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Thursday, 11 September 2008

Enough!

Arianna Huffington on how Obama should react to the sleazy, despicable attacks from the Repugs:

The fear of activating the residual racism provoked by the caricature of the "angry black man" should no longer hold sway. As John Cusack points out, over the last 40 years, popular culture has been "filled with images of strong, powerful black actors who have been able to express righteous rage and still capture our affection and respect. From Sidney Poitier to Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Morgan Freeman -- these are men who have the inherent dignity to express the kind of cosmic rage that comes from being human and responding to injustice. They are perceived as authentic and powerful precisely because they show us their anger as they fight for what is right and true and good. If they didn't, we wouldn't respect them."

Picture Poitier as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night when Rod Steiger's southern sheriff mocks his "funny name for a nigger boy from Philadelphia" and asks, "What do they call you up there?"

Righteous rage drips from every syllable of his five-word answer: "They call me Mister Tibbs!"
Prescience, from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: "Well you made her Mr Drayton, I just met her in Hawaii":

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