Kiss My Black Ass

Somewhat disoriented, I managed to have the presence of mind to tell the front desk clerk to call my colleague and let him know that I would be unable to meet him in the lobby as planned because I was being escorted out of the hotel.

The general manager and I watched as she spoke into the phone. Clearly, I was there to meet a paying guest. But the general manager continued to repeat, “Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel.”

People have asked why I did not refuse to leave and then insist that he call the police.

I think that the truth is I was blindsided.

My professional life is all about working with the news media to ensure that all segments of our society are accurately and fairly portrayed. I often speak of the corrosive effects of skewed media images on our public policy and personal lives.

As a person of color in this country, I have many times felt as if I am under greater scrutiny, so I compensate and arm myself as best I can. I consciously try to act in a way that reassures those around me.

Taking a cue from my father, I try to dress as well as possible, almost as if I’m sending up a silent prayer that if I look like this, maybe you won’t treat me like that.

But walking into a hotel lobby a for a business meeting is such a mundane and common occurrence in my life that it never dawned on me to be on guard.

It wasn’t only the manager who blindsided me. Equally shocking was my own reaction.

We have programs that teach people how to talk across difference, including not internalizing another person’s negative reaction. Intellectually, I knew this had nothing to do with me. Yet all I felt was shame.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., was roundly criticized for screaming “you don’t know who you’re messing with,” according to a police report, as the Cambridge cop arrested him in his own home. [I wrote extensively about Gates-gate, starting here.]

I wanted to shout the same thing, not as an arrogant assertion of my authority but as an anguished cry for recognition of our shared humanity.

“You don’t know who I am. I could be your mother, your sister, your cousin or your aunt. I am a fellow human, not something to be discarded on the street.”

I said none of that.

The closest I came was, “Why are you doing this to me? You know I am meeting someone here.” Even I could hear the weakness in my voice, further deepening my sense of humiliation. That was the only time the general manager deviated from his script., saying, “We have to protect our other guests. Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel.”

I made one more lame attempt to assert myself and asked for his name. He thrust his card at me, opened the front door of the hotel and ushered me into the cold. The card identified him as Joseph Galvan, General Manager of Hampton Inn Washington DC Convention Center.

Stunned, I stood shivering on the street wondering what the heck had just happened to me.

People have asked me whether I want Galvan fired. The truth is I don’t want him ever to do this to someone else, particularly someone younger and truly vulnerable. But firing him won’t solve the problem.

As I pointed out after NPR recently fired Juan Williams, just because you shut someone down doesn’t mean you’ve lifted up the issue.

Our Fault Lines framework teaches that it will be very difficult for us to reach common ground until we learn to have the difficult conversations around charged issues. That’s what I would like to see happen this time.

I would like to sit down and have a conversation with the general manager and his colleagues. I want to know what and who he saw when he looked at me in the lobby of his hotel. I want to discuss his underlying assumptions and how he came to them.

After hearing about what had happened to me, my cousin Peter looked up the company on the Internet and learned that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had sued one of its Indianapolis properties about a month ago. I’d like to talk to company representatives and learn what happened and what they think about both of these incidents. I’d also like to know what the company’s guidelines are for escorting people out of the lobby.

This is what we teach and preach in our media work because we don’t think we have a chance to restore our national sanity if we can’t even determine how to have a civil conversation with each other.

I also attended the rally. I have a couple friends who were nice enough to let me stay in their apartment in Georgetown while they are out of town. It is a very nice building with a lot of upstanding citizens. I guess my friends hadn’t sufficiently alerted the entire condo association that their loud black friend was going to be staying there because I swear, I was getting some of the strangest looks from some of the residents of the building.

I was extremely aware, or at least paranoid, that these people were thinking “What is she doing here?” My friend (whose apartment it is) even joked with me before I got there, “We told the front desk you’d be arriving on Friday. We told them you’re black.” The funny thing is, as he said, “We told them you’re black,” I was saying, “Did you warn them that I’m black?”

Cut to a few days later (after I’d annoyed my friends by locking the keys in the apartment, having to take a cab to my friend’s brother’s house to get the spare key, and etc. (It’s typical me, and because they know me, their reaction to my various shenanigans was more “frustrated parent” than “why are we friends with her again?” Besides, I have the mentality of a 20 year old and a raging case of ADD; it’s not really my fault)), I get a rightfully angry message from my friend that the condo association was unhappy with them because their guest (me) had a “very loud party with 8-10 guests until late.”

Uh. No I didn’t. I had some people over; we were listening to friggin’ Portishead, drinking gin, and talking about sex and politics. I am super loud normally, and when I get drunk, I’m even louder. But 8-10 people? No way.

But guess what? All but one of us was black. I kept trying to rationalize it in my head, while not making lame excuses to my friend, because it certainly wasn’t their fault, and I wasn’t going to play the race card that early.

I was thinking to myself, it’s probably just that the people who lived in the condo weren’t used to any noise at all. Or, maybe we shouldn’t have been drinking and smoking on the balcony. We did get a “Please you keep it down” from a woman upstairs at midnight. At that point there were two of us on the balcony. And we went inside and kept the shit down.

So who knows what went on. I apologized profusely, sent them flowers (who doesn’t like flowers?) and wrote a professional sounding letter that they could send to the HOA. Of course I made sure to mention lawyer and law school about fourteen times, and I used as many “smart sounding words” as I could. I mean, it was Halloween weekend, after a huge ass rally, and they had a whole meeting about me! I’m sure they were very concerned.

But really, we weren’t that loud. I can’t help but think, “It’s because they saw a gaggle of Negros¹ walking in the building, a little bit drunk after having been out in Georgetown.” Then I think, “No, it’s because I’m a loud drunk asshole.” I don’t know what it was. I keep going back and forth.

My point is this: I always feel like I need to state certain things about myself up front. I’m 36 (I look like I’m 20 and somehow being 36 gives me more gravitas); I’m a lawyer (that always helps); and of course, whomever I am talking to can immediately tell that I’m very well-spoken.

I’ve had a good life. I have a good life. I don’t want for anything. There are people who are so much worse off than I am. I’m not complaining. I can dress well and be extra friendly to disarm people. It’s my cross-eyed bear.

It’d be nice, though, to walk into a room and not immediately start counting brown faces.

It’d be nice to not get furtive glances my way when I’m shopping.

It’d be nice to meet a group of people and not feel like an asshole because I’ve met Mr. So and So or Ms. Whatsherface before, but I don’t remember because it was at some social function where I met tons of people, and the only reason Mr. So and So and Ms. Whatsherface remember who the hell I am is because I was the only black person at that function.

::shrugs::

Woe is me.

¹ One such Negro is the gentleman who stirred up a metric fuck ton of controversy with this post over at Pajiba, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.

***The original post stated her name was “Dorothy.” It’s “Dori.”

[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]

I wasn’t sitting in front of the TV watching MSNBC until numerous people started emailing me and alerting me on Twitter to the fact that O’Donnell was repeatedly blaming liberalism and the Left for the Democrats’ political problems. That’s how I became aware of what O’Donnell was saying. Beyond that, here is what Salon’s Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh wrote on election night, long before I wrote a word about any of this (I hadn’t read this until yesterday):

“Strangely, I watched Democrats including MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell try to blame the blowout on whiny progressives.”

If O’Donnell didn’t actually do that, he might want to ask himself why so many people think he did. [Because they have no critical thinking skills?] Did huge numbers of people simultaneously suffer a mass hallucination, or did his comments — spread out over the course of several hours that night — create the impression that this was precisely the point he was making? [No, the people who are pissed off about what he said were inclined to be pissed off no matter what he said and therefore didn’t actually listen to the words that were coming out of his mouth.]

Here’s an exchange between O’Donnell and Maddow that Greenwald uses to illustrate the point:

MADDOW: The situation is that Russ Feingold never earned the loyalty of his party because he was so iconoclastic, he went his own way, he made principled votes on things like the Patriot Act . . . he never earned any national favor from anyone but progressives . . . . . he’s against someone who has a ton of outside help and a ton of money. He just didn’t have anyone supporting him because the national party just never backed him up.

O’DONNELL: What does this have to do with the argument that’s going on inside the Democratic Party between progressives and others about how Democrats should run? Did Russ Feingold lose because he wasn’t liberal enough? . . . . When we talk about money in races, we have to face the fact that it’s not the full explainer that everyone thinks it is. If money beat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, why isn’t it beating Jerry Brown in California? . . . This is about real candidates, this is about real positions they’ve taken, especially if they’re incumbents, like Russ Feingold, and to pretend that voting on Russ Feingold has nothing to do with his voting as an incumbent I think is to ignore the reality of life on the ballot as a Democrat in Wisconsin.. . . .

MADDOW: If you really believe he could have campaigned his way out of this race, I’d love to hear how he could have campaigned differently in a more effective way, but I just don’t see it.

O’DONNELL: A liberal was defeated by a Republican — by voters who had information about this one being a liberal, this one being a Republican. We have to then assume the voters are completely irrational and don’t know what they are doing, or we assume that they do know the difference between a liberal and a Republican and they made that choice, based on his being a liberal and him being a Republican, money being whatever it was in that situation.

(As much as I love the Maddow (and I do, deep in my lady areas), O’Donnell is dead on here. Russ Feingold never earned the loyalty of his party because he made principled votes, i.e., liberal votes, on things like the Patriot Act. America didn’t want a principled vote on the Patriot Act at the time. Americans wanted to send its military somewhere to blow some shit up! Russ Feingold went down, in my humble opinion, because he voted his conscience. There aren’t a lot of politicians who are willing to risk their careers in order to do the right thing. For that, I say, HUZZAH FEINGOLD.)

Later, Greenwald posits that the midterm results were actually a good thing because the Blue Dog Democrats got crushed:

Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for close to half of the Democratic losses. Some of us have been arguing for quite some time that the Rahm-engineered dependence on Blue Dog power is one of the many factors that has made the Democratic Party so weak, blurry, indistinguishable from the GOP, and therefore so politically inept, and would thus be stronger and better without them…. Despite viewing last night’s Blue Dog losses with happiness, I wouldn’t point to this outcome as vindication for my argument, as there are many complex factors that account for last night’s crushing of Congressional Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America’s obvious decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc. etc.

But for slothful pundits who want to derive sweeping meaning from individual races in order to blame the Left and claim that last night was a repudiation of liberalism, the far more rational conclusion — given the eradication of 50% of the Blue Dog caucus — is that the worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls “centrists” and “conservative Democrats.” That is who bore the bulk of the brunt of last night’s Democratic bloodbath — not liberals.

I watched MSNBC’s election coverage, and I didn’t get the sense that O’Donnell was blaming “The Left,” but rather making the point—the very valid point—that not everyone in the Democratic party is a paint-by-numbers liberal. As such, it seems facile to argue that the thrashing of the Blue Dogs means the Democrats should have run a more liberal candidate in those particular districts. It seems more likely that a conservative Democrat was the only electable Democrat in that district.¹

Well, last night, Greenwald appeared on the Last Word to get this whole slap-fight sorted:

I have respected Greenwald for years. During the Bush Nightmare, he was one of the lone voices detailing the gross abuses of power going on in that Administration. On policy and constitutional theory, Greenwald is one of the best, but when it comes to political analysis, he’s not so great. The constant “Obama is fucking it all up” and the “Obama is alienating his base” drumbeat is the reason I stopped reading him on a regular basis. I do, however, agree with some of Greenwald’s criticism and I believe that Obama does have his hopey head up his changey ass on important issues.

Obama was too slow to recognize that the Republicans were going to be obstructionist and united behind their “we don’t have a square to spare” plan for governance. Obama’s extension of Bush’s executive authority bullshit. I’m pissed off about FISA and the continuing invasions of privacy. Obama should be busting mad caps in Wall Street’s ass. And, I don’t think the CIA should be running around the globe assassinating fools willy nilly (although I watched Alias and you can’t convince me that shit ain’t real– there’s some sort of shadow government, with shadow ops doing shadowy shit.)

All that aside, however, I have to say yell this: I AM PART OF THIS HOLY BASE YOU KEEP YAMMERING ABOUT, AND I DON’T FEEL ALIENATED.

A lot of colored folks don’t feel alienated. But those who cry “hippy punching” don’t seem to care about us.² They just want to complain.

So whatever. Let these people who clearly know what is best for me throw their tantrums because that’s definitely what will build a better Progressive Coalition. Keep shooting inside the tent at those who are your allies because that’s definitely the way to build a broader coalition. Completely ignore that your base comprises more than white men, gays who want to serve in the military, gays who want to be married, and rich armchair feminists because that’s also an excellent way to build a broader coalition.

Progressives have a long road³ to hoe. Because face it–this country is not predominantly “liberal.” As O’Donnell pointed out, this country doesn’t even like the word “liberal.” [Check out the video after the jump; O’Donnell proclaims that yes, he is a socialist and no, he’s not ashamed!] This summer’s freak out over healthcare is evidence of that. Add to that the fact that Fox News is pouring propaganda into the minds of millions of Americans twenty-four hours a day/seven days a week, and it becomes apparent that liberals/progressives are pretty much fucked.

Liberals are losing the message war, and liberals can’t stop in-fighting long enough to make it clear to the millions who are being screwed by the Tea Party and by the GOP that they are, in fact, being screwed by a bunch of rich white assholes.

***

Look, I think it is a fantastic idea for lefties to band together and kick the asses of Republicans and corporatist Democrats. President Kucinich? I’d be down. But pragmatically, that shit ain’t happenin’, and if it does, it certainly ain’t happening if folks on the left keep crapping on one another’s faces.


Seriously, Democrats/Progressives/ Liberals (and all non-neocons/Teatwits, and nutjobs), get your shit together. It’s time to get over yourselves and realize that you and people who think exactly the way you do are NOT THE BASE. The Democratic Party is not the GOP; it isn’t a lockstep party. It’s messy being a Democrat. It’s even messier being a liberal. And all the bullshit (mine included! but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want!) simply isn’t helping.

All your base are NOT belong to you. All your base are belong to US.

/end rant

¹ I don’t know, I haven’t actually googled it our anything. This is political analysis from my own ass.

² Straw man, party of one!

³ I literally just learned that the proper phrase is “long row to hoe.” First notar republic, then “all intensive purposes,” then “kitten caboodle,” and now this! Our childrens is learning, y’all.

[image via xkcd]

***This is an abridged version of this admittedly rambly mcRant.  I am redacting portions of it because I don’t want to set fire to somebody else’s house, so to speak.  The full entry is at my blog and I suspect controlled fires are being set as we speak.  So stop by if you are inclined.  Bring a fire extinguisher.  I’ve been told that Sarah Palin is bringing cookies… so … um… maybe bring some chloroform too.  I must say, with all due respect, of course, that some of you won’t be able to handle the truth, ya dig?  I mean, no offense, but some of you just ain’t pickin’ up what i’m puttin’ down.  It’s cool though.  Angry Black Lady isn’t for everyone. Not everyone is down with the ABLC. Peace, brothers and sisters.  -ABL