Is President Obama a Sellout

Questions swirling in the recent dust-up among some of America’s most prominent black intellectuals and talking heads.

African-American names in the news have been exchanging harsh words over the state of black America in the Obama era. President Barack Obama is the piñata at the center of the controversy, but it’s not really about him.

It’s about a clash of massive egos and a longstanding worry that as America lurches toward a post-racial age, the racial grandstanders and panderers will tumble into the tar pits of irrelevance. The race careerists are becoming an endangered species.

One specimen is a classic. Dr.-Professor-Rapper-Signifier Cornel West should be propped up in a glass exhibit case at the Smithsonian. The famous Princeton University scholar is bitterly teed off at the president. West charges that Obama has neglected the unemployed, the poor, those in prison, and — worst of all — the president is not taking his calls.

In a recent interview with progressive web site Truthdig, West railed that Obama is “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.

These epithets point to a deep-seated animosity towards 'race betrayers' who the host community regards as a traitor and an ungrateful free rider. In studying the fear of the sellout among black Americans, Randall Kennedy notes in his book Sellout that a sellout is "a person who betrays something to which she is said to owe allegiance" and can refer to individuals whose actions "retard African-American advancement."

As Kennedy notes, some of the earliest members of the black community labeled as sellouts were those individuals who recaptured runaway slaves or forewarned white authorities of impending slave revolts. Many black authors who wrote treatises against the community were also roundly hated. One example is William Hannibal Thomas, who throughout his early life championed the African-American cause. Later in life, however, he underwent a radical about-face and published The American Negro in 1901. The black individual, he wrote, "has a mind that never thinks in complex terms; Negro intelligence is both superficial and delusive... [and] represents an illiterate race, in which ignorance, cowardice, folly, and idleness are rife." The African-American response was swift and seething. Some threatened him with physical assault and told him to "go off and hang thyself," while others, like Booker T. Washington, remarked that, "It is sad to think of a man without a country. It is sadder to think of a man without a race."

Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke with derision against racial betrayal. Malcolm X called sellouts "house Negros" and King stated that there are many blacks in America "who will seek profit for themselves alone from the struggle." Others branded as sellouts were those individuals who, working as spies for the American government, infiltrated civil rights organizations and kept an eye on groups like the Black Panther Party.

It seems that almost without exception, every successful African-American public figure in the United States -- Oprah, Sean 'Puffy' Combs, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell -- has, at one time or another, faced the question of whether they were selling out. As journalist Peter Beinart pointed out, it seems that "the more whites love you, the more you must reassure your own community that you are still one of them."

In a recent interview with journalist and author Chris Hedges, Princeton professor Cornel West launches a full frontal assault on President Obama. Parts of the interview provide a sound critique of Obama's failures as a populist president. Other parts are deeply unfair, and at times disturbing. West stops just short of branding Obama a "race traitor" or accusing him of selling out African-Americans. While I admire Dr. West, read some of his writings, and briefly met him at the 2009 American Academy of Religion conference in Montreal, I found his comments on Obama problematic to the say the least.

Some of West's critiques arise out of a perceived personal affront by Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. For example, he tells Hedges that he did 65 campaign events for Obama, used to speak with him regularly on the phone, and offer prayers for his success. However, West "never got a call back" from Obama. Additionally, West could not get tickets to the inauguration with his mother and brother. "We had to watch the thing in the hotel," he says.

The relationship continued to deteriorate after Obama became President. West, who had always stated that Obama should not think he is safe from critique simply because he is African-American, received a phone call from Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to the president. According to West, Jarrett was particularly upset by West's statement in an interview that "he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker" in Michelle Obama. "I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure," he tells Hedges. "If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that's a compliment." He goes on to say that while the first lady's initiatives on child obesity and military families are commendable, "why doesn't she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood?"

African American Heritage Parade Brings 'Unity' During Time of Violence

Fear of the sellout is rampant among many ethnic and racial groups in the United States and Canada. When members of these communities enter positions of privilege, they indeed become objects of pride and admiration, but these feelings are often accompanied by a nervous uncertainty as to whether they will eventually "forget where they came from." The sellout has been branded with several epithets in the majority-white North American context. Most of the derogatory terms have referred to being or "acting white," which has been one of the constant characteristics of the sellout. Black sellouts have been called "Uncle Toms" or "Oreos," while South Asians have been called "coconuts" and Asians have been labeled "twinkies" or "bananas."

These epithets point to a deep-seated animosity towards 'race betrayers' who the host community regards as a traitor and an ungrateful free rider. In studying the fear of the sellout among black Americans, Randall Kennedy notes in his book Sellout that a sellout is "a person who betrays something to which she is said to owe allegiance" and can refer to individuals whose actions "retard African-American advancement.

The three-hour event included marching bands, floats and cultural dances. Newark Business Administrator Julien Neals called the event "an important fabric of Newark." He said the parade has become "a long-standing symbol of unity and a positive message."

Ralph Grant, vice president of Somerset Christian College's Newark Center, who also works with the parade's committee, said the event helps people recognize modern-day contributions by African Americans. "When you pull up to a traffic light, you should know that was an African American who invented that traffic light," he said. "When you push a baby carriage, you should know that was an African American who invented the baby carriage."

The event follows four days of violence in the city that included the death of an off-duty Newark police officer Thursday night.

Neals said that while the city deals with crime, it's events such as the parade that help bring "unity."

"The best thing we can do is respond to it and try to get the city back on track and keep the citizens' faiths up that there will be good things going on in the city as well.

Racism still contaminating science:Why?

Earlier this month, the popular magazine Psychology Today published an article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa titled “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" that was met, as one would expect, with a great deal of outrage. The article used data based on another study to make several claims such as "black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women" yet "subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others."

Most attractive black women forever

After some attempted editing of the title, the magazine retracted the post from its website entirely. Kanazawa in turn is facing an investigation by the London School of Economics, where he is a professor, after a unanimous vote for his dismissal by the student union. It’s amazing in 2011 that a respected magazine would publish an article so clearing based in racial bias. And they can’t claim they didn’t know because they wrote the title themselves.

Halle Berry

When a Psychology Today magazine blog appeared under the headline "Why Are African American Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?", some dismissed it as an isolated incident of racism and misogyny creeping into science.

Here in Philadelphia in the early 1800s, one of the world's leading anthropologists, Samuel Morton, was measuring human skulls and using his results to justify the continued enslavement of Africans. "Physical anthropology played a very large role in ways by which race and the institution of slavery was seen - and was either supported or argued against," said Princeton anthropologist Alan Mann.

Beyoncé Knowles

Mann has lectured on this, encouraging his colleagues to be mindful of their field's past. But racism, he said, has infected other fields including biology and psychology.

The post about black women appeared May 15, authored by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics.

Kanazawa based his claim not on a published study but on his own analysis of a large survey by the Add Health group at the University of North Carolina. The vast survey started with seventh to 12th graders and followed them into adulthood, evaluating health along with social, economic, and psychological factors. For reasons that are unclear, the interviewers rated the subjects on attractiveness on a scale from 1 (very unattractive) to 5 (very attractive).

Tyra Banks

From this, Kanazawa concluded that black women are "objectively" less attractive than women of other races - despite the obviously subjective nature of the evaluation.

He also failed to mention that many of the evaluations were made while the subjects were teens, some as young as 12. The same subjects were evaluated at four intervals, and only in the last two of those were they all adults.

Mariah Carey

incident shows some parallels to the case of Philly's skull-measuring anthropologist Morton. (His skull collection is still housed in the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.) Morton thought he had evidence that, on average, Africans had smaller heads and were therefore less intelligent.

Thandie Newton

The abolition movement was growing then, and Morton was embraced by those who favored slavery, said Mann. Morton was also working under the theory that God created human races separately, making them essentially different species. Darwin's evolution theory was still years away.

Vanessa L. Williams

At the time, it was a common assumption that head size correlated with intelligence. It does, roughly, across different animal species, though it's the size of the brain relative to the whole animal that's important rather than the sheer size.

In the human race, the biggest heads belong to the biggest people, said Mann, but not necessarily the brightest.

Even if Morton's assumption were correct and having a small head somehow disqualified a person from freedom, then Americans should have stopped kidnapping Africans and started measuring heads and enslaving those with the smallest. But that clearly wasn't his agenda.

Iman (model)

In the 1980s, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould attempted to debunk Morton in his book The Mismeasure of Man. Gould went so far as to claim that Morton fudged his data, but others, including Mann, have reexamined the evidence and say Morton was wrong not because he cheated but because he used skewed data and made bad assumptions.

Angela Bassett

A disproportionate number of his African skulls came from a relatively diminutive group, Mann said, and Morton might not have been aware of this.

On the other hand, both say he's one of the most popular bloggers at Psychology Today. "If you weren't familiar with the scholarly literature, and only looked at the popularity of the blog, you might think he was a lot more prominent in the field than he is," said Kurzban, who, like Kaufman, writes a much less popular blog on the same site.

Alicia Keys

Kanazawa's previous posts include such headlines as "Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?" Psychology Today might have seen this as a red flag some time ago, but they continue to let him blog under their name. They eventually removed the post about black women with no explanation. They issued an apology on their website late last week, but Kanazawa's blog, "The Scientific Fundamentalist," remained on their site.

In response to questions, the magazine's editors sent The Inquirer a link to an NPR blog post, which contained the following quote from editor in chief Kaja Perina: "Our bloggers are credentialed social scientists" who choose their own topics, Perina wrote. "We in turn reserve the right to remove posts for any number of reasons. Because the post was not commissioned or solicited by PT (in contrast to a magazine article), there was no editorial intent to address questions of race and physical attractiveness."

Naomi Campbell

The controversy has fueled new criticism toward evolutionary psychology, a field that already has some vocal detractors. "Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa," wrote biologist and blogger P.Z. Myers.

Other evolutionary psychologists say they're trying to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, and they can't avoid certain questions just because the answers might be hurtful.

But in an era when scientists are deciphering the fundamental constituents of matter, decoding the genome, and discovering planets sprinkled through the galaxy, anyone might wonder whether determining which race has hotter women is a reasonable endeavor for a grown man, let alone someone Psychology Today deems a credentialed scientist.