanimate objects, I’m applying cocoa butter to my skin, which is incredibly dry, or trying to manage my “unruly” hair. If I’m not the wrong gender for a position of power, I’m the wrong colour: invariably my face doesn’t fit for both reasons.

When racism and sexism collide, feminists call it the theory of intersectionality – where multiple identities combine to increase oppression – but for black women it’s just known as reality. I collect statistical evidence of injustice against black women in the same way others collect football facts: in 2002, minority women made up less than 8% of the total female population, but 29% of the female prison population; despite often high academic achievements, we are twice as likely to be unemployed as white women; we make up over 1% of the population, but under 0.5% of MPs (just three black women). If parliament were representative there’d be 55-60 BME MPs. Let’s assume half of those were women, and if just half of those were black, we’d still have more than three times the black women MPs we currently have. Why does this matter? Because decisions are taken in the corridors of power that affect all our lives, so why shouldn’t we be represented at the table?

And then there’s the seemingly frivolous stuff: told by mad scientists that we are less attractive, and by the rest of the world that we are highly sexed exotic creatures is it any wonder we’re miffed? The fashion world really should get some sort of award for its dedication to constantly letting us know that it finds our hair type, skin colour and bodies to be the least desirable.

Despite all this, I’ve spent my life fighting the label angry black woman because it’s a handy way to put a black woman down, modern-day shorthand for telling her not to have ideas above her station. The truth is, black women are no angrier than white women; if anything we could do with being a lot angrier. But we get labelled because deep down everyone knows we’ve got a right to be mad as hell.

From Bim Adewunmi:-

The meme is old and tired: it’s from the same school of thought that sees women as overly emotional creatures with an equilibrium so delicate, the slightest thing upsets them. It’s similar to the stereotype of the strident feminist, and much like that old gem, the ABW limits you – every response has to be calibrated, because one angry (justified or not) reaction is all it takes for you to become known around the office that ‘angry black woman’.

Comedian David Chappelle talks about an experience he had in a Mississippi restaurant where the waiter jumped in before he could order and suggested the chicken. “It’s no secret down here that blacks and chickens are quite fond of one another,” the waiter says. “All these years I thought I liked chicken because it was delicious,” Chappelle tells the audience. “Turns out I’m genetically predisposed to liking chicken!” To paraphrase: “I thought I was angry because the situation called for an angry reaction, but it turns out I’m just an angry black woman. Whoops, sorry!”

The fear of being labelled an ABW makes you bite your tongue all the time. It’s designed to shut you up. It allows people to get away with things they would never try anywhere else – and then blame you and your reaction. It’s a catch-22 situation: I’m angry about this, but I can’t show it, or else they’ll use that anger as a stick to beat me with.So, I say: screw it. Get angry – and show it. There’s a lot to be angry about.

And now from the Americans:-

From Latoya Peterson:-

I’m loth to reclaim stereotypes – which, after all, are just fictions applied to people on the thinnest of pretexts by others. There’s nothing to like. But I think anger gets a bad rap these days. Why shouldn’t we be angry when poverty is growing – and not just in the United States, but around the world? Occupy Nigeria was kicked off when the president removed a fuel subsidy that doubled and tripled the price of fuel overnight. While all across the world, from Greece to Bahrain, to Iran, to Egypt, to the USA, the youth have taken to the streets.

But we can’t just stop at being angry. Maya Angelou prefers anger to bitterness, noting: “Anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.” But it is far too easy for that blaze to become all consuming. Instead, we need to channel all this righteous anger into action. We should demand more of our governments and our fellow citizens to create more equitable societies. We should feel our anger, understand it – and then push it outwards, allowing it to be the catalyst for collective action. We no longer need to rage at the machine – it is time to figure out how to dismantle it.

And, finally, from Bonnie Greer. Just a note. I’m not Greer’s biggest fan. Like me, she married a Brit and relocated to Britain around the same time I did. She swiftly became the BBC’s resident American voice, but I never felt she said or contributed anything viable to whatever discussion the Beeb happened to be having at whatever time, but I give credit where credit is due, and Greer knocks the ball firmly out of the park and out of sight in this one, because she knows exactly whom to address and for what specific sort of behaviour.

As a Chicago Southsider born and raised, I know where Michelle Obama is coming from. Southsiders are blunt, honest and pull no punches. We can’t afford to, because life is too tough. To step back and take it goes against our very grain – and as the mother of two black girls, there is no way that Michelle is not going to go on the record about her purported activities in the White House. If indeed she was “F-bombed” by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, it would have been water off a duck’s back. And that book doesn’t really bother her, either.

A Southsider’s motto is: “If I don’t know you, I don’t care what you say.” The expression “tell it like it is” comes from the Southside. So in that spirit, this is just a little of what makes me angry: the establishment left, they are arrogant, clueless … and everywhere. No other segment of society dares to presume that they know what you think, how you feel, what’s best for you. Once upon a time they made room for you, gave you space. Now it’s all about patronage – and only the very young are allowed into the golden circle.

Bleaching crème: an abomination, and the single most dangerous force working against black women today. Dark-skinned women – and light-skinned women, too – are its victims. Shame on the media that carry advertisements for it.

Also, white women who sing like black women: all these ladies with the Mariah Carey whoops, the Beyoncé flourishes, the Aretha Franklin vibrato. At first it was wonderful and slightly flattering. Now to hear some home counties girl singing like she comes from the Southside of Chicago sounds phoney and insulting. And it keeps the real ladies from the world’s various Southsides, out of the loop. I blame that killer of music: Simon Cowell – and having Sinitta as his close friend doesn’t let him off the hook.

I totally understand why Michelle Obama and the President, himself, cannot slip into the stereotypical “angry” mode – there are too many people who still buy into racial stereotypes, just waiting to shake their heads and tut at such behaviour. But there are just as many on the Left, who want that “anger” to be shown, because that’s the sort of stereotype for which they voted. It fits into their radical chic mentality and justifies their hipster level. The Right and the Left both suffer from cognitive dissonance, and I applaud Bonnie Greer, an expat like me, for stating what should be, for many on the Left, a lesson in stating the bleeding obvious.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo

For all the second-guessing, it’s still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it’s hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama’s considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.

But life isn’t fair, and this president is in a far tougher spot in 2010 than his predecessor was in 2005.

Sure, the US Navy has submersibles; how many Navy submersible crews have experience with underwater oil-drilling? Answer: none. The US Coast Guard doesn’t have enough boom to protect the shores for which they’re responsible.

What ought Obama to have done? He should’ve just dropped an atomic bomb on it. Or designed top kill himself on a napkin. He should’ve farted on the head of BP’s CEO. Lots of good ideas — but what they really come down to is the lack of an angry black man:

Much more after the jump…

Rich is a little more gentle:

As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP’s pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president’s argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks. It’s not just the gulf that could suffer for decades to come.

Not only does the president look bad if BP takes months to drill the relief-well; he looks bad every day that the fiction of corporate responsibility stands between the American people and a piece of BP’s hide.

British Petroleum — a foreign corporation! — has no right to any of that oil. Not only did the company eschew safety in pursuit of immense profit, it lied about the amount of oil and then tried to prevent any real accounting. Yet we have seen Coast Guard boats — American military craft! — serving as BP’s lackeys (a testament to how deeply captured our republican organs of state have become).

The entire crisis was created by irregulation. Every stage has been revealing: the Coast Guard did not have enough boom to protect the coastlines. BP was actually in charge of booming, and bollixed the job. The agency regulating oil rigs was still a rubber-stamp despite the change at the top of DoI. BP was operating in the libertarian paradise of a bad western. Not only should BP pay for cleaning up, I say this criminally-negligent corporate person should lose the oil.

I don’t ask that this thing called British Petroleum stop existing. I ask that it be held accountable just as a non-corporate person would be held accountable if they accidentally poisoned the Gulf of bloody Mexico: any and all gains from the poisoning would be confiscated, lacking the legal protection of “property.”

I say the well needs to be public property and the oil under it added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I say any and all profits from the development of that well should be used to pay off the costs of future cleanup after BP finishes paying for this mess.

They should lose, or else there is no justice. It’s not complicated. I realize the post title invites controversy, but so be it. We have heard stories of the president losing patience, but we have not seen them.

As Americans, we want the image on our screens of an angry Obama spanking a corporate-person-child. It’s that simple. The right constantly tries to make him out as an angry black man; it is an image he has always eschewed, even to his detriment when he is portrayed as weak and vacillating. (If he’s not angry, he’s not easily enough angered. See how that works?)

This president actually does use power, but quietly. For instance, while getting BP to show the camera feed during top kill and getting them to agree to an independent flow measurement. There is obviously communication and some kind of pressure going on. Rumors persist that there will be criminal charges; yet we have not seen them, and no president ought to declare his desire for them lest he taint the process.

My point here is that you are never, ever going to see the “angry black” Obama. It is not going to happen. Brett Baier tried his damnedest to get one and failed. What we want, of course, is just an angry president. But would America divorce the image from the meme awaiting it?

The president gets prayers by Blackberry every day:

The morning devotional is sent each morning via email by White House faith director Joshua DuBois, the Associated Press reports. Obama said he called the daily prayer a “wonderful practice,” adding that it had started during his presidential campaign.

So this is not new, and that is the point of telling people now. Obama is gradually working at the foundations of a negative meme by consistently behaving in the opposite way.

The ironically-named Gary Kreep, who produced that video under a 501(c)4 for-profit corporation, turns out to also be Executive Director of

A California-based PAC called the Republican Majority Campaign (that) spent nearly all of the $1.7 million it raked in from conservative donors last year, but less than 2% of the money went to supporting candidates or independent political spending.

Like I keep saying: this revolution will be monetized. The tea parties and the Obama-fearmongers are in it for the money. What’s sad is that so many people are gullible enough to fall for their crap.

Simon Owens has the full details.

Seriously, with cocaine being the Republican drug you’d think the CPAC would recognize the Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama. But for that to happen, the GOP would have to be interested in actual governance. They know they want power; but when they have it, their main use seems to be an uninterested and profligate disaster.

In the continuing quest to promote their “narcissist” meme, Faux Noise has been counting the number of times the president uses the first-person singular pronoun in his speeches. Of course, they do this without context or comparison. Mark Lieberman makes quick comparative studies of speeches by Palin and John Boehner and finds (unsurprisingly) that this new line of linguistic attack blows up in their faces:

Satire aside, let me emphasize again my conviction that these numbers are meaningless without further context and analysis, except perhaps as an index of pundits’ idiocy or malice.  Such proportions vary widely with formality, interactivity, and other obvious factors — and there are several different sorts of I and we, as James Pennebaker explains in his post “What is ‘I’ saying?“, 8/9/2009.  But those who think that such counts and rates are a useful measure for one public figure should be honest enough to try the same metric across the board.

Of course, Faux Noise keeps hitting on the idea of Obama’s “permanent campaign” mode as something unprecedented and unnecessary even in the face of their very own 24-7 campaign of noise and nonsense. The White House seems even less interested in the Beltway village than before:

“We ran everything through one strategic filter – how does this help us win the election?” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who held the same title during the campaign. “Anything that didn’t help us do that, we didn’t do.”

[...]

The emphasis on impact is reflected in the 10 interviews Obama has chosen to do so far this year – three with high-profile television anchors, including an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric that was broadcast live before the Super Bowl; four interviews with prominent national magazines; a national radio interview; and the online YouTube interview that incorporated questions from the public.

The 10th interview, with the Bloomberg subsidiary Business Week, was the only one the president has done this year with a reporter who regularly covers the White House, a group often more familiar than anchors or other high-wattage interviewers with the daily ups and downs of the president and his policies.

But it’s all grist for the mill, right? Obama controlling his message is “controlling the press oh noes!” and his speeches are narcissistic because, well, just because. And our permanent campaign to fill our viewers’ heads with bullshit is no reason for the president to step up his game. See how that works?

BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.

A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.

There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.

This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.

Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.

Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.

Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.

But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.

In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.

As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”

Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.

Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:

We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.

H/t to Simon Malloy at Media Matters

An independent commission makes closure recommendations, which Congress has an opportunity to reject. The process is lengthy, high-profile, and defined by built-in mechanisms that prevent just the kind of meddling the conservatives are alleging. And BRAC won’t even make closure decisions for several more years.

So the alleged threat would take a long time to execute, would have a low probability of success, and, if found out, would make the White House look far worse than would much easier and immediate forms of pressure. It would be about as effective as threatening to put a hex on Nelson’s dog. It just isn’t plausible. (Emphasis mine)