[lbo-talk] Adolph Reed's latest

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu May 8 13:54:02 PDT 2008


On May 8, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:


> Cousin Pookie likes this shtick more than anyone else. It's not a
> class
> divide in the black community. Listen to the Ta-Nehisi interview.

Actually, Cousin Pookie would be the one to ask about this, not Ta- Nehisi, except that Cousin Pookie doesn't exist, esp in Obama's family.

This is what Adolph told me for quoting in the LBO piece:

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html>
> Obama already when he talks "black" (e.g., with his "Cousin Pookie"
> riffs, which are the exact equivalent of Shelby Steele's rantings
> about underclass, shiftless "Sam") opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite
> metaphor of victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural...

And this is Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Nation:

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/coates>
> What he is positing is blackness as a valid ethnic identity with
> its own particular folkways and yet still existing within the
> broader American continuum. Already a wave of black politicos--
> Deval Patrick, Corey Booker, Jesse Jackson Jr.--have raised a
> similar banner, and there is nothing "postracial," "postblack" or
> "transcendental" about it.

Patrick, after a rough childhood, went to Milton Academy, Harvard, and Harvard Law School. He served in the Clinton admin and worked for Texaco and Coca-Cola. Booker went to Stanford, Oxford, and Yale, and worked for IBM. They are corporate centrists. Which is essentially what Obama is, by Coates's rendering.



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