The Obama Effect: Black Women, Ghetto Culture, and the Civil Rights Struggle

Various writers and bloggers give their perception on what the election of President Obama means for black women, black love, ghetto culture, and the civil rights struggle.

Deroy Murdock on Ghetto Culture:  Amid crisp breezes and bright sunshine, Barack Obama took the presidential oath Tuesday afternoon, to the thunderous applause of his supporters, the cautious hopes of the loyal opposition, and the well wishes of all Americans.

Three days earlier, four men were stabbed, one critically, at a Brooklyn party celebrating “Notorious,” the new movie about rapper Notorious B.I.G. He released the album “Ready to Die” before being killed in Los Angeles in 1997. Rapper Jamal “Gravy” Woolard – who portrays B.I.G. – was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment against his wife last September, the New York Post reports. “She wouldn’t stop pushing me, so I snuffed her,” he allegedly said.

Question: Will Barack Obama’s erudition and elegance finally eclipse the corrosive, often deadly scourge of hip-hop culture and the ghetto mentality that gnaw away like an army of starved termites beneath black America’s floorboards?

Until at least 2013, the whole world will watch a debonair black man whose studiousness and diligence transported him from a broken home to the world’s most famous house. He will share it with the magnetic Michelle Obama, his wife of 16 years. Just like her husband, the first lady avoided the 50-percent black high-school dropout rate, graduated from an Ivy League university, and earned a Harvard law degree. The Obamas’ two lovely daughters know their father and enjoy him in their daily lives.

The Obamas are not alone among black Americans. Millions of blacks peacefully stay in school, commute to work, nurture their loved ones and improve their communities. Alas, industrious black Americans, particularly in the middle class, are virtually invisible in popular culture. Ubiquitous rappers who too often celebrate violence, degrade women, and perpetrate offstage carnage overshadow such decent citizens. Rappers Milton Bruce Scott, Mac Minister, and C-Murder are among those convicted of homicide (although Mr. Murder faces a re-trial.)

Like bees buzzing from rose to rose, too many black men serially impregnate women who are not their wives, spawning a 67.8 percent black out-of-wedlock birthrate.

Mr. Obama’s daily presence in the White House finally may repel this foul tide. He also may unravel the “Acting White Syndrome,” wherein young black students who do homework and speak proper English are mocked by ghetto-oriented black kids for “acting white.” Light years more than white racism, this is the biggest cancer facing black Americans.

Erin Aubry Kaplan on Michelle Obama and Black Women: Portrayed by the media as extraordinary, Michelle at heart is an ordinary black woman whose life experience and ambiguity about making it in white America resemble those of every other 40ish, middle-class black woman I know. This is wonderful news for us — we finally see an accurate reflection of ourselves in someone who may one day occupy the most exclusive address in the country. But for a good part of the nation, this is exactly the problem.

Michelle’s frankness about the ills of America and how they’re connected to race taps into an anxiety about such a story becoming prominent and representing us all. Like so much about the whole Obama phenomenon, this has never happened. The black story has always been marginal by definition; now, suddenly, it isn’t. And Michelle’s is a story that’s much more nuanced and challenging than the hardcore urban tales or middle-class fantasies we’re used to ascribing to all black folk. Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself. Not exactly flattering, right? Not quite what happened in high school history, right? No wonder people are at a loss.

Jack and Jill Politics on the Civil Rights Struggle: Between Sunday’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial and Monday being MLK Jr. Day, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the media and celebrity personalities drawing strong Lincoln-King-Obama parallels. While it is nearly impossible to overstate the significance of Obama’s inauguration, it is, indeed, possible to do so when such statements equate Obama’s inauguration with the end of the struggle for civil rights.

It was at Sunday’s concert that it first hit me hard. Bono was doing his Bono thing, prancing around the stage, slow-motion pumping his fist and preparing to sing his song, Pride, about Martin Luther King Jr. Talking about King’s “dream,” Bono said, “On Tuesday, that dream comes to pass.” Most of the crowd cheered. I cringed.

Jonathan Weiler on the Black-White Testing Gap:  The New York Times is reporting the results of an interesting study in which “researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.”

The Times article acknowledges several caveats: the study has not yet been peer reviewed, nor has it been replicated elsewhere. Therefore, its effects might merely be transitory – not a harbinger of a longer-term change. And the study appears to require dedicated viewing of events like Obama’s convention speech. In other words, Obama’s success does not, by itself, produce the observed effect, even according to the authors’ study (and assuming, of course, that the study measured something real, and was not simply a statistical fluke). Only people paying active attention appeared to have experienced the change in testing. It will be interesting to see whether there is something larger going on here.

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