The Problem With President Obama’s Cousin Pookie…
By evoking the imagery of lazy Cousin Pookie, President Obama has masterfully avoided giving his Black constituency the serious discussion as well as consideration around policies and grievances that we have longed care about. It is because of our lazy cousin, we have been deprived of stump speeches about mass incarceration, police brutality (particularly in the wake of Ferguson), education (in particular the closing of inner city public schools) or even breast cancer and fibroid research funding. Thanks to the inactivity of Cousin Pookie, the Black community does not get to be pander to like any other special interest group in America. Instead we get lectured about how we need to get off the couch, put our marching shoes on and go vote.
Of course the flaw in all of this is that we already did vote.
And if I recall many of us, including a few Cousin Pookies, voted specifically for Obama. In historic-making droves – and twice. In fact, the African American voter turnout was so high in 2012 that it exceeded the White vote for the first time in history. Black constituency, including Cousin Pookie, voted with the intentions of supporting a candidate who vowed change and offered them hope for a better tomorrow. However with all those votes, which Blacks have hand-delivered to the Obama presidency over the years, in some respects the conditions for the African American community under his leadership has gotten statistically worse, like rising Black poverty and an even greater wealth gap between Blacks and Whites.
Despite his personal hardships, Cousin Pookie is still more likely to support the president and his policies – way more than the Tea Partiers, the Birthers, Fox News, the Republicans and some blue-dog Democrats in both the House and the Senate and just the general racists, who have been the main hinderance in the first Black president’s ability to get anything done (so he says). And even as his national job approval ratings are at an all time low in ten states, 86 percent of Black Americans, including Cousin Pookie, still approve of his job performance.
And that’s likely because in Cousin Pookie’s old, lazy heart, he knows that the first Black president is doing the best he can under insurmountable circumstances. Therefore blaming Cousin Pookie for the lack of accountability the government, by way of elected officials, has to the community seems like a piss-poor rallying cry – if not flat-out deflective.
As if President Obama cared about making sure Cousin Pookie voted, he would have been leading House and Senate Democrats in passing counter measures to voter ID laws, which are already showing to have negative affects on Blacks and other minority’s ability vote nationwide. Or he would have been making a major stink about it. That’s how you rally folks up. Not by trying to make them culpable for what is ultimately a long-time failure in leadership. Seriously, it’s one thing to chastise people about not voting but if the people we voted into office don’t feel like they have to be directly responsive to our needs (beyond telling us how we are not marching and voting enough) then what the hell am I voting for? But you see, the president doesn’t see Voter ID as problematic. No, really…
The biggest irony with the return of Cousin Pookie is that he comes on the midst of one of the biggest protests against police brutality in our nation’s history, organized and manned by young people, who probably have nicknames similar to Obama’s favorite non-voting and wayward factious cousin. Unlike his previous advice to Pookie about getting his lazy bum off the couch and putting on his marching shoes to demand political change, Obama reminded us again that “we are a nation of laws.” More specifically:
“Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.”
Talk about giving Cousin Pookie the runaround.
Not to mention, all this Cousin Pookie talk is just corny. I mean come on Obama! It is 2014. Cousin Pookie hasn’t been a meme since New Jack City. And since our president, who is known for lecturing Black audiences about not only our responsibility to this government, but also how we need to be more respectable and adherent to the standards in society in general, you would think that he would actually be the standard – and in front of all audiences. But instead, he has one voice in front of predominately White audiences and another voice in front of Black audiences and we’re suppose to believe there’s no such thing as talking White…
