One thing I’m very certain of is that not everyone lives in the here-and-now.
By that I mean many people reference everything around them to some past time. For Joe Lieberman, for instance, it’s always 1962, High Camelot, he’s a young idealistic liberal, and the alliances of that time still hold.
I suspect that for Dick Cheney it’s 1974, his boss Richard Nixon is being forced to back-down over Watergate, and he’s determined to overturn the precedent. For Hillary Clinton it’s also 1974, but she’s on the other side of that divide.
For many of my black neighbors, it’s still 1967, but 1967 as it was in white America. Remember, we’re now 2 generations (in the ghetto, nearly three) from the actual 1967, a date which is just one generation removed in white America’s experience of time.
Most middle-class black folks I know are first-generation middle-class. By that I mean they are enthusiastic about their position. They love the accoutrement, the kit, the big car, the suburban manse, the suits and the dresses. They believe firmly they have achieved their status through hard 
work, discipline, and spirituality. They dress for church. Their preachers (left) preach a gospel which says they deserve their wealth, and that the poor deserve their poverty because they lack discipline and give in to temptation. It’s their fault, and it gets laid-off on you, you’re doubly victimized.
They still like the R&B. That thing with the white shirt, and the tie, and the jacket, and the smooth syrupy singing, they like that. Snuggle up on a Saturday night with a Hennessy after the kids are in bed. Light some candles, turn the sound on low. They also like Steve Harvey. He does "Grown Folks Radio" now. If Perry Como were black, and young, they’d love him too, I think.
These people also have kids, many of whom are enamored of the whole hip-hop thing. (To the right, Curtis Jackson, alias 50 Cent.) They rebel by turning up the music, by posing, with pants hung low and gangster-ish body language. These middle class black kids are a lot like white poseurs of the same age, but the black parents don’t see it (and neither do the white, which makes things dangerous for these kids). What they see are thugs. The parents agree with Bill Cosby, with his criticisms of the culture and the young people. He’s right, but is the solution really confrontation, a black-on-black civil war between youth culture and the old people? Isn’t that just letting yourself get used by The Man? I don’t think they care.
I knew these people growing up. They were Jewish, or Italian, many had served in World War II.
They were my parents, too.
Hip-hop to my neighbors is ghetto music. It celebrates violence,
and crime, and drugs — all the evils these parents flee to the suburbs
from. They don’t want to hear about the complexity of life. Their
religion doesn’t believe in the gay. It certainly doesn’t believe in
things like ADHD. All that is nonsense white folks use as an excuse for
bad behavior. A good beating, they think, works better. Look at that
nice Donnie McClurkin — he’s not gay. (Serenity now, insanity later.)
It’s hard for me to get through to these neighbors, because their strength and
success came from breaking through nuance. I did it the hard way, you
can too, or you don’t deserve it. Stop whining. Society for the last several years
has followed their lead, so when white liberals read them statistics
about one-in-three young blacks being in jail, they just nod their
heads and hope the little shits stay there. They’re not of that anymore — they
rose above it. (When I say I and my son have ADHD, they deny it,
they look to put us away, too.)
We know, now, that life isn’t like that. But they don’t. Their
lives, and success, have taught them different lessons. This is the
mess Barack Obama has stepped into,
and it’s something white voters will never understand, until we
realize that, for middle class blacks of Obama’s age, it’s not 2007 at
all.
It’s 1967, and someone needs to bust those hippies’ heads.
