In responding to the summary dismissal of LeGarrette Blount from the University of Oregon football team for punching a Boise State player, an acquaintance marvelled at the disproportionate influence the camera had over the judgment of officials on the field. In identifying “the camera” as the prevailing arbiter of right and wrong in that incident, it inspired me to look closer at the technology that spawned its seeming omnipresence in our lives.
Not only has the explosion in transistor chip/computer technology given us laptop computers 10,000 to 15,000 times more capable than the mainframe that coordinated the Saturn/Apollo Project, but we have the Internet, the Global Positioning System, literally hundreds of cable channels, and more information than we want or need. Amidst this kind of competition, high tech equivalents of the National Enquirer have found a new marketplace: Witness extensive coverage of the “sermons” of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and “funerals” of James Brown and Michael Jackson. We see it also in the blog responses to online editorials and news articles where filters for logic and civility are far more porous than in the printed media. I dare say that a few organized political partisans can appear much larger (and intimidating) in the blogosphere than their actual number.
At some point official judgment must either be respected or discarded in deference to technology. If the latter becomes our fate, trials in the court of high technology would never end and the evidence would be infinite (security cameras, highly sophisticated, but inexpensive personal movie and still cameras, credit card records, records of cell phone usage, computer browsing records, tight shots of the referee’s eyes when play was actually happening, etc., etc.,…).
In courts of law the judge must sometimes declare compelling evidence to be impermissible because of the way it was acquired or because of the time at which it was presented. Perhaps we have reached such a time in our daily lives with the pervasion of technology in information we receive and transmit.
I’m not defending LeGarrette Blount’s crude and unsportsmanlike conduct, but I am wondering if we have permitted image-recording technology to assume undue influence at the expense of due process.
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I got this email the other day. I was one of several newspaper article responding to a quote in a recent NEW YORK magazine article about Obamas vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. There were several responses attached. Here’s what I got in the mail:
First Lady called "ghetto girl" by Martha Vineyard’s black elite
Joni L. Reynolds <http://www.thedailyvoice.com/> | Posted June 25, 2009 11:09 AM
"Many blacks from Oak Bluffs are elated that the Only One- in-Chief may be joining them. "People are going to lose their minds!" Tonya Lewis Lee says.
At the same time, there’s also a bit of wariness among the wealthiest ones, an uncertainty whether Obama will affirm them. "Obama is more a man of the people," says a Vineyarder who’s part of black high society. "He doesn’t seem to identify with affluent black people. His wife definitely doesn’t; she is basically a ghetto girl. That’s what she says–I’m just being sociological. She grew up in the same place Jennifer Hudson did. She hasn’t reached out to the social community of Washington, and people are waiting to see what they’ll do about that." (New Yorker Magazine)
To call a Harvard lawyer a "ghetto girl" is absolutely ludicrous.
The dynamics of black society is very difficult to understand. We are probably the only race that has prejudices against other members of our own race. This anonymous member of the black elite simply said was what is said among her group.
If Mrs. Obama were light-skinned with hazel eyes maybe she might be a little more tolerable, even though she was raised on the wrong side of the track.
Joni L. Reynolds, an African-American mother, writes a blog called Ebony Mom Politics <http://ebonymompolitics.wordpress.com/> .
Carla
2009-06-25 11:32:49
It was followed by this response:
This is a really interesting piece. I am a historian and I study class, in particular classism within the black community. It is my belief that the black elite are a very insecure group of people. They are caught in between two worlds, the white world, which rejects them, and the black middle and working class, which they can’t relate to. They are in so many ways a tragic group of people with no real community to call their own. E. Franklin Frazier’s "The Black Bourgeoisie" explains it better than I can. And Lawrence Otis Graham’s "Our Kind of People" is a revealing book that really speaks to this insecurity. I would recommend them both as good reads. The Obamas, secure and comfortable with themselves, don’t need to be ass ociated with the black elite. They have nothing in common with them. They are not out to prove anything to anybody. They are not trying to be white, nor are they embarrassed by their middle and working class brethren. They are who they are, take it or leave it. And they certainly are not tragic. So I guess that would mean, yes, Barack is "a man for the people" and in my opinion this is a good thing. Because if he was in bed with the black elite, how then would he be any different than GWB, who was in bed with the Texas elite? In regards to the comment about Michelle being a "ghetto girl" again this is a clear indication of how insecure and fragile the black elite is.. This is merely testimony to how threatened they are by her. That this common woman form "the hood" is their first lady. That most likely if a black elite family had put in their bid for the white house (which I don’t think they aspire to anyway), they would h ave not even made it past the Iowa Caucasus. And here is this "common man" with his "ghetto" wife who is not only accepted and loved by "the masses" but also accepted by the white community as well. A feat the black elite will NEVER master! It is pure jealousy and quit e fascinating. Sad too.
Forwarded: Anne Walker
When I read the last part response, I was so pissed out I had to write my own response to what was said:
I don’t understand this response at all.
Why is the guy who says he is a historian talking in these broad and sloppy terms about the black elite? What does he think he is? Not a member of the black elite?
What defines the black elite? Is it money? Education? Social position? Are Oprah Winfey, Shelby Steele and Allen Iverson all members of the black elite? Because those are three very different people by some measures, all similar in others.
And why are people taking one comment by one ignorant hater and applying it broadly across a whole group of black people?
In my own experience, I found Obama support among “black elites” during the campaign to be split along generational lines. Folks old enough to have a close relationship with the Clintons remained loyal to them. Folks Barack’s age and younger were all about Barack. He was one of “them” – a black elite, that is.
There was a time when the black community celebrated the idea of an elite. I don’t get how folks can long for the heady days of the Harlem Renaissance then turn around get start sucking teeth and rolling necks at successful black businessmen and women, educators and artists. You can’t celebrate and promote excellence and simultaneously put down people for being too rich and/or too smart. Neither intelligence or wealth makes you a good person, but if a person is a jerk, just call them a jerk. Assholinity (yes, I made it up) is not restricted by class, color, income bracket or region.
For way too long people jump into easy clichés about house negroes and field negroes, without ever acknowledging that there are now several generations that have grown up reading and discussing these issues. Not to mention the paradigm-changing power of hip hop, which had a profound economic, sociological and aesthetic affect on the community not reflected in 40 year old texts.
Of course, those kinds of observation would require actually knowing what you’re talking about.
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