jackson

I kinda lost it when Michael Jackson’s daughter took to the mic to tell her father she loved him.

A big controversy surfaced yesterday over Jesse Jackson’s comment—heard on a ‘hot mic’—while being interviewed by Fox News. According to Jackson, Senator Obama appears elitist and seems to “talk down” to African Americans. It is clear that old-line civil rights leaders such as Jackson have a degree of discomfort with the Obama message.

Let’s face it, for all his popularity with regular black people, B-Rock was never going to win the Black Authenticity game with guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Whatever it was that Jackson said about BHO in the tape that Fox didn’t play (was it the N-word?) the implication of the whole exchange is clear: Obama is guilty of speaking white to blacks. Because for the gatekeepers of what it means to be authentically black in the US (and this includes liberal whites like Ralph Nader) there are some things you are supposed to say, some poses you are obliged to adopt in order to be considered black. In his 2003 book Authentically Black, the linguistics professor John McWhorter writes that “a tacit sense reigns among a great many black Americans today that the ‘authentic’ black person stresses personal achievement and strength in private, but dutifully takes on the mantle of victimhood as a public face.”