Black Orchid in the White House Garden: Assailing Michelle Obama
August 2008
“Politics is the authoritative allocation of values in a society!”
Cynthia McKinney
“The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons, or brothers of her master!”
Fredrick Douglass
Where and When She Enters
“You know what we’ve got? We’ve got trash in the White House!”
Tammy Bruce, The Laura Inghram Show (‘Listen’)
March 09′
Politics is the hyper-actualization of the zeitgeist of American life and culture. It speaks to the very soul of the nation from its own particular vantage point, garishly poised in the mirror and boldly facing down the physic crucible fronting scene and script of all that the nation collectively has been, and all that it has allowed itself the capacity to become. It is the narrative of the nation’s soul crystallized in campaign combat.
During the Bullwhip Days, as a most enticing however lurid habitual rendezvous played out in the quiet of the early wee hours of the morning, cautiously set in the deafening hush tones of a stark ritual play, staged all throughout the American heartland no matter how near or far, in county after county. Often it was true that when a female slave was to be found quite awhile away from her labors, this fact alone was enough to incite titillating cross-cultural gossip throughout the week. Who was this Black victim Mammy or one of Mammy and Master’s children? Was this Sapphire, or Jezebel? Not a hyper-sensitive moment was to be squandered seeking to resolve this latest bewildering community obsession, —“Just what was Bubba doing in the basement?”
This was so because a Black woman was the legal property of her master and therefore she could never legally be raped. This principle has played its role as one of the supreme mother archetypes of American culture. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, Black woman’s bodies were wholly at the mercy of their White master. As absurd as it may seem, this fact continues to guide and mold much of the social and political discourse of this nation. It is one of the most accursed legacies in the intergenerational transmission of this nation’s recurring racial conflict.
Today, the Black Jezebel has come to the forefront as one of the grand archetypes of the New Mythology that forcefully guides, molds, and defines this society through its cultural production. However, she remains a tragic symptom rendered forever mum and shrouded, sheltering a wound left festering and a child left hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there but once again, “We really not supposed to talk about it!”
After slavery, White men cowardly came to project the frequent Jack the Ripper-like attention that they had once wantonly displayed towards Black women’s bodies, on to the Black man. This was purely collective cowardice upon their part to be sure at a time when Black families were simply attempting to heal from centuries of inhumane abuse.
From this moment on, the maniacal specter of the Black male rapist fiendishly on the prowl for the chastity of pure White women, became the lurid and forced political a priori for the First Evil Birth of Jim Crow. This malicious deafening lie, and its crude female counterparts delivered in the stereotypes of Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and their filthy, naked, and unruly, ‘Picaninny’ children proved remarkably efficient propagandized upon an entire vulnerable and newly freed Black community; during the immediate aftermath of one of the most egregious seasons of man’s inhumanity to man.
Sadly enough, these horribly negative images projected solely out of the pathology of Bubba’s own bitter neurosis in defeat of the war, would help to solicit an additional century of an even viler form of racist bloodlust. No longer a valued commodity, like a horse, a nightstand, or a toilet, the premium upon Black life in this country would diminish precipitously, and the hundred-year struggle over this forged blood-drenched resolve came to redefine an entire society; for better or worse.
Nonetheless, emerging from out of the bitter wrath of life-long captivity you tell me, just what man would ignore the anxious immediate search for his own extended family, only to act out solely to express some queer phantom fiendish lust for the wife of his brutal oppressor? There have often been times in the life of this nation, when simply to be born a Black man, was akin to being born with a gun pointed directly at your head. Most likely, it was a shot gun, leaving little possibility of tracing the bullet.
The Black woman today largely remains an enigma beyond the culture outside of her own community, and often her intellect and strength illicit widespread fear of retribution. The truth, now deeply secreted back of the hidden resolve of tens of thousands of ruthless carnivals of blood-soaked rope and fire, pogroms sentencing Black flesh to the gruesome funeral pyre, is actually much simpler than that. More often than not, Whitefolk simply wanted to steal Colored-folk’s land. America is the great land grab of the Second Rise of Europe.
However, these two lingering projections boldly thrust out of the psychopathic racist personality, left at bay in the midst of the nation once again endeavoring to remake itself more than a century and a quarter ago, continue to mold and guide the unreconciled narrative of race in America. They are the twin pillars and the Mother Archetypes in the haunted lexicon of race and politics, and they are the macabre source of the very voices that Bubba thinks he keeps hearing in his head; extant today in the narrative of Campaign 2008. Now that Barrack Obama has been linked to an angry Black man and stripped of his church, it was no stretch for Bubba to go after his wife Michelle.
“I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels – that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever – then that’s legit. We’ll track it down!”
Bill O’Reilly
Hair-braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher's rope,
Eyes--fagots,
Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath--the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.
Jean Toomer
Mary Turner’s Ghosts
A young fragile 20 year old deeply religious woman in the spring of 1918, Mary Turner could never have imagined the truly inconceivable act of blood thirsty barbarism that would so casually steal her husband’s life. Now, eight months pregnant and grieving in bitter and painful agony, who could have imagined that a fate far more sinister and cruel was about to visit her and her unborn child as well?
Shortly after Hayes Turner was swept up and lynched in yet another wave of Jim Crow’s favorite pubescent pastime in Brooks County Georgia. Whence maniacal White mobs had run rampant in a bizarre lawless bloodlust for months, as if on some kind of vampirish prowl for Black flesh, in her anguish Mary made the mistake of publicly voicing her pain crying out loud: “They gonna pay for what they did!”
Oddly enough, her comments alone immediately solicited a rather bizarre reaction. Instantly, as if riding high upon its recent notoriety, considered one of the most racist institutions in the entire nation, the Atlanta newspaper published her comments within hours. They were scored glaringly across its pages like a screaming bulletin board characterizing her aggrieved remarks as surly “disrespectful”, as if Mary had actually said something quite odious and truly threatening towards the well being of this entire county. The woman was grieving for God’s sake. Yet, even after the senseless murder of her husband, what she said in the midst of her misery somehow made this White community feel as if she was simply not “Proud enough to be an American”; therefore she was “Ungrateful” – Bubba would write from the newsroom, and this alone would be enough to solicit a large White mob to arrive at her home in order to actually lynch her.
Fatigued, distraught, of course as you could imagine she was quite heavy with child and in utter fear for their lives; Mary hid overnight but was tracked down by the following morning. For the simple act of natural human anguish Mary Turner while eight months pregnant with child was dragged to a stream and hung upside down from a tree. Gasoline was poured all over her and set ablaze while her clothes were literally burned to ashes upon her withering body. Suddenly a man stepped forward brandishing a large fishing knife and cut the baby directly out of Mary’s stomach. The poor child gave out a cry as it fell to the ground, giving out one breathe before it died, because another man immediately came forward and smashed the baby’s skull with the heavy heal of his boot.
Mary’s body was then pummeled with bullets to a loud chorus of “ho-ha!” and “Yeeeh – hah!” and the stifling jeers of the crowd could be heard for miles in the distant midst of communities nearby. More than one hundred White men, women, and children all joyously watched this ghoulish and unimaginable crime. Children cheered uncontolably alongside their parents and their collective faces were strangely contorted in a rather bizarre look of overwhelming sexual ecstasy.
Over the course of the next two weeks during that spring in 1918, more than a dozen other innocent Black people lost their lives in the midst of this senseless rampage. Ultimately, upwards of more than 500 Black families were forced to flee north. However, not one individual was ever convicted or even accused of any crime for any one of these serial murders. Not one member of the mob was ever reported to have ever received even a moment of counseling for their madness. Life for them would continue on as normal without skipping a beat. This is what Fredrick Douglass meant when he said that “The struggle for freedom in America is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies and White men’s minds!” and what Justice Harlan agued against in his lone dissent of Plessey vs. Ferguson. It is a legacy born in the psychopathic mind of Jim Crow.
For centuries, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and American Slavery implanted a venal prison plantation sex trade upon American soil, and this did not at all exist in a historical vacuum. It was but the latest salvo in the legendary clash of two completely contradictory cultural worldviews; one born of fire and the other born of ice. The variant seeds of two different cultures could not be more diametrically in contradistinction to one another, than that of the African and the European worlds.
The Black woman is the central line of demarcation or the line in the sand if you will, of these two competing cultures. Space does not here afford us the luxury to sufficiently elaborate upon the full implications of these latent facts. Nevertheless, a more critical view of the forced image of the Black woman in American society does bare our greater scrutiny.
For tens of thousands of years, the ‘Womb’ was amply represented as the architectural crucible of African culture. The womb, as the foundation could be viewed as the sacred seed and ordering principle of life. Holding such prestige, pornography could never exist in this type of society, because the Womb could never be shown being publicly defiled. Women naturally carried themselves with a modest air of elegance, and a man who might seek to violate a woman, would naturally feel the whole weight of the entire community upon him when he sought to strike her. This was a self-fulfilling prophesy in the self defense of a nation.
It is only in recent times with slavery and with the full impact of the Second Rise of Europe (the Maafa) upon African people, that this lifestyle has been disrupted. The traditional role of ‘Twinlinial’ governance in Black male female relations has been the central and most contentious source of European angst towards the Black community for thousands of years. Even though the Black woman as Madonna and Child remains by far the most enduring icon throughout the world, her stereotyped image in American Mythology provides some of the most prominent Archetypes in the collective subconscious of the American mind.
If Mary could not be raped, she surly could not be murdered either. This is one of the most enduring prima facie articles of faith in the history of American law; recently witnessed in the Duke Rape Case (2006) and in the Rape of Tawanna Brawley (1987). It is the stuff about which legends have been made. In both of these cases, the lawyers defending these Black women were ultimately disbarred. Why is this so? Was it as we have been led to believe because they had perpetrated a hoax upon the public trust? Or was it because a Black woman still cannot be legally raped by a White man in America? Recently, a police officer from Florida would actually tell me as much. He related the story to me of an incident that occurred during his first month on the Police Force. Officer Diop and his partner were called to investigate the gang-rape of a Black woman, when suddenly they were stopped by their supervisor and told not to bother: “A Black woman cannot be raped!” they were told. “They consider it a party!”
Mary was ‘thing-a-fied’, stripped of her humanity, mocked like a ‘Baby’s Momma’, scorned, made into a ‘non-person’, and then murdered in a ghoulish cleansing ritual during the light of day in a southern town. Her baby, like her limbs were simply trinkets at play, celebrated through collective cognitive dissociation as mere entertainment at the communal barbeque.
Weather it was to be manifest in the violent aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion (1831), or even earlier through hard centuries of plantation rape and torture, or in the serial brutal video-taped police beatings of Black citizens that are so sadly commonplace in our world today, or in a concussion bomb that is launched in the guise of serving an eviction notice, somehow senselessly dropped upon a household by municipal decree (Philadelphia 1985), or even in the inconceivable community anguish of a loving innocent 92 year old grandmother who is somehow murdered in her very own home on Neal Street by the same police who should have been earnestly working to protect her life (Atlanta 2006), or in the truly remarkable recurring scenes of an entire city sentenced to a Diaspora and still suffering right before our eyes in woeful national disregard.
However it is to be experienced, collective racist trauma ratcheted up in such massive and inhumane proportions, appears to continue to exist for the African American in order to induce and to maintain a fear-repressed collective memory; until their exists nothing more than a robotized Black community that only lives in blackface.
No other group within this society is so vehemently solicited to make a complete break with their own indigenous culture; and no other community remains so terribly mocked and scorned. With the exception of the Palestinians, it often appears that no other people on the planet save African Americans are so often told to simply forget their history.
Nevertheless, today in America and throughout the world Mary and Hayes Turner, and their baby have not been forgotten. Of course, they must still vie for supremacy over the powerful globalized images of America’s Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and their nappy-headed children. Certainly, they are not the source of intellect at CNN or Bubba Fox News, nor sadly even a textbook footnote has appeared to linger for classroom discussion; but in much of the world today, they will never be forgotten. They have become a symbol of America’s soul.
The Creature from Madison Ave
Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.
Revelation 2:20
Lil Kim
Today, perhaps the most resilient grand archetype of New American culture is the troubled super-sexualized conniving Black Jezebel, born in Bubba’s backyard during the glory adolescent days of Jim Crow Apart-Hate, when Mary Turner was just a child. She is as old as the Vampire Lesstat, and as macabre in her many contortions. She was a throwback to White male oppression during the days of slavery, and often she was the object of the sex trade called ‘placage’ and then projected as collateral damage in the pedophilic inter-generational incestuous disregard of the White master for the humanity of his female slave; featured for years at The Quadroon Ball.
Today, hyper-sexualized and grossly ‘thing-a-fied’, she remains standard fare of the nation’s leading cultural production courtesy of Bubba and people like billionaire pornographer Bob Johnson of BET. During the Bullwhip days, she appeared first as the result of the rape of the docile unattractive and defenseless ‘Mammy’; although her parentage has always been in question. Directly after slavery, she suddenly shape-shifted in the bitterly contentious politics of the Reconstruction era, back to the deceitful light-skin seductress, along with her equally troubled sister the rebellious and loud mouthed ‘Sapphire’, who has variously appeared throughout the years. Today they are both woefully manifested in various shades along with a myriad of incarnations of Mammy as well.
Jezebel and Sapphire still exist as supreme archetypes within the primordial cross-cultural narrative production of American life. They exist, extant of a woefully neglected racial discourse as the aggressive Black seductresses of Hollywood cinema, Television, Cable News and now thanks to Bob Johnson and BET, soon to debut in a Hip Hop video near you.
Sadly enough, the active ingredients in cultural suicide no longer require the offense of a White provocateur.
Jezebel would gain unique supremacy after Mammy lost her agency as the superior archetype, when Black people first gained just a little bit more freedom as a culture. Then and now, fear, anger, and guilt invert back of the reality motivating the political and social docu-drama, as Bubba once more projects his aberrant pathology upon an entire nation of people.
In Birth of a Nation, Jezebel arrives on the screen in the winter of 1915 as Lydia, the deceitful conniving vamp who in due course ruins an otherwise good White man’s life. She ultimately would not make her debut splash in film until her coveted role in the Blackploitation films of the 1970’s, during the very pre-dawn hours of the Second Reconstruction, as the nation was once again remaking its brand. However, first Hollywood would abide its slow fade to black in preference of the safer stock image of Mammy typified in Hattie McDaniel’s 1939 Oscar winning performance as ‘Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind. For five years, starting in 1974 Mammy long-suffering and docile, would continue to survive clinching her fist around her bible as Florida Evans or ‘Mamma’ in the television sitcom Good Times.
In 1995 she bemoans the lack of good Black men as Gloria Mathews in ‘Waiting to Exhale’. She is the beat-down Oprah Winfrey character of Sophia in ‘The Color Purple’ (1985) and Sethe in ‘Beloved’ (1998).
Then, in the movie ‘Crash’ (2004) Thandie Newton suddenly revises a contemporary Jezebel who ultimately falls in love with the police officer who fondles her in front of her husband, for whom she has suddenly lost respect. In ‘Monster’s Ball’ (2001) Hallie Berry becomes only the first Black woman in more than a century of Hollywood history to win the Academy Award for Best Actress as Leticia Musgrove, the sex starved Jezebel who begs her husband’s executioner to please make love to her.
Earlier in the century, we discovered that Jezebel had actually stuck around after slavery by cleverly hiding away in the basement. It appears as if she was given new life in the Big House as a kind of mascot. In time, she would arrive as a queer subconscious prerogative in the stock commercial logos of Madison Ave commerce. She would become the nominal choice for the latest celebrated public offering. Though largely taken for granted, for decades her voluptuous black body scantily clad and often grossly exaggerated fronted logos on an appalling myriad of packaging for an alarmingly vast array of goods and services within the everyday consumerism of the New Industrial American society. It is where Wall Street discovered very early on that it could actually re-live a part of the past and curry a newfound brand loyalty all at the very same time; arousing dopamine levels by re-inventing the taboo sexual enticement of miscegenation. Once more, Jezebel’s body is fondled in a wanton ritual of the public marketplace.
It is a fact that in the early 20th century the slave market would be reborn in virtual reality as the African American woman was symbolically being fondled casually; once again in lieu of her alleged wanton promiscuity. Jezebel and her ‘Picaninnys’ were deeply massaged into the collective unconsciousness of the entire American nation, in the despicable images of Black people with grossly distorted features like huge bulging eyes, over-sized and bloated lips and buttocks, along with profuse images of Black people being compared to monkeys. They were images massaged through the palms of the hand in the dollar-ism of everyday American life. The image of a Black woman and her poor nappy-headed children scorned, mocked, and ridiculed, adorned everything from flatware and ashtrays to soda pop from the Eighteenth Century until well into the second half of the Twentieth Century. Much of this still exist today.
As a slim thin-lipped octoroon in the psychological thriller ‘Slow Burn’ (2005) Jolene Blakock is the classic Jezebel, as the seductive hip assistant district attorney Nora Timmer. Her ambiguous racial identity, her super-seductive sexual demeanor, and forged air of vulnerability are the tools that she artfully uses in order to entice the men around her into a deadly web of greed and deceit, right in the middle of a mayoral campaign. She has a reputation for using her ‘street creds’ wisely and now, claming that she has been raped by a Black man that she recently seduced, it is her schizophrenic quest for identity cloaked in her inviting sexual promiscuity that super-charges her irresistible allure. In the end, as Jackie Longbrough she emerges the victor however alone in the world, after political scandal and murder have completely enveloped the men in her midst.
Together Whitney Huston and Michele Lamar Richards create a unique composite of Jezebel, in the popular 1992 movie ‘The Bodyguard’. Huston is Jezebel as Rachel Marron, the successful slim sultry Black superstar pop singer; and Richards is Nikki, her older less successful sister. Nikki is the more voluptuous light-skinned sister, Jezebel’s alter ego who appears to be of mixed racial lineage. On stage, in her silver futuristic diva costume, Rachel throws off her cape and performs a powerfully seductive vamp that instantly whips the crowd into a nympholeptic frenzy. “We’re gonna get looooooose!” she croons.
Then, suddenly she is snatched off the stage and almost stripped of her clothes. Kevin Costner as Frank Farmer is the handsome White former Secret Service man who is reluctantly assigned to protect her. The plot revolves around the sinister efforts of a stalker who seeks to kill the pop icon, and Farmer is at first reluctant to take the job in order it seems to ‘save Jezebel from herself’; until that is, Rachel seduces him. “You didn’t have to fuck everybody!” [At the party] he tells her at one point, and Farmer soon realizes that he’s got quite a bit on his hands.
Finally, Farmer takes Rachel and her family away from her high profile promiscuous lifestyle on vacation to his father’s house on a lake. It is here that the sinister plot to kill Rachel Marron is finally unraveled. As Nikki attempts to seduce Farmer, she reveals her deep seated envy for her own sister’s success, admitting that she is the one who actually hired a hit man to kill her sister in the first place. Nikki balks at his rejection of her saying: “Why have just one sister, when you can have us both?” In the end, Nikki is killed, and even though she has tried to fire the hit man, he continues the contract as the titillating allure of his promiscuous prey is far too enticing to abandon.
While Jezebel was coming of age neatly packaged and efficiently massaged into the minds of people around the world, her children were gracefully allowed to travel with her. These were the ‘Picaninnys’, images of filthy and often unruly nappy-headed Black children. They were usually portrayed with ragged clothes, quite often half naked and being chased through the forest and frequently being eaten by alligators and other beasts of the wild. One could easily assume that Jezebel was such a whore that she was an unfit mother as well, and this was the image of the Black woman that would become globalized for more than a century. Picaninnys would become the greatest source of product branding that the world had ever known, and their tales of delinquency and mischief would become the narrative source of children’s stories for generations to come.
In a nation that still remains vastly segregated on a grassroots level, Jezebel, and the occasionally dismissive outburst of ‘Sapphire’ remain the most powerful images that many Americans have ever seen of the Black woman; and it is of no fault of the Black woman herself that these forces have been arrayed against her. Nevertheless, in the Black community, even after the enormous impact of patriarchal Christianity, which often seems to have rendered many African people spiritually mute and culturally suicidal, the Black woman is still revered beyond the cultural lockbox of Euro-centric society. She remains in fact the celebrated ‘rock’ and foundation of the entire Black community, and she is known by many attributes.
She is Eve in the primordial garden; but not simply as the source of original sin. She is also variously known as The Grande Inquisitor, facing down the serpent that seems to respond to what she has only been told to believe: “That’s not true. Who told you that? You surly shall not die!” (Genesis 3: 1-5). Yet, even before the chronicle of this enduring exchange, she was Asset (Isis) Queen of the Nile and Mother of Civilization. She is Maat, symbol of justice, righteousness, and spiritual probity, with attributes that are far too numerous to mention.
She is the mythical figure of Baset, mysteriously reckoned in the primordial image of the premiere Cat Woman, who leads the charge in the celebrated unification of the Upper and the Lower lands of Ancient KMT; the first and sadly one of the last great High Civilizations that the world has ever known. She is Queen Hatshepsut, the great pharaoh who fights to restore the cultural order sadly torn apart by greed, and war. She is the Black Madonna with Child, known throughout the world as the legendary symbol of the nurturing sprit as the feminine energy of the Universe. Every Black woman carries the potential of all of these attributes and more. It is for this reason that she is variously mocked, envied, and adored, and at the same time she is so often variously feared as well.
She is the torch bearer, like Queen Nzinga leading her people into war, and like Armanita, known as Harriet Tubman, the Great Black Mosses leading her people out of slavery. She is Ida B. Wells and Cynthia McKinney facing down the mobs that seek to lynch her; and speaking Truth to Power in order to tell the nation what it really needs to hear. In the Black community, we know exactly who Michelle Obama is, because we readily recognize all of the natural attributes that she exudes. She is an example of what makes us ‘Proud to be American’, because we have always known that: ‘A Nation Can Rise No Higher than Its Woman!’ This is because it is the woman that is the first teacher of the child.
The Elders teach us that: “The first Book of Life was written by a woman —- ‘Maat’. But, she was only writing down what was being told to her by a man —- ‘Djehuti’. She was the first Chief Justice, and the Hall of Justice was in the Center of the Sun!”
Today, the African American community is increasingly guided by the principles of ‘Sankofa’ (‘Go back and fetch it’), and something we call: ‘I-U-Raysha’, and although I will admit that this crude effort to deliver the most accurate pronunciation of this latent African Mother Principle, does little diligence to its proper spelling, know that this is the governing ‘female’ principle which denotes ‘Healing on a Spiritual Level. It was brought forth to us by our greatest living cultural alchemist Dr. Marimba Ani, and it exists as the actual first principle of the contemporary Reparations Movement.
The European world has never really been able to truly synthesize the unique mytho-poetic complexity of the African Cultural Worldview; and the Modern World has often been introduced to Black American Femininity solely through the psychopathic lens of Bubba in his backyard.
While he has worked aggressively to paint into the public mind a rather demeaning view of the African Village, where men, women, and children seem to simply gather in a primitive ritual half-naked with the Black women’s breast fully exposed, a few thoughts inverted back of this perceptual reality do come to mind. Notice that these women appear to be in the healthy habit of breast-feeding their children, boosting their natural immunity from disease for the rest of their lives. So too, their breasts and bodies simply have not been ‘sexually objectified’ in their society, and no man you will notice has ever attempted to rape them. This would be completely unthinkable.
In the European Cultural Worldview, the female is highly objectified and hyper-sexualized. Man in the European world calls this walk with Creation – ‘His-story’, and by so doing he immediately ‘disses’ half of his family, half of his aid along the journey. Africans knew nothing of this somewhat estranged Cultural Worldview until relatively recent times.
It has been rumored that long before the Democratic primaries were over conservative guru Karl Rove, the architect of the presidency of Bush the Younger, along with a coterie of Neo-Cons gathered their focus groups for the purpose of discovering just how to attack Barrack Obama in the general election. It should come of no surprise that right out of the box they were explicit in their intentions to make Michelle Obama what they constantly called “Fair Game”. Perhaps Bubba reasoned that if he could get away with the unprecedented maltreatment of a sitting African American congresswoman like Cynthia McKinney, even a Black potential First Lady was game as well. Perhaps this is because that even in the year 2008, many people still believe that a Black woman simply cannot be legally raped in America. Why else would Duke University have the audacity to hold a sex party one year after the verdict in that case?
If America is to truly emerge into some kind of post racial society, it shall not arrive there without a measure of honest reconciliation with its past. Yet, reconciling such a brutal and rather barbaric past appears not likely what many Americans are ready to do.
Black Orchid
“I think that [Michelle Obama] video, which we put up on YouTube, struck a nerve. It struck a nerve with Democrats and they squealed and they squealed really loud, and it caused a big storm in the media,” It doesn’t matter if the campaign surrogate is married to the candidate or not. What campaign surrogates say on the campaign trail during the course of the campaign is fair game.”
Tennessee GOP Communications Director Bill Hobbs,
The Huffington Post, June 2008
In ‘Freedomland’ (2006) Julianne Moore plays Brenda Martin, a pale neurotic White single mother who incites racial tensions in a Black New Jersey neighborhood after she accidentally causes the death of her own child In order to cover her crime she immediately claims that he has been abducted. Think Susan Smith in 1994 who claimed that African Americans carjacked her and kidnapped her children; when all along she had killed them herself. Samuel L. Jackson plays Lorenzo, the Black policeman with relatives and street credits in the Black community, which quickly becomes the subject of maddening White rage from the police officers (including Brenda’s brother) in the neighboring White community; now thrown into wanton bloodlust at the mere thought of a fiendish Black man on the prowl.
The plot races towards a terrifying racial conflagration as the Black community is instantly put on lock down, until at last Brenda tells Lorenzo the truth. All of her life Brenda it seems has been an outcast in her family, and she appears to truly derive genuine love and comfort working in a daycare center in the Black community. These are the people that she has come to love and appreciate. Yet, at one point, one of her coworkers tells her: “You, stay away from my child!” Ultimately, she reveals to Lorenzo the love affair that she had with a Black man who was actually with her the night that her son passed away. Gradually, she seems to fall in love with Lorenzo as he interrogates her, and in the end she admits to him that she told this lie simply because with all the misery and pain that the Black community has seen, she really just felt that they could deal with her pain as well.
Freedomland is a symbol of a community far too often made the political dumping grounds for the nation’s ills.
Black Orchid in the White House Garden is an essay taken from the upcoming book Bubba In The Backyard: the Politics of Race, Sex, Gender, and Class in Campaign 2008 by TS Aschenge
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