Barack Obama is a skilled orator

"Chicago Taking a Beating" by Roger Brown (Union League Club) 

     This week I'm burning through vacation days that I'd otherwise lose, and in order to make it a true vacation thought I'd post a few essays written then never published. The following is from mid-October, a million years ago. I imagine I held it back because I came up with something better, and it seemed too much inside baseball, not to mention touching the third rail of race — in a way I find acceptable. Of course you never know whether that electrical rail is live and will kill you or not until you put your foot on it and find out.

     I wouldn't call Barack Obama articulate. Or well-spoken. Even though he is obviously both  — that's why the struggling Kamala Harris campaign trotted him out in Pennsylvania last week to try to convince voters not to let petty considerations prevent them from doing their part to avoid handing our country over to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.
     But I wouldn't use those specific words — "articulate" or "well-spoken" — because ... do you have any idea why? I think this is a media thing. Because a few readers might complain, since Barack Obama is Black, that saying he is articulate somehow suggests that Black people generally aren't articulate or well-spoken, and is thus racist.     
     A stretch, certainly, but one some still make. Maybe trying to improve the world, maybe for the pleasure of lashing out, though the fashion peaked a few years back and I believe is in decline as the general world disaster gathers in strength like the latest hurricane off the Gulf Coast. Maybe the whole thing is an irrational fear of editors and, by osmosis, writers too. Maybe I'm cringing at the sight of a stick.
     It's one of those invisible calculations going on behind the scenes of what's left of the old media. I find the situation unfortunate, as a writer, since it pulls arrows out of our quiver and requires contortions and codes. 
     It affects not just praise, but criticism. You can't apply a cliche criticism about ethnic groups to an individual, no matter how apt. I sometimes forget this. For instance, last week, I wrote a column about Mayor Brandon Johnson's almost psychopathic use of race as a general shield against his numerous flaws. It began. "Respect Mayor Angry!" I liked dubbing him "Mayor Angry" it seemed to fit — and imagined I could use it during what remains of his sure to be brief life in the public eye.
    What I forgot was, at some point in the 1960s Black Panther sorts who were raging about killing whitey were dubbed "angry" and it became some kind of generic slur, the way "cheap" was attached to Jews. Ta-Nehisi Coates raised a tempest last week when idly speculating when conditions in his own life would proceed to an extent where he would join Hamas fighters in raping and killing whatever random Jews he could get his hands on, as a way to make this a more equitable world. Had he called those Jews "cheap" it would have been worse.
     It seems odd, to me, that Ta-Nehisi Coates can say such vile things and I can't call the mayor angry, but then the playing field has tilted one way, the theory being that doing so somehow makes up for it in the past being tilted another. I don't see how that works. But then again, I wouldn't, and comply with the situation as it is to get my stuff in the paper and keep my job for another two years. I changed the lede to "Respect the mayor. No matter what he says or does." Which wasn't the same, but starts off the column well enough.