A coupla days ago I wrote how President Obama's fore-father was not Jesse Jackson, or even Dr. King, but Sam Cooke. A dastardly handsome, urban Everyman, who used calm, poise to defuse racial tension.
Nat Cole was similar, but Cole had no sexual threat and Cooke oozed a sensuality that lead directly to his murder by racists.
The President is somewhere in the middle and, with his ground breaking speech during the Presidential elections on his white Grandmother's incipient racism, heralded the post racism era.
Or did it?
I like the President a lot. Americans have no history, but lest we forget, under the Republicans watch we were inches from a Great Depression and Obama pulled us back from the brink. Everything else pales in comparison to that achievement, every caveat that ignores this truth is a mean one. But even so, his foreign policy has been excellent given the choices open to him (what moron could even consider a US invasion of Libya… THREE WARS ON ARAB TERRITORY???), the presdient has maneuvered himself admirably. So well, he did everything Dubya did and the Arabs still think he is one of theirs.
But he didn't end racism.
In a deep sense, hatred due to irrelevant differences have always been here and always will be. There will always be some form of schism between black and white in the States (not true in, say Yemen, by the way, or Egypt: Sadat was, after all black). The same way the English hate the French, that type of skin deep hatred between the races comes with the deal. But if it is no enforceable by law, if it is just me and my brother against my cousin, it is the price we pay as an animal, like the Chimps and the chickens.
Where it becomes nightmarish is where one in every four black men spend time in prison, where half of all black children are raised in poverty: this is where the post in post racism needs to take effect. And the question mark is, while racism is alive and well it certainly isn't the 1950s. It certainly isn't Jim Crow. A fight has been won, with the electing of a black President, certain canards have been laid to rest without changing the system itself.
Culturally, as far as rock is concerned, hip hop is the equivalent of the blues: it is a secret and only skin pigmentation can let you in. But if you can cut hip hop off… Jay-Z is like Joe Kennedy, a career criminal who went mainstream. Folks like Gucci Mane and T.I., DMX and Weezy, are having problems going straight. They are not post-racial. They are struggling becoming something other than their dreadful childhoods.
Indeed, compared to Motown in the 60s, hip hop is used as an us against them. Motown was the voice of young America, since the 90s hip hop has been a voice talking to America.
Listening to a Geoffrey Wilson, the sense of a generation that has never seen the face of (I am not claiming they haven't felt the effect of) racism in the clear light of day. It feels post-racism because it looks back on a past. Perhaps it is similar to the way Jewish people look back at the holocaust.
And culturally on a level, politically on a level it is. Perhaps it is like smoking tobacco. Marginalized, seen as wrong, socially unacceptably, but still very much alive.
Finally, what does post-racial music sound like? I guess that's for another tomorrow.