(Opinion, cross-posted from Brainstorm)
I don’t know what to say about all the rumors of “whitey” talk vis-à-vis Michelle Obama this week. And I hear that McCain’s wife, who has so far been able to deftly avoid the white-hot media spotlight, has begun calling Michelle Obama on the carpet these last few days for her now-infamous recent comments about being proud of America for the first time. By the way, does such a statement necessarily mean that she is anti-American?
Journalist and cultural critic Juan Williams spent Wednesday evening generously speaking to a few Penn undergraduates about the extent to which Michelle Obama has turned herself into a politically liability. He’s probably right, but I also think that we all might need to have a more serious conversation about what “patriotism” really means.
In many ways, this current controversy reminds me of the brouhaha that erupted in 2002 when the Ice Cube film Barbershop caused such a stir by scripting the kinds of irreverent conversations that often define informal public discussions in the black community, conversations that are sometimes hypercritical of black and white Americans alike. The film demonstrated that nothing is sacrosanct and beyond criticism in such contexts — not Martin Luther King, Jr., not Jesse Jackson, not Rosa Parks — no matter how much they might otherwise be cherished.
Real versions of such self-critical Barbershop comments aren’t self-evident examples of racial self-hatred any more than Michelle Obama’s statements (even before she cleaned them up) are an open-and-shut case of anti-patriotism. Instead, both instances provide examples of the complicated and refreshingly self-critical impulse of vernacular African-American cultural criticism. Of course, this might not play as well “politically” as Mitt Romney’s head-scratching inability to come up with a single thing wrong about contemporary America (remember that), but it seems a lot more honest.
Of course, African Americans don’t corner the market on such tough-love self-criticism, or on the desire for honest public conversations about national and international issues. And, as I argue in my new book, they don’t want to be.
(An aside: To hear me talk a little more about that book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, watch C-Span 2’s BookTV this weekend — Saturday at 9 p.m. or Sunday at 3:30 p.m.)
