David Dante Troutt

Thank You, Michael

Appreciation by David Dante Troutt

Recently, my daughter turned seven, and a week later I realized I was late with a very specific gift. It had occurred to me that she was ready for the Jackson Five, and I hurried to buy her the perfect CD of her own. For most of the days since, we as a family found ourselves dancing hard and purposefully to a lot of the classics, but especially Maybe Tomorrow. It took me a few times to get it. Then I realized that at a certain point in the song, the melody rises into a late-breaking chorus full of the sweetest soul. You are the book that I read each day, they sing. You are the song of my life. Let me sing it to you. There you hear a pure and uncomplicated Michael singing with his big brothers, leading yet surrounded and protected by them. Just as Id hoped, it became my daughters and mine, her voice like Michael’s, mine like the brothers.

Then suddenly Michael Jackson died. Very quietly, he slipped away forever. I was caught having to explain to my daughter and myself the meaning of a tired soul. It meant revealing the okey doke the world played on the words and deeds that made him a soldier of love. It meant recalling where I was and what I was doing during these last forty years. His work spans at least three musical generations, before and after his own. I am his generation the Obama generation, actually and it means reckoning with the seasons of life someone our age has come to know. I decided to start with his voice. › Continue reading

The Divide that United

As this election draws to a close, a very strange and wonderful thing is happening with hardly a word said about it: Racism is losing.  To celebrate this fact must feel like assuming an Obama victory, because few of us do it openly.  Well, it’s time we do. › Continue reading

Who’s Not Your Friend? The Sarah Palin Narratives

[Please see the blog epilogue at the end of this essay]

If Sarah Palin’s sudden and remarkable popularity that boosted John McCain’s presidential hopes continues for more than another week, it will be because of the power of narratives to alter reality and affirm voter preferences. Narratives are no small thing—merely the way we tend to perceive the world—yet they are frequently taken for granted, except by Republican campaign strategists. This time, Democrats demonstrated some brilliance in this vein when Barack Obama began his campaign for president many years ago by framing and repeating the compelling narrative of his life in an elegant memoir. In short, he sold story. In fact, he sold a profound story when Hillary Clinton did not, which is primarily what distinguishes them. And now we have Palin’s.

I am ready to admit that I struggle with hers and not just because I am a Democrat and a supporter of Obama. The first clear fact emerging from her appeal is that we are, as so many social scientists have been telling us for years, a deeply divided country. I am not supposed to like Palin because I am black, a feminist, live in a large Northeastern city and worked very, very hard in school to reverse my childhood lack of class privilege. I am the Other American to whom she refuses to speak. Yet, because she could well become my president too, I am compelled to try to understand how her narrative works so well on others. › Continue reading

Judging the Elitist by Its Cover: The New Yorker Revealed

Just before the New Yorker cover came out depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as black power/Muslim terrorists, I was telling someone how useless the term “elitist” was.  It was one of several pejorative labels tossed recently at Barack, and it was pure epithet disguised as a descriptor.  But of what?  It describes nothing.  It only rankles.  It’s subject to so much modification in order to make sense—pedigree, social distance/indifference, unearned/unacknowledged privilege—that it’s useless except to impugn.

Then the cover appeared.  It showed up first on the Internet, then in the corners of printed tabloids, next, in my city of New York, on the real cover of the magazine itself hanging defiantly from clips along the tops of newsstands, baiting you as you passed or waited for a train or a light: That image.

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The Great Black Hope

The sun had barely risen on Barack Obama’s first full day as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States when my brother-in-law stood alone in front of a Seattle Starbucks, waiting for it to open, and soon encountered the old racial microaggressions.  He is black.  Within a few minutes, several white Seattleites, also dressed for work, approached the door and awkwardly formed a line.  No one met his eyes or acknowledged him.  No one was rude.  They simply ignored him and formed a line surrounding him, as if he were a tree or a mailbox.  When my brother-in-law and I talked later about his moment of invisibility, we assumed that many of these same people in line voted for Obama in the primary and will vote for him in November.

The moment raises the question: How would an Obama presidency likely improve the daily lives of the average black person in America?  So far, I’ve come up with five tangible benefits, and the greatest beneficiaries might not be middle-class professional blacks like my brother-in-law and me, but working-class and poorer blacks who make up a plurality of all black Americans.  Yet first has to be the intangible changes that come with the power of symbols to alter reality.

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How Right to Be So Wrong: Barack Obama and the Essential Surprise

Sometimes there’s nothing more satisfying than being completely wrong.

The good white folks of Indiana made sure of this in last week’s primary, just when Barack Obama’s candidacy was supposed to hinge on the “coalition” of working-class white voters Hillary Clinton had accumulated in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania’s “bitter” whites gave Clinton renewed hope by dashing the hope that Democrats might transcendently vote the issues and the odds rather than any prejudices they might harbor.  Pennsylvania made me wonder if I’d been right about race in America after all.  But white folks turn out to be less predictable than Hillary thought.

The Obama campaign has taught us many things so far.  He was right about the wisdom of running for president so soon.  His campaign awakened new voters with positive substance rather than negative pushback.  Intellectuals are discovering the value of a clearer line between secular black leadership and religious leadership.  Pundits are learning the importance of Chicago politics to multiracial politics and the South Side as a laboratory for American urban politics.  Liberals are re-examining their assumptions.

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Deficient Differences: How Barack Obama Deals with a Loss in the Family

Barack Obama’s emphatic denunciation of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for a series of comments the reverend made to news outlets last week is far more than politics.  Rev. Wright reveled in a bewildering litany of racial differences.  He repeated his most charged political beliefs and characterized this tempest in the racial trope of an attack on black faith before Obama finally cut him loose.  But this spectacle is more personal than political and more universal than racial.

Instead, we are riveted by some lasting mythology about human bonds.  The Obama-Wright breach is intriguing for its psychological familiarity, and as compelling as a car crash.  If cultures and religions invent eternal myths as narrations of life, where does this story fit and what could it mean for Obama?

The obvious analogy is an inversion of the Oedipal struggle, where the enraged father seeks the death of his son but accomplishes only their mutual destruction.

Or try Roman mythology with Reverend Wright as the ruler of the universe, Saturn, whose children were prophesied one day to depose him.  As each is born, he devours them.  Yet one gets away, Jupiter, who ultimately defeats his father.  This myth even reaches into astrology where Saturn is associated with old age, melancholy and the domineering father.  Jupiter—Barack—represents goodness.

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No Country for Old (Black) Men

Until his pastor’s most incendiary soundbites recirculated on the web, Barack Obama had managed to be the “post-racial,” “post-partisan” candidate to all America, if not the most beautiful, an unimposing buddy to white men, an attraction to women across racial and ethnic lines.  But Rev. Wright’s selected sermons suddenly threatened all of that just as racial divisiveness emanated from his Democratic rival’s camp, and Obama was called upon to address race in America head on.

The question is whether the master orator and personification of racial unity could show a cynical nation how to talk to about race amid a battle of metaphors about Wright.

The tightrope cliché doesn’t begin to describe the challenge Obama faced.  It is not just blue-collar white men in Pennsylvania whom Obama had to reassure, but a significant number of educated white liberals there and elsewhere concerned, for instance, about Wright’s statements about American foreign policy in the Middle East.  The endless repetition of four or five Wright snippets are often characterized as racist and hateful, but their actual content suggests a deeper fear that could join white constituencies: radical anti-Americanism.

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Theater of the Patently Absurd or “Bitch Is the New Black”

“The knock on the Clintons—the candidacy as well as the campaign—has always been that they would say anything to get elected and exploit divisions rather than build bridges.  Both of those traits were on fatalistic display when Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton fundraiser, recently asserted that Barack Obama is lucky to be a black man or he could not hope to come this far.

“The country,” she added, “is caught up in the concept.”What makes these comments so consistent with the campaign has less to do with Ferraro’s position as a fundraiser for Hillary than their tone.  Anyone can do that and anyone can opine.  It’s the familiar vituperative ring tone and an emerging take-no-prisoners attitude toward race from people who seem resentful that black voters have left them.

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