Bedtime for Democracy

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Look, we all know what’s going on here. First, with the birther conspiracy, we learned that being the president of the United States is a white privilege (articulated in an excellent article up at Alternet). If you didn’t catch it the first time around, John McCain’s status may be even more circumspect than Obama’s. So, is ‘born in the USA’ code for ‘white’ now?

And now, with Common’s trip to the White House, we see the same sort of language being sent through different codes this time around. The issue isn’t that Common is some sort of cop-killer poet (even if he were), but that he is a black man trying to enter the White House –something that seems pretty hard to do these days.

Tea Partiers and Fox News are galvanizing more followers when they call Common things like ‘thug.’ White kids don’t get to be thugs these days. Only blacks (from the ‘inner city’ if you buy that euphemism) are thugs, because they are the ones meant to receive the sort of ‘law and order’ and drug law punishments being doled out by the fistful (try image searching it – is ‘thugness’ constituted by criminality or race?). No, the fuss over Common isn’t about his lyrics (although Sean Hannity did a pretty good job at maneuvering around his socially conscious wordplay) but about the simple fact of his race.

Let’s see where this goes.