How Does Obama Woo 'Downscale Dems'? - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

How Does Obama Woo 'Downscale Dems'? - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

Why Blacks are Hesitant about Barack

Jesse's Nod Won't Help Obama
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 3, 2007, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama beamed as he sat beside Jesse Jackson as Jesse announced that he was formally endorsing Obama's candidacy. The idea was that Jackson's endorsement would give Obama a rocket boost with black voters.

It won't. And there are two glaring reasons why.

The first is Jackson himself. While some polls show that Jackson is still popular among many blacks, he's not the Jackson of a decade ago or even four years ago. That Jackson could instantly heat up a crowd with a timely slogan, catchy rhyme, or well-timed phrase and he had the instant ear of presidents and heads of state.

However, the taint of sexual scandal and his fade from the headlines has wiped much of the luster off of his racial star. Jackson belongs to the older civil rights generation, and he's found it tough sledding trying to sell his civil rights pitch to upwardly mobile, younger blacks that have little inkling of past civil rights struggles.

Jackson hinted at that in his little talk endorsing Obama, when he said that it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of black politicians. That was self-serving and disingenuous. Jackson has no intention of passing any torch on now. He will continue to do everything he can to micromanage a role for himself on the national political scene. In the next breath he boasted that he'd work with whichever Democrat ultimately emerges on top and that he is talking to the other Democratic contenders about his agenda.

The second problem is Obama. Even if Jackson was a rock solid Obama man, and still had the sheen on his leadership badge, he wouldn't be much help to him. A Democratic presidential contender must not be afraid to dump strategies on the nation's public policy table to combat the astronomical high black unemployment rate, soaring incarceration for black men, the HIV/AIDS plague, and failing public schools, as well as a plan for drug and criminal justice system overhaul.

These are the issues that stir the political juices of most blacks. Obama hasn't as yet stirred them on these issues. Obama is a good liberal with a commendable record on some issues. The problem is there's just not enough of a record to gauge his effectiveness as a presidential possibility, or even as a good Senator at this still very early point in his jump to the national political stage.

Black voters, indeed all voters, crave and deserve a candidate with a proven track record or at least a defined plan for dealing with the crucial issues. The initial reluctance of many black voters, top black Democrats, civil rights leaders, and that includes Jackson for a while; to leap on the Obama bandwagon is due to the freshman Senator's paper thin legislative record.

As Obama's rock star allure fades in the gruel and heat of the presidential campaign, the questions will loom bigger about his plan for an exit from Iraq, nuclear proliferation, stimulating the economy, battling inflation, environmental and labor problems, campaign finance reform and the always explosive minefield of racial relations.

The contrast between Obama and his Democratic presidential rival John Edwards on the issues has been glaring. Edwards was a full term senator, a seasoned presidential ticket campaigner in 2004, and in the years since the election has barnstormed the country talking and listening to labor and health care advocates about working conditions and the urgent need for affordable health care for the estimated fifty million uninsured Americans.

Blacks and Latinos make up a significant percent of the uninsured. He's crafted a thoughtful and detailed comprehensive plan for national health care and has talked it up at campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. At a Democratic presidential candidates forum in Las Vegas in March he spelled out the plan.

Obama has detailed no plan on health care, and stumbled badly when asked about it at the Las Vegas confab. Obama backers counter that the knock that their candidate lacks political seasoning and a firm handle on the issues is unfair. They say that Bush was equally inexperienced in national and international problem solving before grabbing the Oval Office.

That's a lame counter. The White House is no place for on-the-job-training. Voters, and even top Republicans, should have demanded more of candidate Bush. They didn't, and his towering public policy fumbles, initially on the war on terrorism, and on Iraq, Social Security and Tax reform has been nothing short of disastrous, has cost taxpayers dearly, and has caused much political and public rancor and division.

When the presidential campaign turns torrid in next year's primaries, Obama will have to spell out clearly where he stands on the hot-button issues, and tell how he'll make things work in the White House if he gets there. The voters will and should demand that much of him as well as the other candidates. Jackson can't and won't help Obama there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black

What we do know about Obama

Obama's Identity: Where Do We Start?
By Patricia Williams, The Nation
Posted on February 16, 2007,
I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man. -- Senator Joseph Biden, in faint but unfettered praise of Senator Barack Obama

Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated "Legacies," a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a "twinning doll" -- a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll's waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it's a black doll. In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, "the races are joined head to toe ... continuously revealing and concealing one another." Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union.

When I inquired further, McCallum told me that there was an old children's song about the dolls: "Turn you up/Turn you back./First you're white/Then you're black." I tried Googling those words in hopes of finding a recording. Instead I turned up a satirical piece by rocker Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black," in which a (presumably hypothetical) "I" desires "to be black" as an escape from a neurosis of whiteness. Actually, the word "white" is never used in the song. It's alluded to in the chorus -- obliquely but with crystal clarity nonetheless: "I don't wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student any more." According to these lyrics, whiteness is a dull preserve defined by respectable class status, college education and world-class angst; black people have ever so much more fun, what with having "natural rhythm," "a big prick," a "stable of foxy whores" and "get myself shot in the spring" "like Martin Luther King."

The jolly entertainment of switching identity from white to black and back again is not the exclusive province of frat boys slumming around as pretenders to ghetto life. "Jungle parties" are still good clean fun at country clubs, at Halloween parties down at the precinct and in the unfortunate confusion that is Kevin Federline. The inverse -- switching from black to white and black again -- is more freighted. Blacks who present themselves as clean and articulate and sober and important risk being viewed as false, elitist or duplicitous. "Acting white" has all these connotations. Whites "acting black," on the other hand -- i.e., any coded masquerade of down and dirty -- tend to be read as cool or maybe disaffected or, at worst, stuck in some stage of rebellious adolescence.

Frankly, what I found most unforgivable about Senator Biden's recent remarks was his utter failure to learn from a past in which he was intimately implicated. He was, after all, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when our spectacularly inarticulate President's father nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. As every last minority graduate of Yale -- whew, ten or fifteen at least -- came forward to weigh in about whether Thomas or Anita Hill was more believable, media forces expressed shock and awe that there were -- gasp -- just so many black people who could string a whole sentence together! Astonishing sequences of subject-verb-object! A few years later, it was Colin Powell who was perceived as shockingly articulate; then Condoleezza Rice.

The persistence of this narrative is not limited to Biden. On MSNBC's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews hosted a discussion of Obama's decision to run for President. "No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery," Matthews opined. "All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Not true, I thought. The "bad stuff in our history" rests heavily upon each and every one of us. It shapes us all, whether me, Matthews, Obama, Biden -- or Amadou Diallo, the decent, hard-working Guinean immigrant without any American racial "history," who died in a hail of bullets fired by New York City police officers because he looked like what the officers, groaning with racial "baggage," imagined to be a criminal. Some parts of our racial experience are nothing more or less than particular to our accidental location in the geography of a culture.

If, for example, I migrated to South Africa and were greeted as an exciting, exotic black American prophet (we "articulate" blacks are inescapably "exotic" when we travel abroad), I'd be no less implicated in the complexities of that country's racial struggles -- even if I were entirely ignorant of those struggles. At a more complex level, however, American identity is defined by the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth. It is that narrative of chosen migration that has exiled most African-Americans from a substantial part of the American narrative -- and it is precisely his place in that narrative that makes Obama so attractive, so intriguing and yet so strange.

Obama's family history is an assemblage of elements of the American dream. His late father migrated from Kenya to the United States; his mother was from Kansas. Before him, the archetypal narrative of immigrant odyssey had been an almost exclusively white and European one. I suspect that Obama's aura stems not just from a Tiger Woods-ishly fashionable taste for "biracialism" but from the fact that he's managed to fuse the immigrant myth of meteoric upward mobility onto the figure of a black man.

Back on Chris Matthews, Cynthia Tucker, a black woman who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responded, "He truly does seem to transcend race because his mother, after all, let's not forget, was white." Matthews agreed: "His grandmother he went to visit in Hawaii is white. Yeah." This, to me, was a baffling exchange. Obama's mother's being white is supposedly what allows him to transcend this thing called race? He looks black but he really isn't? Is blackness really only defined by Jim Crow, anger and slavery? If American-ness, at least in this equation, is defined by patronymic immigrant hope, is racial transcendence then to be defined by maternity, relation to whiteness, biology? "Transcendence" implies rising above something, cutting through, being liberated from. What would it reveal about the hidden valuations of race if one were to invert the equation by positing that Barack Obama "transcended" whiteness because his father was black?

Senator Obama has many attractive attributes -- he's smart, a great writer and speaker, a skilled tactician, full of fresh vision, youthful, with a good-looking Kennedy-esque appeal. Yet there are many people to whom his appeal rests not on what he is but on what they imagine he isn't. He's not a whiner; he's not angry. He doesn't hate white people. He doesn't wear his hair like Al Sharpton. He is not the whole list of negatives that people like Chris Matthews or Joe Biden or a whole generation of fucked-up middle-class college students identify as "blackness." Indeed, part of the reason I am anxious about the trustworthiness of Obama's widespread appeal is this unacknowledged value placed on his ability to perform "unexpected" aspects of both whiteness (as in, proud immigrant stock) and blackness (as in, his remarkable ability to discern that the sterling fish knife is not a shoe horn).

This is not just about the dualism of black and white, of course. Obama's family raised him in diverse locales -- Hawaii, Indonesia, the world. Does the perception of his identity change if we think of him as our first Hawaiian presidential candidate? To paraphrase, is he the first mainstream Hawaiian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who wouldn't be caught dead in a grass skirt holding a ukulele? Or the first mainstream Indonesian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who had the interesting experience of going to a Roman Catholic school in a largely Muslim country, which might provide lots of useful cultural insights for a President to have in this time and place? No, unfortunately, as there are those at Fox News who can't tell a Roman Catholic school from a madrassa.

Worse yet, a lot of the analysis of Biden's comment has skimmed over his patronizing of Obama's substance. Rather, it has focused on whether the comments destroyed Biden's chances to run for President. Who, after all, even knew Biden had his hat in the ring?

But back to Senator Obama, a presidential candidate of profound decency, extraordinary smarts and great eloquence. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, a position that requires not just the highest grades in the entire universe but also the unanimous acclaim of a band of viciously competitive students and a famously divided faculty. Those who make Law Review are immediate stars, and fabulously fast-tracked. Those who have served on the Law Review include a stunning and stellar array of familiar names: Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts; Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Judge Richard Posner, Michael Chertoff and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It is, in the secretly assigned world of global power, an even better ticket to the top than being sealed in a coffin at Skull and Bones. It was acknowledged as such when Jews first joined the Law Review, when Democratic political pundit Susan Estrich became the first woman president of the Law Review in 1976 and when Obama became its first black president. It is a position whose credentializing power has never been questioned as far as anyone knows -- at least till a few weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article in which Ron Klain, informal adviser to Biden's presidential bid, wondered if being president of the Law Review really and truly required the same skill set as being President of the United States. As a cabdriver recently expressed it to me: "Maybe the mirage in the desert is no more than a benchmark constantly being moved out of reach." (He too was articulate, and quite poetic, that cabbie. Made me wonder what benchmarks had been moved beyond his reach to leave him ferrying me around at midnight.)

Of course, the crown of the Law Review presidency is not the only aspect of Senator Obama's "authenticity" that's being refigured as a mess of thorns. If no one doubts his blackness when it comes to the uniqueness of his accomplishments while on the Law Review, he's apparently not "black enough" in other contexts. In another article in the Times, perpetual contrarians like Stanley Crouch, Debra Dickerson and Carol Swain were quoted as questioning whether he truly was a brother beneath the skin. It is surely ironic that Obama -- one of the very few Americans of any stripe who has actual first-degree relatives in Africa -- is being figured in some quarters as an imposter of African-American-ness.

At the same time, Obama's identity reveals the complex blindness and slipperiness of American conceptions of race, culture and ethnicity. There's a lovely quote from Saidiya Hartman's remarkable new book Lose Your Mother: As she wends her way through Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship, she notes, "I was the stranger in the village, a wandering seed bereft of the possibility of taking root. Behind my back people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the word 'slave,' but we all knew who was who. As a 'slave baby,' I represented what most chose to avoid: the catastrophe that was our past ... and what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of someone's origins."

As I read Hartman's words, I wondered how familiar that sentiment felt to me, or to the many African-Americans -- whether they've never left our shores or traveled the world -- so relentlessly in search of "home." I wondered how familiar that passage must feel to recent arrivals to our peculiarly dubbed "homeland." Just today I met a Swedish woman who is phenotypically "Asian." When she was a student at the University of California, she went to the hospital with stomach pains -- and was almost committed as insane before she ever got to see a doctor, because the administrative gatekeepers simply could not reconcile her appearance with her assertion that she was a Swedish citizen.

And in this moment of unprecedented diaspora, I wonder how familiar all these sentiments must feel to Barack Obama just now. Flipped endlessly down a hall of mirrored images of blackness and whiteness, he is no less celebrated than Frederick Douglass was as one whose entire identity is mired in the exhausted exceptionalism of the "surprisingly" hyperarticulate African phenotype; yet simultaneously embraced as one who has transcended the embodiment of a troublesome past and emerged on the other side -- bright as a newly minted coin, "cleansed" of baggage, of roots, of the unacknowledged rupture that is, paradoxically, our greatest national bond.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."

Obama is Black enough for Black Women of the World

Obama Wouldn't Be First Black President
By Aysha Hussain


© DiversityInc 2007 ® All rights reserved.


You've seen the headlines: "Are Americans Ready for a Black President?" "Is Obama Black Enough?" "Obama: America's First Black President?"



Ever since the nation first met Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2004, his race has been called into question more times than Michael Jackson's. Obama is clearly a black man, but is this really a breakthrough? Some blacks say Obama isn't "black enough," which seems ironic because for many blacks, former President Bill Clinton was "black enough." In 2001, Clinton was honored as the nation's "first black president" at the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Annual Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C.



Were there other "black" presidents? Some historians have reason to believe people don't really understand the genealogy of past U.S. Presidents. Research shows at least five U.S. presidents had black ancestors and Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, was considered the first black president, according to historian Leroy Vaughn, author of Black People and Their Place in World History.



Vaughn's research shows Jefferson was not the only former black U.S. president. Who were the others? Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But why was this unknown? How were they elected president? All five of these presidents never acknowledged their black ancestry.



Jefferson, who served two terms between 1801 and 1809, was described as the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father," as stated in Vaughn's findings. Jefferson also was said to have destroyed all documentation attached to his mother, even going to extremes to seize letters written by his mother to other people.



President Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president, was in office between 1829 and 1837. Vaughn cites an article written in The Virginia Magazine of History that Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a black man. The magazine also stated that Jackson's oldest brother had been sold as a slave.



Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, served between 1861 and 1865. Lincoln was said to have been the illegitimate son of an African man, according to Leroy's findings. Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and his mother allegedly came from an Ethiopian tribe. His heritage fueled so much controversy that Lincoln was nicknamed "Abraham Africanus the First" by his opponents.



President Warren Harding, the 29th president, in office between 1921 and 1923, apparently never denied his ancestry. According to Vaughn, William Chancellor, a professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy. Evidently, Harding had black ancestors between both sets of parents. Chancellor also said that Harding attended Iberia College, a school founded to educate fugitive slaves.

Coolidge, the nation's 30th president, served between 1923 and 1929 and supposedly was proud of his heritage. He claimed his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor" and in Europe the name "Moor" was given to all blacks just as "Negro" was used in America. It later was concluded that Coolidge was part black.

The only difference between Obama and these former presidents is that none of their family histories were fully acknowledged by others. Even though Obama is half-white, he strongly resembles his Kenyan father. And not only is Obama open about his ancestry, most people acknowledge him as a black man, which is why people will identify Obama, if elected, as the first black president of the United States.

Obama Is Clear you Can See

Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted February 14, 2007.

The "talent of the century" hits the campaign trail, and while it isn't clear who Obama really is, he's certainly helping make it clear who the bad candidates are.

Last Friday night a friend called and told me that Barack Obama had posted a sort of pre-announcement of the start of his presidential campaign on his website. I immediately cued it up and within ten minutes was writing a column blasting him for ripping off half of his campaign speech from a smorgasbord of '04 Democratic candidates -- then stopped when I realized that I'd already written exactly that column about Hillary Clinton's kickoff speech a few weeks ago.

So I went back and watched the speech again, and I actually felt chills run up my spine. A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton's launch speech ripped off John Kerry and the DLC with its "Let's have a conversation" theme; Obama, meanwhile, went the Howard Dean route, nicking "A campaign to take America back" from Dean and RFK Jr., among others. The fact that Hillary, like Kerry, is set up as the DLC-acolyte candidate while Obama, like Dean, is set up as the antiwar candidate suggests a kind of permanent template for the Democratic primary process. Maybe soon the race for the Democratic primary will be like Everytown USA's annual high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire, where every year they find a new antiwar Blanche and a new pro-corporate Stanley. The faces are different, the lines are the same.

I've been on the fence about Obama for more than two years now, ever since his breakout performance at the Democratic convention in '04. When I saw that speech -- an iconic piece of inspired nonsense/political showmanship, one that set flashbulbs popping like Michael Jordan's virtuoso 1988 dunk contest performance -- I knew right away that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee someday, perhaps even in the next election cycle.

When I mentioned this to my friends, they told me I was crazy. Obama had had absolutely no national experience at that time, he was a political virgin, there was no way he was ready for prime time. My answer to that was, compared to what? Throw a guy who can speak like that against the list of likely Democratic candidates in 2008 -- a sorry collection of human saline drips that included Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd -- and Obama could fucking walk to the nomination, even if he chose a page from the Betty Crocker cookbook as his stump speech.

Fast forward two years and that appears to be exactly what Obama has done. The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature -- he's a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality. If Hillary Clinton even dares to open her mouth within a hundred feet of him at any time during the campaign, she's going to come off like a pig digging for truffles. Even Edwards -- the so-called "slick" candidate from '04 -- sounds like a two-bit suburban Buick dealer next to Obama. You get past the "issues," and it's a wipeout.

Obama knows this, and so his entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can't run against him on the issues because you can't even find him on the ideological spectrum. Obama's "Man for all seasons" act is so perfect in its particulars that just about anyone can find a bit of himself somewhere in the candidate's background, whether in his genes or his upbringing. You can be white, you can be black, you can be Christian, you can be Muslim, you can be from the American heartland or from Africa... you can even, according to his book The Audacity of Hope, worship Norse Gods or bury your relatives according to Hawaiian rituals:


In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites ...

As far as political positioning goes, his strategy seems to be to appear as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly. He is a black man from Chicago who gets away with praising Ronald Reagan, which is not an easy task. His political ideal is basically a rehash of the Blair-Clinton "third way" deal, an amalgam of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the middle of the middle.

In short, Obama is a creature perfectly in tune with the awesome corporate strivings of Hollywood, Madison avenue and the Beltway -- he tries, and often succeeds, at selling a politics of seeking out the very center of where we already are, to the very couch where we've been sitting all this time, as an exciting, revolutionary journey into the unknown. And while most of what he says and writes is basically some version of the same old tired clichés about family and faith and hope and optimism and "working together" and "getting involved," he adds to those clichés real literary flair, wordsmithing far beyond the range of most politicians. Take this bit about his kids in his book:


... I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of your child's presence and never let go -- to preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of their fingers clasped around yours.
Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliché, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Even when Hillary announced she was running for president, she sounded like she was ordering coffee. Obama on the other hand can close his eyes and the clichés just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term bullshit artist.

My usual instinct when presented with this type of Zelig-esque, Eddie Haskell, non-stick personality is to violently reject it. But over the course of the last few weeks I've found myself increasingly amused by the Obama phenomenon. For one thing, he clearly pisses off Hillary to no end. Same with Biden and all of those other windbag jerk-off assholes in that revolting "national security Democrats" clan in the Senate. There is something subtly racist (in Biden's case, not so subtle) in the way these more entrenched Democrats are riding Obama's lack of credentials and acting like the '08 nomination is their birthright, like he hasn't "waited his turn" or something, paid his dues. As if any of these clowns would wait ten seconds to declare for the White House if they had the same odds that Obama has now.

I have no idea who Obama really is, but he is against the war now (and at least never voted for it) and he seems to infuriate the right people. He has people bitching now that he's not black enough, and there are obviously going to be plenty of people for whom he's too black. And both of those groups of people, frankly, deserve whatever's coming to them. So for the time being I'm going to enjoy his rise to the top, the same way I enjoyed reading The Red and The Black -- like another great phony, Julien Sorel, Obama is a perfect mirror of the society he was born to conquer, and his journey upward throws everyone he passes into stark, humorous relief. Whether I'll vote for him is another story. But he's certainly helping make it clear who shouldn't get my vote.

Obama officially enters the Frey

Illinois senator Barack Obama officially enters 2008 race for president
Sat Feb 10, 1:51 PM
By Nedra Pickler
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) - Democrat Barack Obama declared himself a candidate Saturday for the White House in 2008, evoking Abraham Lincoln's ability to unite the country and promising to lead a new generation as the country's first black president.
The first-term senator announced his candidacy from the state capital where he began his elective career just 10 years ago, and in front of the building where in another century, Lincoln served eight years in the Illinois Legislature.
"We can build a more hopeful America," Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery. "And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States."
Obama did not mention his family background, his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia or that he would make history if elected president.
Instead, he focused on his life in Illinois over the last two decades, beginning with a job as a community organizer with a $13,000-a-year salary that strengthened his Christian faith.
He said the struggles he saw people face inspired him to get a law degree and run for the state legislature, where he served eight years before becoming a U.S. senator just two years ago.
"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity, to this announcement," Obama said. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.
"Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done," he said. "Today we are called once more - and it is time for our generation to answer that call."
Obama, 45, gained national recognition with the publication of two bestselling books, "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," and by delivering the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His optimistic message and his compelling biography immediately sparked talk of his White House potential.
Initially he said he would not run for president. But he said last fall that he was considering it after receiving so much encouragement. He formed a presidential exploratory committee last month.
Despite his thin political resume, Obama is considered New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief rival among many vying for the Democratic presidential nomination.


From Powell-mania to Obamarama
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
Posted on December 18, 2006, Printed on December 19, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45681/
"Obamarama" can be defined as the cult of personality surrounding the young senator from Illinois -- Barack Obama -- and his "leadership potential," specifically the fad fantasy that he could be the first "black" POTUS.
Apparently, Colin Powell-mania is officially over. Maybe Condi-palooza is right around the corner?
I put "black" in quotes not because I question Obama's authenticity, smoothness, eloquence, or blackness (whatever that means), but only to note the inevitable (and irritable) racial debate Obama's candidacy will inspire in living rooms and barbershops across the country.
Would he really be the first truly "black" president? His father is Kenyan and his mother is white. His forbears weren't slaves in America. So, he may be 'a person of color,' but this isn't a story of a descendent of slaves rising to the most powerful office in the nation, etc.
The other national race discussion Obama's candidacy will spark is whether the "color-blind" anti-affirmative action crowd actually sees him as "black," which brings with it a host of unconscious, often negative, associations, manifested in coded language like "is he really the most qualified?" As we get closer to campaign season, watch how much "serious" commentary you'll find raising questions about his "qualifications," as if affirmative action opponents didn't vote for Bush. Twice.
Of course it's possible that a white majority may vote for a black president. But Condi's a more formidable candidate than Obama. A black woman running against a Democratic opponent? How do PC Democrats go after a black woman and win?
Still, if the historical record is any indication, Obama winning the White House in '08 would be nothing short of absolutely shocking, a few steps down the ladder from discovering alien life on Mars. True shock and awe, on my part, at least.
If Obama were to somehow prevail on election night, I would be OJ Simpson-acquittal shocked. Add to it my surprise at how surprised most of my fellow Americans seemed to be that terrorists actually attacked the United States after all these years of U.S. "interventions" and that's how shocked I'd be.
The awe part wouldn't kick in until a few months later. Let's say Obama is elected. If he actually lived aaaall the way from election night to the inauguration, I would be so awed I'd lead an anti-affirmative action protest in front of the NAACP's national headquarters.
What would be most surprising isn't the possibility that a majority of white Americans would cast their ballot for a black presidential candidate, which must be the case given present demographics. No, the real surprise would be if a majority of white America voted for a black Democrat with pragmatic-progressive values and policy ideas.
Because the undeniable record is: black leaders who don't come from the Booker T. Washington "safe Negro" tradition never reach the pinnacle of their political potential before they're either marginalized or killed, whether we're talking about Martin and Malcolm, Jesse and Al or Shirley Chisolm and Paul Robeson, superficial style aside.
Robeson's life is instructive, actually. As my friend Stew Goodwin has convinced me, Robeson is one of the most accomplished Americans of the 20th century, whose life boasts elite accomplishments in sports, theater, music, oration and activism. Progress? Yes, but here we have probably the pound-for-pound most talented African-American ever and most folks reading this right now are saying Paul Robe-who?
That's not an excuse for black politicians and civic leaders to throw in the towel. As the legendary Detroit activist Grace Boggs once told me, "You just never know."
One thing we do know: As important as responsive politicians are in creating a better America, it can't happen without an organized, energized, visionary and multi-racial citizen movement, no matter who's in the White House. Instead of obsessing over presidential possibilities, it would be more fruitful to focus on social movement possibilities.


From Powell-mania to Obamarama
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
Posted on December 18, 2006, Printed on December 19, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45681/
"Obamarama" can be defined as the cult of personality surrounding the young senator from Illinois -- Barack Obama -- and his "leadership potential," specifically the fad fantasy that he could be the first "black" POTUS.
Apparently, Colin Powell-mania is officially over. Maybe Condi-palooza is right around the corner?
I put "black" in quotes not because I question Obama's authenticity, smoothness, eloquence, or blackness (whatever that means), but only to note the inevitable (and irritable) racial debate Obama's candidacy will inspire in living rooms and barbershops across the country.
Would he really be the first truly "black" president? His father is Kenyan and his mother is white. His forbears weren't slaves in America. So, he may be 'a person of color,' but this isn't a story of a descendent of slaves rising to the most powerful office in the nation, etc.
The other national race discussion Obama's candidacy will spark is whether the "color-blind" anti-affirmative action crowd actually sees him as "black," which brings with it a host of unconscious, often negative, associations, manifested in coded language like "is he really the most qualified?" As we get closer to campaign season, watch how much "serious" commentary you'll find raising questions about his "qualifications," as if affirmative action opponents didn't vote for Bush. Twice.
Of course it's possible that a white majority may vote for a black president. But Condi's a more formidable candidate than Obama. A black woman running against a Democratic opponent? How do PC Democrats go after a black woman and win?
Still, if the historical record is any indication, Obama winning the White House in '08 would be nothing short of absolutely shocking, a few steps down the ladder from discovering alien life on Mars. True shock and awe, on my part, at least.
If Obama were to somehow prevail on election night, I would be OJ Simpson-acquittal shocked. Add to it my surprise at how surprised most of my fellow Americans seemed to be that terrorists actually attacked the United States after all these years of U.S. "interventions" and that's how shocked I'd be.
The awe part wouldn't kick in until a few months later. Let's say Obama is elected. If he actually lived aaaall the way from election night to the inauguration, I would be so awed I'd lead an anti-affirmative action protest in front of the NAACP's national headquarters.
What would be most surprising isn't the possibility that a majority of white Americans would cast their ballot for a black presidential candidate, which must be the case given present demographics. No, the real surprise would be if a majority of white America voted for a black Democrat with pragmatic-progressive values and policy ideas.
Because the undeniable record is: black leaders who don't come from the Booker T. Washington "safe Negro" tradition never reach the pinnacle of their political potential before they're either marginalized or killed, whether we're talking about Martin and Malcolm, Jesse and Al or Shirley Chisolm and Paul Robeson, superficial style aside.
Robeson's life is instructive, actually. As my friend Stew Goodwin has convinced me, Robeson is one of the most accomplished Americans of the 20th century, whose life boasts elite accomplishments in sports, theater, music, oration and activism. Progress? Yes, but here we have probably the pound-for-pound most talented African-American ever and most folks reading this right now are saying Paul Robe-who?
That's not an excuse for black politicians and civic leaders to throw in the towel. As the legendary Detroit activist Grace Boggs once told me, "You just never know."
One thing we do know: As important as responsive politicians are in creating a better America, it can't happen without an organized, energized, visionary and multi-racial citizen movement, no matter who's in the White House. Instead of obsessing over presidential possibilities, it would be more fruitful to focus on social movement possibilities.

What's Up with Obama being Black Enough

Is Obama 'Black Enough'?
By Yoji Cole


Even before Barack Obama announced his candidacy, the media marveled at his rock-star status, a moniker heaped on public personalities when crowds gather in the thousands to see or hear them. For Obama, those crowds have mostly been white.



At first I thought Obama's crowds were mostly white because black America was collectively reserving its excitement for fear that whites would be turned off if too much of Obama's support was from blacks. After listening to black columnists, politicians, ministers and everyday black people question Obama's "blackness," however, I'm dismayed to hear how many in the nation's black community question his allegiance based mostly on his education and lack of a direct link to the civil-rights era or an inner-city background.



"Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves," wrote Stanley Crouch in his New York Daily News column.



How troubling. I remember a time when black America's tent was wide open because America's "one drop" rule huddled the nation's caramel-skinned to dark-skinned people, basically any person with one drop of African blood, under that big top. "What to racist whites was a stain of impurity became a badge of pride," writes Orlando Patterson in Time magazine. Patterson adds that black America welcomed leaders who were immigrants themselves or whose parents where immigrants, such as W.E.B. DuBois, whose father was Haitian; Jamaican Marcus Garvey, one of the most influential black leaders of the early 20th century; or others, such as Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, Stokely Carmichael, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, all of whom were either immigrants or whose parents were immigrants.



Black leaders today must be more than civil-rights leaders or black Horatio Alger characters. The diversity of the nation requires that, and while some black Americans question his blackness, other black Americans and immigrant Americans see his ability to unite the nation.



African-American voters wonder why white America loves him so much, said Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who has followed Obama's political ascent, in NBC's report.



Obama, whose black father was from Kenya and whose white mother was from Kansas, has dealt with such questions before. Recent public challenges came from black Republican Alan Keyes, whom the GOP recruited to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois. Obama won. But the fact that the GOP put Keyes against Obama says everything about race's place in American politics—it's like moths to a light. Keyes, who is from the southeastern United States, was sent to Illinois to run against Obama. With no connections to Chicago, it appeared the move was for no other reason than that Keyes is black.



When black voters say they are not card-carrying Obama supporters, they're saying they're not going to be duped by a black candidate simply because he or she is black. Reports like NBC's and candidates like Keyes indicate white America suspects that to be the case. And when the discussion is framed as "is he black enough," that's angering.



Such questions crop up because of Obama's education and because he wasn't reared in an inner-city. It's as though once a black person enrolls in college or university, especially Harvard Law School, they lose all connection to blackness.



Actually, Obama built his political career by rooting himself in the black community. In 1983, not long after resigning from a high-powered financial consultant's post in Manhattan, he moved to Chicago as a $10,000-a-year organizer for the Calumet Community Religious Conference. There he visited barbershops and cruised the main thoroughfares in a used car, getting a feel for Chicago's South Side. He left Chicago to attend Harvard Law School. After graduating, he returned to head a statewide voter-registration effort before joining a small civil-rights law firm. In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois Senate from a mostly black South Side district, and he and his wife, Michelle, another black lawyer, were married at the predominantly black Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.



Now that he is officially a candidate for the presidency, Obama will continue to attract an inordinate amount of attention. That attention is affording him the opportunity to not only define his candidacy but also redefine what it is to be a black man in the nation's collective mind. From his platform, Obama will broaden the black-American male's image to include leadership, education, insight, fortitude and a host of other positive attributes.



Those attributes will undoubtedly attract many voters who are not white or black to Obama, who is many different things to many different Americans. Obama's challenge is to show voters why casting a ballot for him is in their best interest because he is not running for president of white America or black America, but of the United States of America. And, if elected, Obama will have to answer to more than white voters and black voters—also to Latino voters, recent immigrant voters, East Indian voters, Vietnamese voters, Chinese voters, Christian voters, Muslim voters, gay voters, lesbian voters and myriad different types of voters. So Obama, as a person of mixed racial heritage and mixed cultural heritage, is the perfect candidate.



And not all blacks question Obama's blackness. In Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, blacks who were asked about his candidacy mainly expressed excitement, reported The Washington Post in January. Browsing through Afrocentric Book Store, Nathan Unger, 63, stopped to say that he wants Obama to run although he harbors few illusions about how much Obama would be able to focus on the concerns of black voters.



"Even if we get 30 percent from Obama, we're not going to get that from anybody else," Unger said. "From white folks, we might get 10 percent. What I worry about is that we might want too much from him. It's not just about us out here; it's about everybody."

All About Barack Obama the man who could be President

Obama Descended From Former Presidents
By Yoji Cole
Obama Descended From Former Presidents

Bruce Harrison, a Hawaii-based genealogist and founder of the Family Forest Project, has found links between Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and Presidents George Washington, James Madison, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter. The company searched the ancestors of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, dating back many centuries. He said the Family Forest shows Dunham having a number of her ancestral pathways leading back to early colonial Virginia and New England, and some extend back for many centuries into Europe. One of her ancestral pathways leads to one of Obama's 12th great-grandfathers, the Hon. Laurence Washington, who built Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire, England. Over the course of five centuries, according to recorded history, he became the ancestor of Washington, Carter, Gen. George S. Patton, Gov. Adlai Stevenson and Quincy Jones, Harrison said


Obama's presidential lineage
Sen. Barack Obama has commander-in-chief genes
By Karin Stanton
Associated Press
KAILUA-KONA » A Big Island genealogist says presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has some ancestral ties to the White House.
Bruce Harrison, founder of the Waikoloa-based Family Forest Project, said he found links between the Democratic senator from Illinois and Presidents George Washington, James Madison, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter.
On the Net
» Family Forest: www.FamilyForest.com

Millisecond Publishing Co., the company that was first to establish the cousin relationship between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 race, traced Obama's maternal ancestors in establishing his relationship to the former presidents.
Harrison said Obama's exact relationships are calculations based on a wealth of fully sourced knowledge within the "Family Forest," his company's proprietary family history research tool.
The company searched the ancestors of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, dating back many centuries.
He said the Family Forest shows Dunham having a number of her ancestral pathways leading back to early colonial Virginia and New England, and some extend back for many centuries into Europe.
One of her ancestral pathways leads to one of Obama's 12th great-grandfathers, the Hon. Laurence Washington, who built Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire, England.
Over the course of five centuries, according to recorded history, he became the ancestor of Washington, Carter, Gen. George S. Patton, Gov. Adlai Stevenson and Quincy Jones, Harrison said.
"Of course, the Honorable Laurence Washington is also the ancestor of at least a million other living people, including some very famous ones, but most are everyday folks," he said.
Harrison, who has spent tens of thousands of hours poring over historical documents and entering the data into a genealogy software program, said links also popped up to four other presidential contenders.
The Hawaii-born Obama shares ancestors with former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Arizona Sen. John McCain, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Harrison, who founded the Family Forest Project with wife Kristine in 1995, said the ancestry research program has enough data now to map generation-by-generation ancestral pathways of up to 2 billion people. If all the charts were printed out, he said, it would top 30 billion pages.

Obama for President ... Brazil's Beach Class

zFebruary 7, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Ready for Obama Already
By MARTIN PLISSNER
Washington
WITH Barack Obama expected to announce on Saturday that he’s running for president, if you enter “America,” “ready” and “black president” in a Google search, you’ll get around 125,000 hits. When pollsters bring up those words with random samples of voters — and they’ve done it a lot recently — they get “yes” answers from 62 percent (CNN), 56 percent (Newsweek), 58 percent (Gallup) and 55 percent (CBS).
Most of these surveys, however, ask people only if the rest of America is ready for it to happen, not about being ready themselves to make it happen. When one poll asked Republicans and Democrats if they would vote for a “qualified” black of their own party, barely 5 percent said no — hardly surprising, as doing so would be a frank acknowledgment of prejudice.
A much better poll would consist of giving an actual set of candidates’ names at the end of a real campaign. Fortunately, 10 years ago such a test was actually done.
On Nov. 5, 1996, Voter News Service — the organization hired by the TV networks to do exit polling — asked people at the polls, who had just given Bill Clinton 49 percent of the vote, Bob Dole 41 percent and Ross Perot 8 percent, how they would have voted if the Republican candidate had been Gen. Colin L. Powell. In an exit poll sample of 3,697 (three times the size of a standard high-grade public opinion survey), the result was this:
Powell: 50 percent.
Clinton: 38 percent.
Perot: 9 percent.
This finding, however, was not part of the pooled report shared by all the networks; it was commissioned by CBS News, of which I was then political director. As often happens, however, when there’s a lot of big news, this bit of data got buried in an end-of-night roundup and was quickly forgotten. But it does suggest there was a day when Americans, had they been given a choice of major party candidates, one of whom was black, would very likely have chosen the black one.
Most significantly, General Powell would have won the race because of the support of white voters — Bill Clinton outpolled him 2 to 1 among the blacks surveyed. Among white voters, whom Senator Dole had carried very narrowly (too narrowly for him to win), General Powell clobbered the incumbent, 53 percent to 33 percent.
Any poll analysis has to be hedged with qualifications, and this one more than most. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole had just been through bruising year-long campaigns and exposed to more than $100 million of take-no-prisoners advertising. Colin Powell had not. He was still being acclaimed for his role as the country’s top soldier in its only clear victory since World War II.
Still, even with these qualifiers, there is a pretty good, if not quite conclusive, case that America has for some time been ready to elect a black president. The question for Barack Obama is whether this time around it will be ready for this one.
Martin Plissner is the author of “The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Election

February 7, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Right Candidates, Wrong Question
By GLORIA STEINEM
EVEN before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking which candidate are Americans more ready for, a white woman or a black man?
With all due respect to the journalistic dilemma of reporting two “firsts” at the same time — two viable presidential candidates who aren’t the usual white faces over collars and ties — I think this is a dumb and destructive question.
It’s dumb because most Americans are smart enough to figure out that a member of a group may or may not represent its interests. After all, many African-Americans opposed the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 because they were aware of his record — and the views of his conservative supporters.
Similarly, most women weren’t excited about Elizabeth Dole as a presidential candidate for the 2000 election because she seemed more attached to those in power than those in need of it. Indeed, Elizabeth Dole even got support from people who opposed women making their own reproductive decisions. (If Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decides to run for president, I imagine that she would face the same fate.)
The question is also destructive because it’s divisive. In fact, women of all races and men of color — who together form an underrepresented majority of this country — have often found themselves in coalition. Both opposed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq more and earlier than their white male counterparts. White women have also been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.
It’s way too early to know which candidate will earn trust or survive Swift-boating, but forcing a choice between race and sex only conceals what’s really going on.
So far, for example, polls show that about 60 percent of African-American Democrats support Hillary Clinton, while only about 20 percent support Barack Obama. These surprising numbers probably have less to do with Senator Obama himself than with whether people feel he’s been around long enough to trust, whether the name “Clinton,” with its associations of racial inclusiveness, is a better bet, and whether a member of one’s own group — a group that has endured a history of discrimination — could win anyway.
This disease of doubt plays a big role: 81 percent of black voters tell pollsters that a white man will get the Democratic nomination, while only 58 percent of white voters do. Such doubt also helps to explain why women are more likely than men to support Hillary Clinton, but also more likely to say she can’t win.
Still, the larger question is: Why compare allies and ignore the opposition? Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists and critics of the war in Iraq, though she voted early and wrong, and he spoke out early and right. Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president.
But the greatest reason for progressives to refuse to be drawn into an irrelevant debate about Senators Clinton and Obama is that it is destructive. We can accomplish much more if we act as a coalition. Think, for instance, of the powerful 19th-century coalition for universal adult suffrage. The parallels between being a chattel slave by race and chattel as a wife, daughter or indentured worker turned abolitionists into suffragists, and vice versa. This coalition against a caste system based on race and sex turned the country on its head — until it was divided by giving the vote to its smallest part, Negro men.
Sojourner Truth famously warned that this division would cripple the movement for decades to come — and it did. Only a half-century later did white and black women get the vote, by then tarnished by the racist rhetoric of some white women and diminished by racist restrictions and violence at polls. And only decades after that, in the 1960s, did the civil rights movement start a new wave of equality that spread into feminism, the Native American movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and much more.
But those activists were reinventing the wheel. They were rediscovering Gunnar Myrdal’s verdict of the 1940s that “the parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs.”
This time, we could learn from history. We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I’ve figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I’m supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
I just say yes.

February 6, 2007
RIO DE JANEIRO JOURNAL
Drawing Lines Across the Sand, Between Classes
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilians like to say that the beach is their country’s “most democratic space.” But some bodies — and some beaches — are more equal than others.
In the Brazilian imagination, the beach has traditionally been regarded as the great leveler, “the place where the general, the teacher, the politician, the millionaire and the poor student” were all equal, said Roberto da Matta, an anthropologist and newspaper columnist who is a leading social commentator. “Their bodies were all made equally humble,” he said, by the near-naked proximity of “one body with others, all of them without defense or disguise.”
But here in Brazil’s postcard city, where the summer vacation season is in full swing, the hierarchy, in which both class and skin color play a part, is clear to all. The beaches facing the ocean in elite neighborhoods on the south side and those who frequent them rank higher than those on the north side, fronting the polluted Guanabara Bay.
In Rio, 59 beaches spread out along 110 miles of sand. Even the city’s most elite beaches, Ipanema and Copacabana, and their lesser-known extensions, Leblon and Leme, are informally subdivided into sectors, demarcated by a dozen lifeguard stations called postos, each about a half-mile from the next. Each posto, numbered 1 to 12, has a culture of its own, appeals to a different “tribe” and can be inhospitable to interlopers.
Brazil has nearly 5,000 miles of tropical coastline, and “by law, the beach is always public property and never private,” said Patrícia Farias, author of “Grabbing Some Color at the Beach,” a study of race relations on Rio’s beaches. “The discourse is always one of, ‘We all live together democratically,’ but the second, unspoken part of that is ‘but it has to be by my rules.’ ”
In Rio, Posto 9 has been at the top of the heap for more than 30 years. It is favored by left-wing intellectuals, who fly the flag of the governing Workers’ Party there, as well as by entertainers and former hippies.
The area between Postos 11 and 12 in Leblon is the redoubt of upper-middle-class mothers and their small children. That phenomenon emerged about 20 years ago, when a sidewalk kiosk selling coconuts and drinks installed a diaper-changing station and a small playground in hopes of seeing business grow.
“Ipanema is always in the vanguard, but Leblon has more of a family vibe,” João Fontes, of the Leblon community association, said when asked to compare the two beaches, which are separated by only a narrow canal. “We’d rather be quiet and unassuming than to brag.”
At the other end of Ipanema, Posto 7 is a favorite gathering spot for local surfers. But it also draws outsiders, many of them dark-skinned, from working-class suburbs up to a three-hour bus ride away, especially on weekends, when entire families station themselves on the sand.
The bulk of these suburban bus passengers get off at the first bus stops in Ipanema, near Posto 7. The outsiders are known pejoratively as “farofeiros,” because they are said to prefer to bring picnic lunches that include farofa, a toasted flour made from yucca. They are also the butt of gibes because they sit on drab straw mats rather than colorful cloth towels and apply a cheap red tanning lotion instead of buying more expensive sunscreens.
“Most people treat you O.K., but some are really prejudiced, even racist,” said Jefferson Luiz Santos Fonseca, 27, who occasionally goes to Ipanema on summer weekends with his wife and children.
Among themselves, Brazilians often criticize their society as one in which selective disobedience of laws and rules is generalized, in ways small and large. Cars routinely run red lights and park on sidewalks, and protected forests are felled for their timber or occupied by squatters.
In many respects, the beach is no different. Paddleball players at water’s edge, dog owners playing fetch with their pets and surfers who threaten to run over swimmers all routinely flout restrictions on their activities, “and nobody does a thing about it, not the municipal guard and certainly not the defenseless sunbather,” complained Joana Guimarães, the mother of two small children.
That is not to say there are no limits on behavior. Despite Brazil’s reputation for sexual tolerance, both the toplessness and nudity increasingly seen on European beaches are frowned upon here. When a group of young women tried going topless in Ipanema a few years ago, people poured beer on them, insulted them and called the police.
But what really worries beachgoers are the “sweeps” in which large groups of young men from the favelas, or squatter slums in the hills overlooking the beach, raid the shore and rob beachgoers. That began in the early 1990s, and, though it has diminished in recent years as the police have responded, it lingers as a source of unease with a clearly racial component.
“If you’re sitting there with your wife and kids, your watch and your money hidden in an obvious place, and a group of dark-skinned teenagers with that dyed blond hair come by, you start to get nervous,” said Antônio Bezerra Andrade, an Ipanema resident.
Some luxury beachfront hotels have in recent years equipped security guards with binoculars, to watch from their upper floors and communicate by walkie-talkie to colleagues on the beach. They also try to shoo away the freelance prostitutes, known in some parts of Brazil as “Cinderellas of the sand.”
Still, “what amazes me is that in a society that represents itself as being so highly disorganized, the beach is astonishingly organized,” Mr. da Matta said. But order, and the comforts that go with it, could not be maintained without what can only be described as a servant class.
Beachgoers are served by strolling vendors who have made the long commute from the working-class suburbs to sell wares like soft drinks, ice cream, sunglasses, clothes and tanning lotion.
“Sometimes you get these groups of really hot upper-class babes putting down their boyfriends or talking about their sex lives right in front of you,” said one vendor, who asked not to be identified because he feared offending regular clients. “It’s like you’re not even there, like you’re invisible or not a person.”
Many of Brazil’s cultural and social trends and movements are born in Rio, with the beach serving as their stage. When, in the early 1970s, for example, the actress Leila Diniz wore a skimpy bikini to Posto 9 while gloriously pregnant and unmarried, traditionalists were horrified. But feminists point to the episode as a galvanizing moment in their efforts to gain equal rights.
A few years later, with a military dictatorship still in power, Fernando Gabeira, today a writer and a prominent member of Congress representing the Green Party, returned from exile in Europe and signaled his generation’s split from the Stalinist left by wearing the briefest of crocheted trunks to the beach.
More recently, gays have staked out an area near Posto 9, which now flies the rainbow flag that is the emblem of their movement.
“Why, after years in which homosexuals congregated discreetly near the Copacabana Palace Hotel, do you all of a sudden have a gay beach at Farme de Amoedo Street?” Ms. Farias, the author, said. “It’s because groups use the beach to acquire visibility, to say ‘Hey, I’m here, too.’ In order to do that, they need a spot on the beach that they can say is theirs.”