In celebration of the upcoming anthology that Nico’s co-editing – The Audacity of Post-Racism – I’d like to direct you to poor ol’ Chris Matthews…the MSNBC with all the right intentions…the kid who often scores one for the dodgeball team, but not without it accidentally ricocheting and hitting the cute girl in the face.  In this case, the cute girl is everyone who belongs to a race.

Yikes…forgot Obama was black???  What, were you sitting there like, “What an eloquent little Welsh boy that is speaking up there!” If someone told me that something I did made them forget I was Asian…FOR A FULL HOUR!!…I’d slap them and then I’d go home and write a circa-1999 slam poem about my identity.

Chris Maaaaaaaaaathews
Nuts like some caaaaaaaaaaaashews
I want to grab a Pocky and staaaaaab you
Chocolate pundit
Chocolate pundit
Choc. O. Late. Pun. Dit.

Fortunately, he’s a talented television personality who has the platform and skills to overwrite any gaffs he might make while the camera’s rolling:

Thanks for that, Chris.  For a moment there we forgot that you were a colorblind unicorn who squirted civil rights from your eyeballs.

“Alas, grayscale Malcolm and Yuri reunited in my retinas!” – Chris Matthews

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Our good friend Adam Mansbach has been a key facilitator in conversations with race, hip-hop, and white privilege with his acclaimed books Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews, and is also the editor-in-chief of the upcoming book of essays The Audacity of Post-Racism, which Nico’s also an editor for! (in the sociopolitical literature arena, having Adam as the editor-in-chief is as big as having Diddy as your executive producer, except instead of adlibs you get grammar checks)

Adam gives a sneak peek of what’s to come with his article of the same name, where he explores the concept of the “post-racism” society that some have assumed that we are a part of with the election of Barack Obama, and dissects the weight behind Barack’s speech “Toward a More Perfect Union” as well as black and Jewish relations in America. 

In today’s climate where we can have a mixed-race President while simultaneously a Black Harvard can get arrested for breaking into his own home, Adam prompts a vital discussion.

An excerpt:

The soft-focus abstraction of racial realities goes beyond Obama’s speech.  It has been a hallmark of the entire presidential campaign, with its musings on whether Obama is too black, black enough, or ‘post-race.’ Naturally, one must be black to be ‘post-race,’ for the same reason that no one thought to ask whether Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney was too white or not white enough.  The purpose of abstracting race is to obscure racism, to elide the fact that a black person is never so lacking in blackness – culturally, personally, politically, or by any other standard – to find himself exempt from discrimination. 

Read the whole article at Davey D’s blog.

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