Take The Hood Back

It feels insulting to bother posting this, but in the days following the Powell endorsement, the right insisted that black people vote their skin color and not a positive agenda for the nation. Among the things this charming little theory overlooks is that black people rather frequently — indeed, nearly always — vote for white candidates and white candidates reciprocate with relative infrequency, but why make the point myself when UGK legend Bun B can do it for me:

My whole thing is I’m trying to help get not just youth, but folks who are disenfranchised from the system, get them back in the process. It’s not for me to send people a certain way. But just to get them into the process. It doesn’t stop with just voting. At the end of the day, we need to hold him accountable. Everything is just beginning in November, more so January. It’s not the end when you vote. It’s just the beginning.

Obama is not perfect–his ideology, what he’d like to do versus what he’s able to do are two different things. It’s not like, ‘Great! we got a Black president’ and it’s all good. We all got hyped about Kwame Kilpatrick. We need to hold Obama to a higher standard than most.

That comes to me via TAP’s Adam Serwer. I also liked this point from Bun:

My family went off to war. My cousin is a marine and he was deployed to Afghanistan. So I was like, if my cousin dies over this shit, IT’S ON. I’ll use all my power to do this. Even if he makes it back alive, it should still be on. From the beginning it’s important to support the troops and then it’s important to bring them home, and I was like, if things don’t go your way, you have no reason to say you didn’t try.