Well, the secret is out. I was fascinated with the Obay ads as well as everyone else. They were brilliantly done. It’s just that now we know who was behind them, it’s… anti-climactic. I just wish they were promoting something more… um… interesting. Somehow “Ontario Colleges” as the punch line for some thing this cool underwhelms… Oh well.
But, that being said, I was having this very argument with a friend of mine over coffee: University isn’t for everyone. In fact it’s probably a colossal waste of time for a lot of the people there. Academia has become a business though and higher and higher numbers of recruits are needed to keep the profits coming…
And here is the big question for me: If I knew then what I know now, would I have gone to University? I’m still trying to answer that one.
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: And so, to pretend that we can somehow take [race and gender] out of the conversation when a white woman runs against a black man, when she tears up at being sort of beat up by him, when her husband can come in and rally around her and suggest that we need to sort of support her because she’s having difficulties, while Barack Obama is getting death threats, basically lynching threats on him and his family…
I’ve been meaning to put this up for a while. It’s still an excellent debate with some good points to ponder… Is there still a race now anyway?
The above link will take you to an excellent debate on DemocracyNOW concerning the impact of Barack Obama and the implications of an Obama presidency on black people.
I especially like this quote from Glen Ford:
We’re in this era of firsts, and the ultimate first, a first—possibly a first black president. But we already had two firsts. Colin Powell was one of them, and Condoleezza Rice, his successor as secretary of state [was another]. How did that redound to the benefit of black people for the United States to have a black – put a black face on imperialism, on aggressive war, on violations of international law? How does that make black people look better in the world? Is that the kind of burden that black people want to carry around?
Again, a problem is that Obama, through no fault of his own, has to carry a burden for ‘black people’. And this is whether he wants to or not. Just ask Tiger Woods for his opinion on this. I believe that Obama does deploy his blackness strategically, and so the criticisms are warranted. But as Ford points out, a black-face (I mean this in both senses of the term) on imperialism is not something to hope for.
A friend sent me a link to this wonderful speech by Steve Jobs. The best graduation speech you might ever hear. Particularly inspiring is his thoughts on death, “life’s greatest invention.” Reminds me of M. Scott Peck’s words in “The road less traveled” that “it is death that provides life with all its meaning.” Quite true. Thought I would share it here:
