The Paradox of Being a Black Role Model

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME

17 March 16

Wildly successful role models reflect the tyranny of low expectations

he U.S. president and a prima ballerina.

Throw in a rabbi and a priest and you’ve got the start of a classic watercooler joke. But add first black American President and first black female principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre and it’s no longer a joke but an uplifting ideal for a new generation of African Americans. Two shining role models of how diligence, discipline and perseverance can overcome even the most daunting obstacles to achieve the American Dream. But being a black role model is a double-edged sword of inspiration and frustration.

Yes, you are an inspiration to children of color—living proof that although you face a lot of closed doors, they aren’t all locked. For Barack Obama, the doors were double-locked: no black person had ever been President, and no one from Hawaii had ever been President. So too for Misty Copeland: she started ballet at 13—late for a dancer—and had the “wrong” body type. Yet somehow they both rolled the Sisyphean rock of being black to the top of the mountain, and it stayed.

The frustration for the black role model is knowing that, though you are proof it can be done—a happy lottery winner waving a million-dollar ticket—the odds are so astronomically stacked against you that it sometimes feels as if you’re more the source of false hope and crushed dreams. A casino shill they let win so the suckers will keep playing the slots. Americans have been blasting the “land of opportunity” playlist from birth. At every opportunity, rousing odds-beating success stories are trotted out in history textbooks and popular media to spangle the Dream like a beauty queen at a supermarket opening.

Unfortunately, the American Dream has lost a lot of luster in recent years. Rather than shine like a bright beacon of hope to optimists everywhere, it winks like a battery-drained flashlight in a horror movie. A 2014 New York Times poll discovered that only 64% of Americans agreed that they still believed in the American Dream, the lowest result in nearly 20 years. Loss of faith is even higher among America’s youth. A 2015 Harvard Institute of Politics national poll found that 48% of 18-to-29-year-olds considered the American Dream to be “dead.” As Bruce Springsteen said, “I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American Dream.”

For Americans of color, closing that gap may seem like a bridge too far. Having successful ethnic role models is great because it affirms the country’s commitment to the principle of equal opportunity. But at the same time we see police killing unarmed African Americans, voter-ID laws keeping poor minorities from the ballot, the federal government slashing programs that offer food and medical care, assaults on affirmative action and an inferior education for poorer children of color, which will keep them out of higher education and better-paying jobs. The door is not just closed and locked—it’s boarded, nailed and cemented shut.

So when we hold up wildly successful role models, we’re telling those who can’t overcome the towering obstacles blocking their progress that they are to blame for their failure. They just didn’t try hard enough, weren’t clever enough, didn’t have the fortitude. That’s like blaming rape victims for not running away. This is the tyranny of low expectations.

Role models of color face a unique form of judgment. If you’re black and you fail, many will claim you failed because blacks aren’t up to the task. But if you’re black and you succeed, they will then claim that you succeeded because you’re black and were given an advantage. You are not allowed to succeed or fail on your own merits. Yet if George W. Bush is judged to be a bad President, no one says, “Well, we tried a white guy and it didn’t work, so no more white Presidents.” Or Southerners. Or Texans. Or self-portraitists in the shower.

The irony is that despite generations of closed doors, it is people of color who have the most faith in the American Dream. A 2015 CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 55% of blacks and 52% of Hispanics believed it was easier for them to attain the American Dream than it was for their parents. Only 35% of whites believed that. This brazen optimism in the face of systemic racism is in large part due to pioneering role models like Misty Copeland and President Obama.

In 11.22.63, a Hulu series based on Stephen King’s novel, a man time-travels to the past to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. But his attempts to change history are met with supernatural resistance because, as a character tells him, the past doesn’t want to be changed: “The past pushes back.” So does American culture. We fear change so much that we fight it, even when change reflects our founding principles. We just have to push against the pushing. Only harder.

That’s what Misty Copeland and President Obama have done their whole lives. Which makes them role models not just for people of color but for all Americans. •

The Killing Fields of Baghdad: The Case of Hillary, Layla, and "Little Deer"

By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News

17 March 16

n June 27, 1993, just after 2 a.m. and two years after the end of the Gulf War, US Tomahawk missiles reduced the home of Layla al-Attar, the Director of the Iraqi National Museum and a leading advocate for women artists in the Middle East, to rubble and ash. “There was no warning,” said her daughter, Rema. “We were sound asleep. We heard an explosion and felt the walls shake. We tried to get out but we couldn’t do it. The whole house collapsed on top of us.”

Rema, or “Little Deer,” was blinded in one eye by the 1993 bombing. She left Baghdad soon after and underwent extensive face surgery in Los Angeles and Canada before moving to the Bay Area. She was 19 when “the bombs changed everything,” she said. “I was very deep under and no one could hear me. I was dying by the time they got through. They didn’t get to my parents for another two hours. It was two hours too late.”

According to The New York Times, Layla al-Attar and her husband were “found dead under the debris” after one of the 23 US cruise missiles launched by former president Bill Clinton “blasted craters as deep as 30 feet in Al Manour, an exclusive residential area.”

Clinton claimed he had ordered the bombing of Baghdad to foil an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush, who was on his way to visit Kuwait for a gala postwar victory celebration. The death plot was a CIA ruse and was never confirmed by any named source.

Following the missile attack that killed al-Attar and her husband and housekeeper, and half-blinded Rema, a report prepared by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center suggested that Kuwait might have fabricated the alleged presidential assassination plot in order to play up the continuing Iraqi threat. All of the alleged assassins were later released in Kuwait without prosecution.

The Life of the Artist Lost

As director of the Iraqi National Art Museum, Layla al-Attar had been a powerful force in gaining recognition for women artists in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. She was also, her daughter said, “very beautiful, very well respected, and very kind.”

“It was really something I will never forget,” Iraqi artist Mohammed al-Sadoun told me at the time of the bombing. “I was watching CNN and suddenly I heard that a famous Iraqi artist was killed, and I tried to recognize the image as it was displayed on TV: it was Layla’s house, and there was nothing left of it.”

Layla al-Attar contributed to the Iraqi community in many ways, al-Sadoun said. “First as a very fine woman artist, but also as an art leader, where she was involved with art business, curating exhibitions, international exhibitions such as the 1988 exhibition,” he said. “The exhibition brought thousands of artists to Iraq from many different countries, including the United States. To find a female leading an art establishment in a country like Iraq, with an Arab-Muslim culture, was really significant.”

It was also quite significant in the Arab community that al-Attar’s paintings contained naked women, mingling with trees and the natural environment. In al-Attar’s paintings, as she wrote in introducing one of her exhibitions, Middle-Eastern women were “respected and exalted, not marginalized or excluded altogether. I am trying to bring into the society of ideal faith, the role of women, the dignity of their existence, and their humanity. My instrument to accomplish that is made of lines blended with waves.”

The Leading Women’s Right Campaigner Goes Silent

Enter Hillary Clinton. As First Lady, Clinton was globetrotting for women’s rights, from Boston to Beijing. Indeed, she was perhaps the most high-profile campaigner for women’s rights on the planet.

On September 5, 1995, a little more than two years after her husband murdered Layla al-Attar in her own home while she slept, Hillary Clinton told the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session in Beijing, China:

There are some who question the reason for this conference. Let them listen to the voices of women in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. There are some who wonder whether the lives of women and girls matter to economic and political progress around the globe. Let them look at the women gathered here ... the homemakers and nurses, the teachers and lawyers, the policymakers and women who run their own businesses.

Layla al-Attar was many of the above: A mother, a teacher, a business woman, and a celebrated artist, yet Hillary Clinton could not seem to find the time or the conscience to visit with Rema to express her condolences along with the president’s. To this day, there is no formal apology on record to the al-Attar family, and to the people of Iraq, who lost one of their cherished artists – a woman – a woman ascending against overwhelming odds in the highly male-dominated Middle East.

“Nobody has ever called me,” Rema told me during a telephone interview in 1998, five years after her mom and dad perished in the U.S. missile assault. “It’s like they don’t even know what happened.”

Many who mourned the death of Layla al-Attar believed the Clintons’ silence was clearly a political choice, not to call attention to the killing of such a prominent woman, a leader in the art world of the Middle East. Others believed it was a not “collateral damage” as Clinton claimed. It was the second time the artist’s house had been hit. It had been demolished two years earlier during another US attack and had just been reconstructed. The fact that it was hit for the second time made many Iraqis suspicious that it wasn’t an accident, but that the artist was targeted as an official of the Iraqi government.

One exiled Iraqi artist, who runs a corner deli in San Francisco and who asked to remain anonymous, told me recently, “The killing of Layla was very simply the result of the passing of the torch of the same policy from Bush to Clinton. I don’t know for sure if they meant to kill Layla, but the Clintons certainly didn’t express a peep of regret. But then the Clintons are famous for putting political pragmatism before truth and humanity.”

Even worse than Hillary’s silence on the killing of Layla al-Attar, said the Iraqi exile, “is the fact that she didn’t seem to learn anything from the killing of so many innocents in Iraq, and as secretary of state she continued the same failed and deadly policy. The same policy that has turned my country into a permanent war zone, and paved the way for the birth of ISIS.”

“Let this conference be our – and the world’s – call to action” Hillary Clinton concluded at the 1995 women’s conference in Beijing. “Let us heed that call so we can create a world in which every woman is treated with respect and dignity, every boy and girl is loved and cared for equally, and every family has the hope of a strong and stable future.”

When I interviewed Rema al-Attar in San Jose in 1998, she was sitting on pins and needles, as Bill Clinton was threatening to bomb her country again. She was terribly worried she would soon be receiving a phone call that her brother – who survived the bombing that killed her parents and ended her hope for a “stable future” – might be killed in the next attack. Rema did not speak of anger and revenge, but of sorrow and fear. “I get scared so easily now, I can’t do anything. I always wear dark glasses.”

“[Bill] Clinton bragged about his first big bombing that killed Layla, and his wife was silent about it,” the anonymous Iraqi artist lamented. “Layla was a women of peace, an artist who made beauty, who was known throughout Europe and the Middle East as a peacemaker. She was someone who could have helped bridge the gap between our countries, and Hillary Clinton was silent and still is. Now she’s running for president, bragging about a policy that still kills about a thousand Iraqis a month.”

Editorial Note

In a commentary for Democracy Now! at the time of Layla’s killing, I suggested that the Clintons make sure to hang a few of her works in the White House, so as not to forget the nature and implications of gratuitous warfare. Not surprisingly, I was never taken up on my suggestion. However, if the next president ends up being a woman who claims to champion women’s rights and women’s liberation, I suggest a perfect place for a piece by Layla al-Attar would be right over Bill Clinton’s face, between Bush One and Bush the Second.

Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.