Barack’s Elite Black Condescension

(Originally Posted 6/17/2008)

It’s fine for Michelle Obama to stand on a national platform in an outfit that costs thousands of dollars and give Barack Obama, America’s first African-American true political candidate, a black power fist pump. Perhaps it was a strange need to appeal to a crossover audience – this time blacks – that led her to announce Barack Obama then victorious as an Illinois state Senator as her “baby’s daddy.” It is fine for Barack Obama to give a stern Sunday sermon on the perils of absent fathers in the black community drawing on his own hurt growing up without one. All of these motions of Michelle and Barack Obama to keep it real as they continue to be the picture of America’s black elite may seem fine, but, nothing about any of these gestures is founded in sincerity nor are they completely accurate. All of this is simply condescension in the highest.

The fact is Michelle Obama can casually use the term my baby’s daddy because her daughters actually have not only a father, but, a committed companion to their mother. When Michelle uses a rhetoric that is so completely toxic in the black community and uses it as a way to be cool, this is soft handed bigotry. Barack Obama is married to Michelle Obama and made a choice to have children with her and provide for his family. He is therefore a father, husband, and a provider. A baby’s daddy is none of these things and I suspect Michelle Obama knows this. To play this rhetoric as lighthearted when far too many women actually have several of their baby’s daddy in the black community is rude and insensitive. Few to none of these women will have a splinter of Michelle Obama’s opportunities in life. Let us please stop lying to these communities by making these sad and real tragedies they face seems cool and hip in sophisticated circles. Not to mention, at best un-presidential and at worst completely low-class. Should words such as these come out of the mouth of a potential first lady?

Perhaps Michelle’s use of such a derogatory and sexist term for women is the reason Barack Obama made a point to deliver a sermon in church last Sunday on absentee fathers in the black community. Maybe it was just Father’s Day. Maybe it was because he knows the black community so desperately needs high profile, professional figures to speak out on the accountability of parenthood. “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes, said Obama.” He continued, “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And, the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” Well said, Obama. Not to be so persnickety, but the foundation he never mentioned in this sermon is the one that that is most critical to taking responsibility: marriage. Without this exercise in the black community black women are right back where Michelle Obama left off in her introduction of Barack - stuck with a baby’s daddy.

It would be just fine for Michelle and Barack Obama to simply go on and be elite, proper, and Presidential. Go ahead you two, you’ve earned it. That is what Princeton and Harvard are for. People are expecting greatness from you. We expect folks like Barack and Michelle Obama to be above certain gangster and welfare vernacular unfit for public consumption. We don’t want their halfhearted sermons on fathers simply being there. The public wants for their children what they have. The good sense to get a good education and marry the mother and father of your children and create a family with options. People want options that come from making good choices. Isn’t it a shame that all too often the elite who are in a higher place as a result of their choices choose not to divulge their path to the rest of the world, but, instead choose to “keep it real” hence condoning the poor choices that keep so many from making it off the ground.