Can Pookie (& Nay-Nay) Get Some Love?

Who is Obama's 'Cousin Pookie'?
By JONATHAN TILOVE

In his sermon Sunday at Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., Barack Obama declared: "If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.''

It wasn't the first time the Illinois senator and presidential aspirant has invoked "Pookie'' in gently scolding terms, and his mention was met with affirmations of recognition at the church.

But for those not in the know, the question remains: Who is this Pookie?

The Obama campaign didn't respond to requests for details. But Newhouse News Service asked some of America's best minds on black culture, language and politics.

In their interviews and e-mails, Pookie emerges as a stock character of the black popular imagination, a name that has come to personify the kind of layabout kin who, if endearing, is also a source of some embarrassment and consternation to his more successful relations. And, it turns out, in his use of Pookie, Obama reveals something about himself.

"Pookie means a whole lot of different things; none of them are good,'' said Kevin Gray, a South Carolina writer and activist. "Pookie's always the foil.''

To linguist and writer John McWhorter, Pookie is the kind of ghetto character played by Cedric the Entertainer or Chris Tucker in one of those "Barbershop'' or "Friday'' movies. In the 1960s and '70s, he would have gone by Leroy, Tyrone or Otis.

Pookie, according to Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and writer about race, is "nearly a pop-culture folk-figure in black circles.'' He is the average black every-youth.

While Gray said Pookie goes way back, Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University, believes he has come into his own only in the last decade, as a "metaphor for kin ... who everybody knows is just a little trifling and a little lazy.''

Neal believes Pookie's rise is linked to the growth of the black middle class, and "intimately connected to some of the anxieties that the black middle class has with regards to their relatives who have not been as financially successful. I'm sure Sen. Obama has a few Pookies in his own family.''

"It's a real strong use of language,'' said Bakari Kitwana, the hip-hop writer, lecturer and activist. In dropping Pookie's name, Obama is signaling to those who question his blackness — because his mother was white and his father an African without slave ancestry — that he is not an outsider to black life.

"If you get it you get it, and if you don't, you don't care,'' Kitwana said. "I have a Pookie in my family.''

Read Full Essay...