Common Sense and the Southern Strategy

But alas, the Southern Strategy is alive and well and living in America. With a black man in the White House, it’s pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel for right-wing pundits and politicians.

• Step 1. Pick anyone Barack Obama associates with in any way, shape or form (all the better if they are black).
•  Step 2. Scour their resume for the single most radical thing they’ve ever said or done.
• Step 3. Take that incident, even if it’s somewhat of an anomaly, and present it as if it is the most significant thing that person has ever said or done in their entire career (and if the person has never said or done anything suitably radical, get Andrew Breitbart or James O’Keefe to selectively edit a videotape to make it look that way and send it to Matt Drudge). See also: ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, Jeremiah Wright and now Common.

I’ve been a fan of Common for years and I didn’t even know that he went to Cuba to visit Assata Shakur, until Bill O’Reilly told me. But then, I just listen to his music and watch his movies, I don’t go scouring the internet to cherry pick negative talking points about him. I’m willing to bet that Bill O’Reilly had almost no idea who Common was until he was invited to the White House. I own several of Common’s albums and I bet the staff of The O’Reilly Factor has spent more time on Common’s Wikipedia page than I have.

Here’s what I know about Common:
1. He makes great music.
2. He’s a surprisingly good actor.
3. He featured The Last Poets on his song, “The Corner.”
4. The last verse on his album, “Be” is performed by his father.
5. He’s a dead ringer for what Suge Knight would look like, one year after gastric bypass surgery.

Come on, how bad can the guy be? He let his dad read a poem on his album! In 1995, my dad suggested that we do a poetry video together, and I politely pretended to be suffering from a sudden bout of hysterical deafness (the way my dad pitched it, we’d be wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and standing in front of a fireplace. I’m pretty sure one of us was to be smoking a pipe).

People who actually listen to hip-hop know that Common is one of the most non-violent, non-sexist artists in the game. So either Fox News is counting on the fact that their audience has no idea who Common is and therefore they can paint him any way they want, or Fox News has no idea who Common is and view him exclusively through the lens of the facts they can data mine about him that run the most counter to their political agenda.

So what’s the take away? The obvious one is that it’s easy for rightwing pundits to create black boogie men out of thin air to terrify a white audience. The less obvious one is to ask how often we on the left are introduced to someone on the right that we’ve never heard of and let the one or two talking points that we get about them from left leaning sources color our entire perception of them, to the point where we are suspicious of anyone who has anything good to say about them. I know it’s happened to me. It’s easy to demean the other side for being stupid, it’s harder to look in the mirror and ask if you’ve ever done it yourself.

Here’s Jon Stewart ripping Bill O’Reilly a new one on the fake Common controversy.