“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

In 1958, Caroline County (Virginia) Judge Leon M. Bazile said these words as he sentenced Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman, to a year in prison for violating the state’s law against blacks and whites marrying. The judge suspended their sentence in exchange for them agreeing to leave the state for 25 years.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court heard their case, ruling that such miscegenation laws are against the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, that they are “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy…[and] there can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Mildred Loving died on Monday. (Her husband had died in a car crash many years before.)

I’m old enough to understand that 1967 was not that long ago. That’s the thing about getting older — the span of time reveals itself as a continuum. What seemed a lifetime ago, you realize, is just part of a lifetime.
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Mildred Loving’s lifetime ended Monday. Tuesday evening, my wife and I — a couple of the same colors as Mildred and Richard Loving — watched one of our offspring, our 14-year-old daughter, win the county 800 meter championship (going away, if I might brag). I’d like to pretend I told her the story of the Lovings and she ran inspired. No. She just ran, faster (much!) than all of the other qualifiers. Just part of a lifetime.

I start this post by noting that Senator Obama’s ascension means something to my family and me. My three children are the children of an interracial marriage; none of them considers his or her self white. Seeing an African-American man becoming a party’s presidential candidate is important for our family. But Obama has a slight church problem.

It’s not his controversial former pastor, whom I’ve blogenberged about previously. It’s that, with his impressive oratorical skills, he sometimes forgets he’s not in an African-American church. That’s what happened with his recent “bitter gate.” He didn’t say anything so awful. He didn’t say anything that would make a reasonable person conclude he’s elitist. But he gave attacks an opening.

I’ve been the only white face in an African-American church, at an African-American wedding, and in an African-American club. My wife often listens to the Sunday sermons at Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard University, and I listen along. It doesn’t make me any darker than the average white guy, just a bit different in my insights.

Homilies at African-American churches often mix political with the spiritual. Not every line would pass a magazine’s fact checker (I’m not sure they would in my church, either) — or political opposition research, for that matter — but the meaning and the feeling are expertly communicated. Obama’s real good at that style of communicating. But, as he’s learning with “bitter gate,” it can be dangerous in politics.

I’m in Tennessee today, the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which, of course, took place in Tennessee.

I stopped at a drugstore. Stepping out of my car a good old boy, his face framed by a scruffy beard on the bottom, a dirty Tennessee Volunteers baseball cap on the top, approached me. All he said to me was, in a long southern drawl, “You think Tennessee can beat LSU without Candace Parker?”

Candace Parker is the African-American star of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. She’s battling a bad shoulder injury. The Tennessee Volunteers are playing LSU in the national semi-finals Sunday night.

Forty years ago somebody (some people?) killed one of my heroes in Tennessee. Today, a good old boy in Tennessee shared with me that he was worried about the left shoulder of an African-American woman basketball player.

Some unexpected things make me feel good.

Brands are sticky. Visceral reactions, emotions, gut instincts, what was spinning in your head the last time you were exposed to the brand — all have much more to do with how you respond to that brand than intellectual thought. That’s the mistake too many people make when it comes to PR and marketing: it’s the feeling, stupid, not the thought. And that’s the problem Barack Obama has right now and, unfortunately, for quite some time to come.

When it comes to marketing (and politics is the ultimate in marketing) feelings trump intellectualizing every time. People feel a brand. They feel a candidate. Relatively little deductive reasoning enters into their personal equation. And what they feel is the sum of lots of different feelings felt at different times. Permanently added into the sum of feelings people have toward the Barack Obama brand are the controversial words of his former pastor. For many people, that’s not going away. For them, it will color, at least a bit, how they forever view Barack Obama even if they forget all about Rev. Wright.

The big problem for Barack Obama? Brands are sticky. You can’t intellectualize away what sticks to a brand. That’s how the Obama team is trying to deal with the Rev. Wright problem. That’s all they can do, and they are doing it very well. Problem is, brands are sticky — for months to come.

“In our circles, people really equate wealth with status,” a mother of one of my son’s lacrosse teammates said, in a tone that suggested she was telling me something new.

“Really, I never noticed,” I said, my response dripping with sarcasm. “And they hide it so well,” the sarcasm dripping faster.

Where we live, my boy’s two main sports - lacrosse and ice hockey — are not solely the province of wealthy white people, but they do disproportionately populate the stands. One thing’s obvious to me: most of them look, dress, talk, probably even smell alike. One thing I don’t get: why do they want that?

The more financially successful these people get, the more they create an insular world. Whether they would admit this or not, it’s clear to me that their greatest ambition for their children is to see them grow up, go to school, get a job, get married, join a country club (oh glory be!), get old, and eventually die without ever building any real relationships outside of the world where everybody looks, dresses, talks, and probably even smells alike.

And I just don’t get it. I’m getting more successful (thanks to hard work and faith in God). I keep trying to expand the colors of my world - not aspire to blandness cradle to grave.

(For the record, I very much like the mother I refer to here. I just will never get that world.)

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Bonus Blogenberg: Yesterday, President Bush publicly thanked the Secretary of the Treasury for working over the weekend. Wow, as a small business owner I cannot imagine somebody working on a weekend. I hope the Treasury Secretary will be able to get some needed rest and recover.

Regular readers of Blogenberg know my wife is black. I have often thought of my children as a small piece of Dr. King’s legacy. I’ve studied a good bit about the civil rights movement and, while Dr. King is and will always be one of my very, very few heroes, I don’t fall into America’s penchant for Hollywood simplicity when it comes to this important part of our history, suggesting that Dr. King was the man who made it all happen. But I also sincerely believe that my wife and I would not be married were it not for him.

(Carry Me Home, by Diane McWhorter and Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, by Taylor Branch are, in my view, required reading for every American.)

I put one of those small pieces of legacy on a plane today: my 19-year-old son, returning after a five week visit to continue studying piano and composing at a major U.S. conservatory. It’s depressing to see him disappear through the security gate. And it’s thrilling. Just a sophomore, he’s got a plan for where he’s going after conservatory and beyond. He’s doing exactly what he needs to do to bring his plan to fruition — he’s excelling academically and musically.

He’s carrying Dr. King’s legacy very well. Good job.

I broke one of my personal rules last week while visiting Jackson, Mississippi: I claimed race creds.

I was down in the south conducting a day of communications strategy development and media training. The folks I was working with were all African American. I really liked them. It was just one of those groups that I really connected with. The media training went great — every individual I worked with, we really sharpened their talents as communicators. Towards the end of the day together, as everybody was just sitting and talking, feeling good about our six or so hours together, somebody told me that one of the participants was the former president of a well known HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). I went out of my way to note that my wife attended an HBCU, and so did several of her siblings. I wanted everybody else in the room to know that I was almost-kind-of-sort-of-really-connected-to-them-even-though-I’m white.

I immediately cringed inside. I don’t like to do that. It’s a rule of mine that I don’t lay out my race cred (that is, race credentials) because it always feel as if it’s just me trying to prove something or impress somebody — as if I’m yelling, “Don’t I really understand people who don’t look like me?!” or, “Aren’t I cooler than most everybody else?!”

One of the participants laughed and exclaimed, “So you’re a brother!” He wasn’t being sarcastic. He wasn’t poking fun. It was said with real warmth.

But I still cringed inside. Though I will say this: with my wife’s help it is true that I no longer dance with my arms glued to my side!

*The title of this Blogenberg is a takeoff on a song, originally by the Hollies, called He ain’t heavy he’s my brother. It was covered by The Osmonds, resulting in one of the worst “artistic” endeavors in history.

Twenty years ago, I was involved in the seemingly unending fights over interracial adoption – specifically, should white parents be allowed to adopt black children? The organization I worked for, and represented in the media, believed the answer should be yes. I was even labeled a racist in one major newspaper.

Part of the argument against allowing such adoptions was the “who will teach” argument, as in who will teach these children how to navigate an inherently racist society. My answer at the time was, I’d rather see these children trying to figure it out with parents (in this case white) than trying to figure out anything in a foster care system that was increasingly betraying their futures.

I had such a “who will teach” moment of my own yesterday, at the mall – where so many of my important parenting moments seem to happen (loyal Blogenberg readers will recognize that!). I took my 13-year-old twins shopping. Each of them, the girl and the boy, armed with a cell phone and “safe shopping” instructions, were allowed to shop on their own, while I stayed available in the mall. (more…)

Some of my best friends are NPR fans. I’m an NPR listener. And what I listened to on the way home from work, Monday, October 1, disgusted me.

It was on All Things Considered, and it was titled “Courting Justice Kennedy’s ‘Swing’ Vote.” This is how the NPR website describes it: “As the ‘swing’ judge on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy has to fend off people from the left and the right who wish to influence his thinking. Satirists Bruce Kluger and David Slavin imagine how that might play out.”

One way, in Kluger’s and Slavin’s imagination, it plays out is Justice Clarence Thomas as Justice Antonin Scalia’s lackey, with a rather large dose of stupid. The way Kluger and Slavin depicted Thomas reminded me of the typical black servant often found in 1930s and 40s movies, such as the Charlie Chan or Abbott & Costello movies I used to love as a kid – slow of shuffling feet and mind, a complete toady for the white man. (more…)

The mainstream news media has a serious African American problem. Lots of blacks in this country are furious at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Greta Van Susteren, Anderson Cooper, etc.

There’s no polling or focus groups behind my conclusion. Just listening to my wife, her siblings, and her friends, and hearing a healthy dose of The Michael Baisden Show on WHUR playing on my kitchen radio.

They’re furious about the Jena Six – with good reason. And they’re disgusted that, except on September 20 when tens of thousands marched in Jena, Louisiana, the mainstream media spent no time talking about what clearly appears to be vile prosecutorial racism. From the perspective of many, Greta, Anderson, etc. pull out all the stops when it comes to reporting on a young white girl gone missing or – talk about manna from heaven for the media – OJ getting arrested. But when it comes to reporting on nooses hung from a playground tree, racial fights, and African American youth being charged with attempted murder after a schoolyard brawl, the television news coverage might as well fade to black. Well, actually, I guess not