Duke Ellington, Obama and black boxers...

Stanley Couch has a great piece on The Daily Beast. He's exploring the reactions of the Obama phenomenon inside the black community. Specifically, he's answering the charge that a lot of black folks didn't know anyone like Obama in their communities.

An excerpt:

This began with the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, both of whom painted essentially one-dimensional portraits of black experience that were determined to shame the white people into removing black people from the limitless house of pain reserved for them. Racism made black people ashamed of their hair, their skin color, their lips and noses, their supposed intellectual inferiority. Were there truly bad things that had been done to black people and continued to be done and are still, in some ways, done to this very day? Yes and no.

Read the whole thing here>>