A White Captain America?

Apparently, the powers that be at Marvel Inc. are having trouble casting the lead role in the upcoming Captain America.

Deadline.com reports that Marvel has approached Channing Tatum for the role. They say he very likely skipped the audition process since his recent turns in G.I.Joe' and 'Dear John' have positioned him as a bankable name. They're saying that, if Marvel advances the conversation with him, it'll be in the form of an offer for the role, not an audition. . . . Meanwhile, the Motion Captured blog at Hitfix is saying that Ryan Philippe is also a contender. . . "[I] actually am going in to meet on 'Captain America,' which is kind of cool," Phillippe told MTV. "After Superman, he was kind of my favorite."

Part of the problem might be that Marvel is only considering white actors like the "old for his age" Ryan Philippe and ex-stripper Channing Tatum. White guys often have to cut through too many layers of irony and/or bitterness to have the kind of purity needed to convincingly play the Steve Rogers role in Captain America. Tom Welling is convincing in Smallville, but Ben Affleck had too much super-ironic Dogma and Gigli baggage for Daredevil to work. White actors tend to be more convincing when they're burdened by guilt and bitterness as well. Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis evoke enough bitterness to fill a Tolstoy novel while Matt Damon hit all the guilt marks as Jason Bourne in the Bourne movies.

The problem with Steve Rogers and Captain America is that Rogers came through WWII as pure as he went in. It's hard to imagine any white actor portraying that convincingly. Maybe Tom Welling, but he's already taken.

It would be better if Marvel started looking for a black lead.

Some Honest Discussion of Race

Eric Holder wants some honest talk about race. So, I thought I'd offer up up some comments about my perspective on race in the United States.

In my case, talking honestly means have the courage of my optimism and idealism.

I believe that the fundamental racial issue in the United States is the need for people to "embrace" each other across racial lines.

It's not enough to "tolerate" other people. The political theorist Wendy Brown is very much correct in arguing that toleration is just the willingness to be around people that you can still stigmatize as the "other," the "inferior," the "sick people," or the "oppressor." What is needed is for people to value, enjoy, and be interested in the people "across the lines." I'm a white, rural, heterosexual, and middle-aged guy. I should be able to reletavize my own whiteness and enjoy the whiteness, blackness, hispanicness, gayness, and heterosexuality of others.

And I try to do so.

I should also follow the example of Gandhi and seek to recognize the blackness, hispanicness, gayness within myself.

People internalize other cultures as they come into contact with them and we should embrace that internalization. In the United States, white people and black people have internalized a great deal of each other's patterns even as they've stigmatized each other.

We should embrace the "other within" as well as without.

That is precisely what I've internalized from my reading in African-American thought over the last fifteen years--the writing of Boston King, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and others.

And I couldn't understand my own identity is I didn't understand that these authors are not only the African-American heritage. They're also part of my heritage.

Bobby Rush Plays the Thomas Card. Congressman Bobby Rush of Chicago was playing a race card yesterday when urging people to accept the Rod Blagojevich's nomination of Roland Burris for the Senate seat held by Barack Obama.

"I would ask you to not hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer. Roland Burris is worthy," Rush said.

But which race card was Bobby Rush playing. In mainstream political commentary, "the race card" is viewed as a racial reference that African-Americans unfairly use to gain advantage over whites. But that's ridiculous. What 250 years of slavery, another hundred years of segregation, and a couple generations of racial discrimination means is that America is practically drowning in race cards. So it's important to be specific about which race card Bobby Rush was playing.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune claims that Rush was playing the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton race card.

Grown-ups have seen such theater before. The only things missing were cameo performances by those two prolific race card players, Al Sharpton and Chicago's own Rev. Jesse Jackson.

I'm sure people could find these kinds of references to lynching from Sharpton's involvement in the Tawana Brawley mess. But claiming that the rejection of the kind of ethically questionable and manipulative race play being made by Blagojevich is analogous to lynching doesn't sound like Jackson or anything Sharpton's said since he first ran for President.

Instead, Bobby Rush is sounding more like Clarence Thomas. Here's Thomas from his Senate confirmation hearing after his pathetic conduct toward Anita Hill was revealed.

"This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree."

That's one of the many conservative race cards. Conservatives also play "color-blindness," the Bell Curve, and a host of other race cards against African-Americans. "Barack the Magic Negro" is a race card that Rush Limbaugh particularly enjoyed playing. In the case of Clarence Thomas, the conservative idea is that liberals who engage in critical treatment or moral condemnation of African-American conservatives are doing the moral equivalent of a lynching. Bobby Rush and Roland Burris aren't conservatives, but Rush is doing essentially the same thing when he claims that liberal rejection of Roland Burris would be "lynching."

Playing a race card in support of a corrupt figure like Blagojevich is no surprise. How many pro-Blagojevich cards are out there? But it's not the kind of card that either Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton would play.

Perhaps the Republicans Need Black Friends. Leading Republicans seem to have a lot of problems with this "not being a racist" thing. Today, it was reported that Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), distributed a Christmas CD to RNC members that included the song "Barack the Magic Negro."

The CD, called “We Hate the USA,” lampoons liberals with such songs as “John Edwards’ Poverty Tour,” “Wright place, wrong pastor,” “Love Client #9,” “Ivory and Ebony” and “The Star Spanglish banner.” Several of the track titles, including “Barack the Magic Negro,” are written in bold font.

The song, which debuted on Limbaugh’s show in late March 2007, latches onto an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times of the same title. That column, penned by cultural critic David Ehrenstein, argued that Obama could serve as a balm to whites who felt guilty about past treatment of African Americans.

There's a big disconnect here between Saltsman's smarts as a political operative and his ability to think about race and racism in the United States. According to sources, Chip Saltsman is a first-rate campaign manager and was described by Bill Frist as "a multi-talented superstar."

But Saltsman's response to the controversy over using "Barack the Magic Negro" as part of his campaign to become RNC chair is incredibly stupid.

Saltsman said he meant nothing untoward by forwarding what amounts to a joke more at Ehrenstein’s expense than at Obama’s. “Paul Shanklin is a long-time friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for the Rush Limbaugh show are light-hearted political parodies,” Saltsman said.

Given that it doesn't occur to Saltsman that he should care whether he's stigmatizing Barack Obama on the basis of race, I thought about recommending that Chiperino run these kinds of things by his black friends before he puts them out there.

But then it struck me that Chip Saltsman might not have any black friends and that not having any black friends is part of what's getting him into trouble.

The same might be the case with Republicans in general. Barack Obama got 96% of the black vote during the presidential election. Sure he was the first African-American nominee of a major political party. But Hillary would have done just as well with African-Americans if Obama had decided not to run. Likewise, there are no black Republican governors, Congressmen, or Senators, and there were only 36 black delegates at the 2008 Republican Convention (compared to 1087 black delegates at the Democratic Convention).

Outside of Shelby Steele and Michael Steele, there don't seem to be enough black Republicans to befriend top GOP figures like Chip Saltsman, steer them away from the use of racist symbolism, and help them develop some smarts about racial politics in our beloved country.

Perhaps the Republicans could start a "black friend" program to recruit African-Americans to help GOP presidential candidates, campaign managers, pollsters, consultants, and state party officials do a better job of presenting themselves to non-white populations.

Obviously, one could criticize this type of program as tokenism, but tokenism is a long if not an honorable tradition among white liberals. So, there's little justification for snobbery on the left.

More importantly, the Republicans have to start somewhere.