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"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”


Senator Joe Biden (comment about presidential candidate Barak Obama)

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You just were told you had to attend a meeting you have been dreading. The meeting was very boring as predicted but then this black speaker from the head office gets up to the podium.

He is tall and handsome, freshly scrubbed in a nice suit and has everyone enthralled with his excellent diction, beautifully resonant voice and encyclopedic knowledge.

You turn to your black coworker to tell her how clean and articulate the speaker was, but before you can say that you remember black people don't like being called articulate, you don't know why but you remember hearing it. You excuse yourself and run down three flights of stairs to your office, open your drawer with the candy stash and under the tootsie rolls you see your tattered copy of Roget's Thesaurus-- thinking to yourself that this French guy has a lot of nerve writing a book on American synonyms ( you forgot he wasn't French, but Scottish). You look up some synonyms for articulate. You choose a good one, run up three flights of stairs back to the meeting, heart racing, with a big smile on your face and almost breathlessly say to your black coworker, wasn't he a captivating and knowledgeable speaker?

Your black coworker smiles and agree with you.

Whew!





That's a lot of work for one word. Why are black people so high maintenance?

Well, If I, Broke Down Oprah, may be permitted to speak on behalf of black people, we still haven't received our 40 acres and a mule, so that means you don't get to call us articulate.

Why not?

Because you are making the assumption that blacks are not articulate and now you have happened upon one who is unexpectedly articulate and you feel having made that discovery, you deserve some kind of medal.

In the past (like during slavery and Jim Crow) black people who spoke well and were well read were viewed very suspiciously. ( I feel the same way about crows. They are way too smart and they make me nervous). Anyway, at best they could be fired or denied jobs; and at worst they could be lynched. So it was not in their best interest to be articulate. That didn’t mean they weren’t. That didn’t mean they lacked ambition, goals, or speaking skills, they just had to survive in the world in which they lived.

That was a very long time ago. Black people nowadays go to college, have good jobs and thousands, maybe even millions of us are articulate.

When you point out our articulateness, you are taking us back to that period when we had to be less than we were.




Returning to the quote by Senator Biden at the beginning of this piece, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt about the word "clean". Did he mean hygienically clean or clean in the non corrupt sense? I think he meant in the non corrupt sense. However I believe there are millions of whites who think most blacks are not clean. They think blacks are dirty, shifty, don’t bathe regularly and just not their kind of people. Slaves smelled pretty bad because they had to work all day in the hot sun, and they didn’t have shower facilities or access to powders and perfumes. But that was again a really long long long time ago. That’s why I don’t think Biden meant “soap and water” clean. I hope.



And what about the previous black candidates he inadvertently smeared?

Obama has been singled out as the first serious black candidate for president, I beg to differ and will explain below, but a great many black people have considered previous black presidential candidates seriously. He meant that Obama is the first candidate acceptable to whites.

Why do I disagree with that assumption? We are a year away from the official start of the presidential season and already we know Obama’s middle name is Hussein and he went to a Madrasa(?) and lived in Indonesia. By the time the press’s brain dead stepchild, Fox News, finishes with him his name will be Barak Osama not Barak Obama.

Racist white people didn't like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Carol Moseley Braun and Shirley Chisholm either but at least they were real Americans with real American names and looked like real black people-- not like East Africans. I am waiting for Fox to dig up some pictures or stories about Obama and a white woman.

Then I think before it is over he may turn out to be the least likely black presidential candidate.