“We’re going to see how open the GOP is to this black–their ‘new black friend’ when they find out he is harassing blonde women as opposed to black women. That sort of thing of black sexuality–predatory black sexuality. Very frightening. So we’ll see how that plays out.”
– Touré on MSNBC
Touré, Milton Academy Class of ’89, is out there trying to sell his book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. I’m not sure why Touré –and not Herman Cain and not Thomas Sowell and not Clarence Thomas–is qualified to write about blackness, but I was intrigued, so I bought it. “You have to learn to shape your voice and find the courage to say really honest things,” he told The Milton Measure, the high school newspaper I once edited. I wondered to myself, did this mean I would I finally get that “honest conversation on race”?
It was a tough sell. You see, Touré grew up pretty privileged. We both went to the far left prep school, Milton Academy (tuition $30k a year)–he starting in kindergarten, me as a scholarship winner in ninth grade. He became something of a tennis star. Dropping out of Emory, he started writing about hip hop for Rolling Stone and became the go-to black writer for a lot of the media. “When I write about hip hop, I want to expand the complexity of the discussion about the brilliant creators. Many people look at rappers as dumb and I know they’re not,” he told his old high school newspaper in September.
Alas, when it comes to another black American–Herman Cain–Touré has nothing but contempt. “[Herman Cain]’s totally ridiculous! I mean like intellectually ridiculous,” he told Bill Maher. Cain, according to Touré, is “unctuous,” which is to say “oily” and “anxious to please”–what normal people would call “charming.” Touré, again speaking for all blacks, tells us that Cain won’t past muster with blacks. He might want to check the returns from Cain’s 2004 Republican bid. Cain won only two counties during that bid. His largest vote totals came from suburban Cobb and Gwinnett counties. His second highest vote totals came from Chatham, the majority-black county seat of Savannah. Cain predicts he’ll get up to a third of the black vote should he get the nomination.Why the hostility? Permit me to venture a guess. Herman Cain doesn’t play by Touré ‘s rules. He isn’t concerned about post-blackness or pre-blackness or blackness really. He isn’t concerned about being called “African-American,” preferring to be called what he is–a black American. He “does not care” about what the professional politicians or the professionally black writers have to say about him. And that has them hollering all the more, with Touré even suggesting his light-hearted jokes on the campaign trail were “minstrelsy.” “He’s not a serious thinker,” Touré told Maher. “The real problem is that he’s hijacking the process for his brand–to sell some books, to maybe get a job on Fox… it shouldn’t be right to do that.” But of course, it’s totally fine for a black writer who writes about hip hop to go out there and sell some books on MSNBC and wherever he can.
For his book, Touré went out and interviewed 105 people and asked, “What’s the most racist thing that’s ever happened to you?” He recounts the answers in Time. “More than a third of them said the answer is unknowable. It’s something that they weren’t aware of happening but that materially changed their lives. There was no confrontation, no ugly words, just power exerting itself in a smooth, efficient, prejudiced way to maintain the vast inequalities of this country.”
He did get around to interviewing cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, but somehow Herman Cain was never asked for even a few words. Perhaps it’s because he might have something to say. Cain was, by his own admission, “po'”–his family had to work up to poor. His grandparents were slaves, he lived in Jim Crow America, his father worked three menial jobs, and he and his brother drank from white-only fountains. That experience left its mark. He cuts his own hair to this day after a barbershop rejected him.
And yet he loves America all the same for its “capacity to change.” “I’ve basically adopted the attitude that performance will be my barrier buster,” Cain told Ebony magazine in its April 1988 issue. “If that means working a little harder, or that my performance has to be a little better, then, hey, that’s the price you pay. It’s a small price versus the price that was paid by those who died or were jailed so that I and others could have a chance.” Bitterness never came into his heart. Cain worked hard and earned degrees in math and computer science. So much for being “intellectually ridiculous” (Touré was an African studies major before he dropped out of Emory).
Rather than sitting on the back of the bus, he reminds us that he now owns his campaign bus. He sings his “Impossible Dream” on the campaign trail. Another black American also had a dream–that men would be judged on the content of their character, not their color. You might even say it is the American Dream.