So I show up at Fox News HQ at, like, two seconds before 2 pm, which is when Color of Change, Nas and MoveOn.org were to present Fox News with 600,000+ letters requesting that the act right. ndre Banks was theres and I figured I should meet folks I support so regularly. Since I didn't make it to Netroots Nation and will not make it to Blogging While Brown this was the last opportunity for a while.
We had 45 seconds to talk. Andre was busy. Lotta-lotta media coverage; Fox even had this squirrelly little guy out there with a mike and a tape recorder. I recognized this Latino brother that interviewed me while he was at Columbia...he's working The Newshour's website now. I was interviewed by Reuters, god knows if or where it will be used. Met two cute white chicks who bummed a cigarette. They were wearing colorofchange.org t-shirts but did not know Fox won a lawsuit that established they have the first amendment guaranteed right to lie. This is to say even people who are offended by Fox don't know how bad they are.
Some Nas fans with signs made with magic marker and whiteboard showed. I got a Nas t-shirt (it's all baggy, black, with a big-ass "N") to go with the colorofchange.org t-shirt. I'm talking to folks and a Black couple walking by asks what's going on...I say Fox, black folks, Obama and it's like, yeah, I know...And a little later a white couple asks, I say Fox, black folks, Obama and the guys says, but "doesn't all media..." and to myself I say "you ignore the content and limit analysis to form?" and was not very convincing with these people.
And then I got to talk to Andre a few more minutes while Nas had everyone's attention. Nas needed no prompting but I didn't hear that much. There were folks to whom seeing Nas was a lot more important than it was to me. MoveOn's rep said he was hitting every point, though. I was also told Fox' refusal to accept 600K signatures wasn't a huge surprise.
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OMG.... you smoke? Just
OMG.... you smoke? Just kidding.
I am going to some Obama events in the Sarasota/Tampa area this Friday and Saturday. I think one will be predominately white and the other will be hosted at a black church. It should be interesting to study the contrasts.
As far as the organizing is going, the white lady who was enthusiastic about attracting black volunteers has been slow to respond to an invitation to speak at a Haitian church attended by a friend of mine. She had previously shown strong interest in attending a service and putting in a campaign pitch but has failed to return any phone calls for the past couple of weeks. At this point the individual who extended the invitation has grown disinterested in the campaign partially as a result of being snubbed and partially because he doesn't think that Obama can fail to win given the favorable press coverage he has been getting. His change in attitude highlighted, in my mind, the predicament faced by young black people whose interest in politics and current events originated with Obama's campaign. They slights they encounter dim their enthusiasm, but they buy into all this "post-racial" hype and believe his success is inevitable. Thus they remain disengaged. Maybe I am way off, but this reflects my initial impression.
Folks who were so hot and
Folks who were so hot and eager to launch a website to post any slight, racially motivated or not, directed toward Obama don't seem quite as eager to create website devoted to how certain groups of colored people are being dissed by representatives of the Obama campaign. This is not the first time I have read or heard about such incidents like the one posted above.