Obama, Rice, Comey Syncopated Scandals

A Score in Four Movements

🎙️ Voice Memo Prelude (Pair with ambient jazz: brushed snares, soft Rhodes, archival murmurs)

“You’re listening to a syncopated truth. Not the kind declared in headlines or carved into stone… But the kind that lives between beats in the silences, the suspensions, the moments they hope you overlook.

This week, the criminal referral of Barack Obama and other Obama-era officials was framed as justice by some, theater by others. But beneath it all, it’s a study in narrative—how rhythm gets remixed to distort memory, how power performs its own score. read more

Obama Said “Nigger”

ATLANTA, GA (CASCADE PRESS) President Barack Obama said “Nigger” the other day.

I just be damn.

Like everything he eats, drinks, wears, thinks and does, it is causing quite a controversy.

What’s new about that?

I just be damned.

It is not like the President called anybody a “Nigger.” It is not that he denigrated anyone with the use of the word “Nigger.” He did not use the term to prove he was superior to a so-called “Nigger.” He did not say “Nigger” in such a way that you knew with a degree of specificity that Obama hated “Niggers.”

I just be damned.

Obama said that we have to realize that racism is more than calling someone “Nigger.”

You know what?

Obama is right. He should know.

I am sure growing up with white people he, like every black American I know in his age range, was called a “Nigger” multiple times by people wanting to impress their superior status over him. For a guy with half white DNA, that really has to sting.

When I was in junior high school, I had a white teacher who called me “Nigger” everyday. I knew with a certainty that she was belittling me and my parentage. Although she has long since rotted in her grave, I rather still dislike her today for the sting that word produced in my soul each day she pronounced to the world that I was a “Nigger. ”

Then there were the times when my black classmates and I walked from football practice through a white neighborhood and encountered a group of white men, probably in their mid-twenties, drinking beer under a tree.

As my group passed them, someone often yell out, “Nigger.” Looking over our shoulders we could see the group with their menacing stare daring us to turn and fight. Fighting would be futile. If we managed to beat them out of their drunken racist minds, they would lie and say we were trying to break into a home in the area.

I know the sting of the word “Nigger.” The manner in which President Obama said “Nigger” the other day does not carry the same sting, nor did he intend it too. This is the crux of the matter. Racism, Obama properly opined, is more than a word.

While we are on the subject of words with sharp meanings, I like soup. I like to have saltine crackers with my soup. Then one day my doctor took me off crackers. I now hate crackers. I won’t touch a cracker and I won’t go near a cracker. The only thing a cracker can do for me is point me in the direction of some sweet potato chips.

I just be damned, I just said crackers. I just said I hate crackers.

I just be damned.

Oh my gosh, there is that word again, damn. Damn becomes profane when you say “damn you,” or worst when one damns God. Otherwise it is just a word that denotes a doomed state.

Political correctness, I just be damned.

Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com

Starbucks Talks Race over Coffee

Starbucks just added a jolt to a morning cup of java. The jolt is not from some exotic Central American or African brew. This bounce is not due to an extravagant aromatic coffee bean. The added sway does not come from what is in the cup. It’s what is written on the cup and what the Starbuck’s server says to you when you pick up your cup of java that is jerking Americans awake.

This week, Starbucks introduced it’s “Race Together” cup and encouraged its employees to begin a discussion with its customers on race.

Finally, someone has joined President Obama’s call for a national discussion on race. It was seven years ago this week that President Obama first called for a national conversation on race. This speech was delivered in Philadelphia and is credited with securing him the Democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency. However, few Americans heeded his plea for honest racial discussions.

Following the jury verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial, Obama again renewed his call for a national discussion on race in a Friday afternoon news conference. As I wrote in “Justice in the Round,” President Obama did not call this news conference to announce that black people should engage in a national discussion on race, but that white Americans should begin these painful discussions.

Few did.

The President again asked the nation to begin this important dialogue following the turmoil in Ferguson.

Starbucks has launched a campaign to start this conversation over a cup of coffee. The idea has met with skepticism in the first few hours . The last thing a caffeine addict wants in the early morning before that first cup of coffee is a serious conversation on any topic. And racial discussions are way, way down the list.

Yet Starbucks and kitchen tables across America are precisely the places where this racial discussion must begin.

Wake-up America! Have a cup of java and a frank discussion on why you feel the way you feel about people in a racial group different than your own. Hopefully, your discussion will change how you view people who are not members of your ethnic, religious, political or social groups.

Why Not Joe?

Joe Biden has stood behind President Obama the last six years in every crisis from reviving the economy, to immigration reform, gay marriage, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the war in Iraq and health care reform. Photo Credits: upi.com

A conversation from a far region in the back of my mind:

Why not Joe?

Really, Joe?

Yea, why not Joe?

Joe who?

Come on, you know, Joe – Joe Biden.

Is he still in public life?

Well, yea. He is still the Vice President of the United States of America.

You got to be kidding me. That old fossil is still the Vice President of the United States?

For crying out loud, I mean, for laughing out loud, where have you been living the last six years? read more

Obama connect dots

Obama connect dots. Standing at the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Barack Obama connect dots. He made the case for restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This bridge, which bears the name of a Confederate General made the perfect backdrop for President Obama to connect these dots.

“This speech,” my 86 year-old mother called to say to me, “will be repeated for years to come by the children, just like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, ‘I have a dream’ speech.”

Undoubtedly, this speech will. By connecting these dots, Obama freed Selma from the burden of shame, her segregated past has carried the past 50 years.

Indeed the whole nation carries this shame, drenched in the blood of Lewis, Williams, Boynton, and nameless-faceless others.

While President Obama connected these dots, he wove every constituent part of America into the rich fabric of the expanding American dream. He implored conservatives in the nation to make room for the immigrant, the former Negroes, the women, the Gays, the Muslims; in short, every living breathing human being, who was not part of the equation when the framers drafted the Constitution of the United States of America.

He did it with a flare and a style unmatched by any president in the history of the country. At times, he spoke presidential. At other times, he spoke like he was sitting in my family knook, chatting over morning coffee while discussing the issues of the day.

Then there were times his speech was reminiscent of a political stump speech, as he urged the 100 congress men and women in the audience, to go back to congress and get 400 other members to restore the Voting Rights Act.

There were times he spoke like a parent, chiding the young people for not voting after so much blood had been shed to gain them the right to vote.

Finally, he spoke like a brother on the corner telling the brothers, that they give away their power. He concluded his speech in the tradition of the great ministers of the Gospel, quoting Isaiah, in the cadence of Jesse Jackson, to the roar of the crowd, connecting dots, making the case that black lives matter and we too are Americans.

Harold Michael Harvey, JD, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com