"A college-bred Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem."
-- Zora Neale Hurston "What White Publishers Won't Print"
1. Obama has defied traditional categories of black people in the American imagination. His highly-regarded speech on race--reasoned and eloquent--made it difficult to stick him with the Radical Black label. Now, the "tar brush" is out again. This time he's being painted as the "upppity Negro"--a type traditionally considered dangerous because s/he DOES NOT KNOW HER PLACE.
2. I have, heretofore, been of the mind, that the Obama supporters who are ardent Hillary haters have been unfair. Today, I have changed my mind-- That Clinton has seized upon using Obama's remarks against him by painting him as an uppity Negro is SICKENING and DEPLORABLE. Obama is elitest? And Hillary--Yale Law School -educated now with an income that is out of the stratosphere of what any "lunch-bucket Democrat" will make in His lifetime--is not?
So here we are close to a half a dozen decades since Zora Neale Hurston wrote those words--and still, we, the college-bred Negroes, are a problem for the American imagination.