Articulate While Black by Alim H. Samy; Smitherman Geneva; Dyson Michael Eric

Author:Alim, H. Samy; Smitherman, Geneva; Dyson, Michael Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2012-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

The “Hezbollah Fist-Jab” and Other Wild-Ass Verbal Assaults: (Mis)Understanding “Black Folks 2.0”

White ignorance was revealed not only in the misnaming of this Black cultural communicative gesture but also and, ultimately more importantly, in misunderstanding the meaning of the gesture. On the Internet, in the news media, and in everyday people’s conversations, The Pound was characterized as symbolizing militancy, violence, and a terrorist Muslim ritual. On Fox News’s America’s Pulse, television host E. D. Hill referred to the Obamas’ gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.”7 Obama’s mythical Muslim connection was symbolized by The Pound being dubbed a “Hezbollah fist-jab.” The original source of this wild-ass verbal assault appears to have been a posting on HumanEvents.com whose home page bills it as “leading conservative media since 1944.” In this posting, the reader commented that “Michelle is not as ‘refined’ as Obama at hiding her TRUE feelings about America—etc. Her Hezbollah style fist-jabbing.”8

White folks was already mystified and confused by this presidential candidate with the “funny name” whose mother was White and whose father was a citizen of Kenya; who had grown up in an “exotic” place—Hawai’i (never mind that it is one of the “United” States and has been since 1959, albeit contentiously so)9; who had spent some of his childhood years in another “exotic” place—Indonesia; whose religion was believed to be Islam (never mind that he had, on numerous occasions, proclaimed his Christian faith and had spent some two decades as a member of Trinity United Church of Christ under the Pastorship of Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright). Now here the Black guy come comin up in the campaign with this weird “fist bump”—initiated, no less, by his slave descendant wife from the South Side Chi-Town ghetto, who might be a militant Black Nationalist holdover from the Black Power Movement. (White folks, we feel you; in retrospect, all of it may have been a bit much for y’all to process.) Thus the media and everyday conversations were rife with speculations about the Obamas’ use of The Pound, at worst, as a symbol of solidarity with Islamic terrorists, or at best, as an expression of a Black American “hate Whitey” sentiment (echoing another White folks’ myth that a tape existed of Michelle castigating “Whitey”; however, to date, nobody has ever produced the tape).

In contrast to the negative reactions in some White quarters, African Americans overwhelmingly applauded the Obamas’ pound (at least initially). Sistas in beauty shops and hair-braiding salons everywhere high-fived and exchanged their own pounds of tribute to Michelle, “our brilliant, bad Sista,” for taking the lead in initiating this gesture with her man. Many Blacks had been skeptical about what they referred to as Obama’s “Blackness” (after all, he is “half-White,” as many Black folk put it, and not the descendant of enslaved Africans and the neoenslavement experience like millions of other African Americans). For these sistas and brothas, The Pound indicated that at last the “boy is showing his Black-hand side” (as one Baptist church deacon put it). Black author

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