Lots of folks along Lewis Avenue and in Downtown Brooklyn -- not to mention at her alma maters Harvard Law and Oberlin College -- are pouring toasts and celebrating.
Bedford-Stuyvesant's Jacqueline Berrien was named on Thursday by President Barack Obama to be chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Berrien's husband is the activist and social policy guy Peter Williams, a Brooklynite to his heart and graduate of Bishop Loughlin High School.
Berrien has been an Associate Director and Counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, based here in New York City.
According to the White House, President Obama had this to say about this newest appointment:
"Jacqueline Berrien has spent her entire career fighting to give voice to underrepresented communities and protect our most basic rights. Each of us deserves a fair chance to succeed in our workplace and make a contribution to this nation, and I’m confident that Jacqueline’s passion and leadership will ensure that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is living up to that mission. I look forward to undertaking this important work with Jacqueline in the months and years ahead."
This is a Barack Obama speech that should go down in history, for its declaration of the evils committed over the past decade by credit card companies, banks and, yes, Verizon and various telephone companies as well.
Who thinks that those Verizon bills -- and the bills as well from National Grid or ConEd (as in "We con Ed or Bob or anyone else we can") or Citi Card -- were really meant to inform their consumers?
The statements have been so stunningly confusing that one suspected, at first, that they were devised by illiterates.
It took a year or so to realize it was intentional obfuscation on the part of the companies.
The time lag in reaching that awareness was attributable -- not just to stupidity -- but a reluctance to accept that well established American companies would treat their customers with such cold, calculating and (dare we say criminal) contempt.
American businesses, at the level of Verizon and big banks and insurance companies, created a culture of deception that enveloped us in a painful financial crisis, a crisis that, until recently, seemed likely to destroy the way of life we have known.
Obama's speech criticizing that culture was discussed and parsed on CNN and other news stations, but they were fairly boring and meaningless, really, when measured against the real thing.
They did not, of course -- egotists that they are -- want streaming competition from a 19 minute presidential speech of this type.
In it, Obama (in his gentle way) criticized companies that have cunningly lured millions of Americans into loans and deals they could not afford and that they did not understand, companies that offered "a bewildering array of incomprehensible options," companies that competed "not by offering better products but more complicated ones, with more fine print and more hidden terms."
Thus the need, he said, for better, tougher regulation.
It all began without any sense of impending controversy.
The president of the New York Association of Black Journalists, Gary Anthony Ramsay, sent a notice out on the organization's listserv, saying NYABJ would be hosting an event sponsored by the News Corp.
The June 24 event would honor "several journalists and supporters who have crossed significant landmarks in their careers as they continue to break barriers," the announcement said.
Then an energetic exchange erupted online after black journalist Eric Tait strongly objected to the relationship with News Corp., arguing News Corp. (which owns The New York Post and a ton of other media) "is not who this organization should be partnering with for anything."
Last night I noticed the back and forth and offered my thoughts -- which I've expressed previously on this blog -- especially about The New York Post and its cartoon showing a police officer shooting a chimpanzee, a chimpanzee that was generally viewed as representing President Barack Obama. [See image accompanying this post.]
My comment didn't show up for many hours on the NYABJ listserv, but I eventually saw it today, and soon thereafter I saw (posted by NYABJ) an AP piece about News Corp.'s new "external diversity council."
This Memorial Day, as President Barack Obama paid tribute to those who have fallen in battle, I could not help but think of my father, Wilfred Howell, deceased, who was one of the first black marines and served in the Pacific in World War II.
Well, to the extent that Murdoch has anything to do with big undertakings of his papers, this one puts him squarely in the Obama camp.
Latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows that those surveyed are pleased with what their new president is doing, beating ex President Bush by a long, long shot.
Recall (you of short, Net memories) that said Murdoch has been besieged of late with calls for him to fire his editor in chief at the New York Post, as well as the cartoonist there who did a cartoon seeming to equate Obama with a chimp shot to death by police.
Critics have said that Murdoch is in something of a quandary, having affection for the editor, Col Allan, and wanting to show a progressive side by cozying up to Obama.
(Read previous BrooklynRon posts, notably this one.)
On the yes side there is the following argument: That New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch is a power lover who wants to be in with Barack Obama.
Not that Obama himself has been complaining about the cartoon in question here -- the one from a few days ago in which, some say, Post cartoonist Sean Delonas seemed to gleefully compare Obama to a chimpanzee that'd been shot by cops.
But the cartoon is an object of derision and contempt by 99 percent of those in Obama's base, as well as many decent folks of Republican persuasion who think it's wrong to make light of killing politicians.
Not to mention allegations that the cartoonist crossed a racial line in comparing the dead chimp to Obama.
One suspects that Murdoch might be embarrassed or -- at least, in polite company -- pretending to be embarrassed. (If you need to see it again, click here for the cartoon.)
On the other hand -- on the no, he won't fire them side -- is the following: That Col Allan, the Post editor in chief who has defended the cartoon, is a mean and powerful journalist who has been with Murdoch for many years, here and in Australia.
Allan has fired staff at the Post with a confident coldness that surprised even hardened local journalists (including one black female editor who was dying of cancer).
Surviving incidents like this one, Allan turned a deaf ear (and another part of his body) to Blacks, Latinos, gays and others who have complained about the paper's crass insensitivity when it comes to them and their issues.
Allan has proudly called himself a "Giuliani conservative," which many in the city might interpret as code words effectively saying, as Giuliani himself said (effectively), "I don't give a damn what those Blacks and Latinos think."
But here's the bottom line: That the newspaper business is a bottom line business, not as much about truth telling or being fair or being objective, as about selling newspapers.
And Col Allan himself said in a New York magazine interview about the possibility of his being fired someday:
“I’ll get fired not because Rupert doesn’t like the stories I put in the paper. I’ll get fired because we don’t sell newspapers. And that judgment is made not by Rupert, but by the market, and by the audience." (read whole article.)
As the NAACP now calls for Allan and Delonas to be fired -- or face a national boycott -- that day of Allan and/or Delonas' forced farewell may be approaching.
Sean Delonas earns a living spewing hate dressed up in cartoons.
Given that his creations appear in The New York Post, there's a certain logic there.
For no other publication has a reputation for being -- so regularly -- disrespectful of the city's darker people.
What's really strange in this latest Post dust-up is to learn the following: that Sean Delonas recently authored, with his school-age son, a book for children titled "Scuttle's
Big Wish."
The Allentown Morning Call described the book as "a cautionary, but playful, King Midas-based tale about a mouse whose touch turns everything he loves to cheese." And it points out that Delonas did the book as a way of drawing closer to his son, who was living with his mother, and apart from dad Sean, in New Jersey.
From where, therefore, comes this evil nature that would, by the interpretation of some, suggest that the assassination of Obama would be a good thing.
Not to mention the incredible, Ku Klux Klan-like comparison of Obama with a chimpanzee.
We noted last year how strange it was that the Post actually endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Strange, we said, given the Post's history of aggressively and gleefully opposing progressive figures with dark complexions.
Perhaps, we thought, it might be the oh so ambitious hand of Post owner Rupert Murdoch, who saw early on that Obama had winning stuff and wanted to be among the insiders.
Oh, Rupert Murdoch, now is the time to speak and show some decency.
By the way, remember when Delonas (eight years ago) did the disgusting caricature that so angered the Black and Latino community, the one showing Freddy Ferrer kissing the huge backside of the Rev. Al Sharpton?
Fast as the speed of sound, the Obama White House put up its new website, replacing names and faces of the Bush administration, whose term now seems to have ended eons ago.
But much more than the names and faces have changed.
This is the dawning of a new day, the entrance of a crew so savvy to 2.0 communications that it's scary.
No wonder so many in the White House press corps seem so pissed. The world is changing around them, like so many bolts of converging lightning, and they don't seem to know how to deal with it.
In a scene that spread with Net alacrity, as Obama paid a visit to the White House corps, Politico reporter Johnathan Martin bypassed the hellos and handshakes of common relations, and went after Obama with a tough question about lobbyists that, under normal circumstances, would have seemed appropriate, but here seemed like a spoiled child demanding a toy.
Obama's coolness in the situation reflected confidence that his people have things under control, on the communications front.
The new White House website is an amazing display of IT talent, to be expected, we suppose, of those who took the Net, along with cell phones and Twitter, to political heights that Howard Dean's folks five years ago never imagined.
The web site offers so much information -- for sure partisan, in all meaningful senses of the word, but, grief, lots and lots of information -- that the routines of reporters there will surely have to undergo serious self-examination.
It makes the sites of local elected officials in New York seem like old one page, paper press releases.
Seriously, we (and I mean Huffington, Politicker, Politico, AfroNetizen, BrooklynRon and many, many other journalist/web sites and bloggers) have to come up with new chairs and whips to handle the new political lion.
The words of Mark Knopfler in his song "Boom, Like That" come to mind:
"These boys have got this down, Ought to be one of these in every town. These boys have got the touch. It's clean as a whistle And it don't cost much."
Knopfler was singing of the rise of Ray Kroc, late founder of the McDonald's fast good chain. But he just as well may have been singing an ode to the Netizens of the Obama White House.
For the heck of it, maybe you'd just want to see and hear Knopfler doing the above tune, which, we warn you, is a little eerie in chord arrangement and other ways.
Well, it wasn't St. Lucia that penned the poem but its very lettered son, Derek Walcott.
Obama was once seen with a book of Walcott's poems in tow, and since that time, some months ago, it's been known that there's a special bond between the two men.
So it's no surprise that Walcott offered up a special creation dedicated to Obama, the most literary president since Abraham Lincoln.
"Forty Acres" (get the reference to Forty Acres and a Mule?) originally appeared in the Times of London, which, on its website, is also giving visitors a chance to see and hear Walcott reading the poem.
By the way, for a long white I've taken pleasure in declaring that Walcott's native St. Lucia has more Nobel Laureates, per capita, than any other country.
There are only two Lucian Laureates (the other being the late Sir Arthur Lewis, an economist); but St. Lucia is a small Caribbean island, and two Nobel Prizes for such a small place are big deal.
I once wrote about this proud Caribbean fact back in 2000 when Walcott spoke at LaGuardia Community College.
Alexis de Tocqueville [top left image], the early 19th century French writer/researcher who traveled the States and offered judgments on the moral questions of the day, was profoundly pessimistic on the issue of race.
Blacks and Whites were simply too far apart in too many ways to expect a resolution of the American race problem, he effectively said.
Oh, what de Tocqueville must be thinking now, as Barack Obama reaches out to touch the Bible that Abe Lincoln touched, and takes the same oath!
Roll over, Alexis. This calls for a song.
And, hey, friends, take those fingers out of your ears as you listen to "The Mountaintop"!
