Sugar’s Take

As an avid Hennessy drinker, I am torn between whether or not this is good business practice with a meaningful payoff or pimpage 9000… or a little of both. I think it’s a great idea to commemorate a historical presidency with a bottle of some nice cognac (folks tend to degrade products the ‘urban’ community enjoys), but it’s not OK to pimp folks’ new found happiness in the name of a college fund. It’s almost like Hennessy is indirectly asking the CEO of the College Fund to use Obama’s celebrity as a hook to sell their product as a means of raising money. Sounds a little confusing? That’s how I felt when I heard it. Why didn’t Hennessy just write them a check, put out the commemorative bottle and keep the change? Maybe they did something like that.. it just sounds very indirectly sneaky. I might get a bottle. I’m not sleepin’ outside or nothing, but I’ll support a good deed. Like I said, I like Hennessy. I wish they’d use some of that energy to get the ‘White Hennessy’ available on this side of the world. It’s that good; otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Maybe they need to be cuttin’ me a check too. I’m just serious.

Ed’s Take

There is a reason there is a liquor store on almost every corner where black folks congregate. Furious Styles, Laurence Fishburne’s character in Boyz N The Hood, said it best: “They want us to kill ourselves.” We have lost many an uncle, play cousin, auntie, and parent to alcoholism.  Folks who a darker than blue, often weathering the storm of limited life chances, diminished opportunities, and second hand schooling,  are more susceptible to chemical dependency  as they attempt to survive in society where black life is often expendable. In his groovy yet illuminating song “The Bottle,” noted poet and vocalist Gil Scott Heron details the seduction of drugs better than my blog response ever could:

See that black boy over there, runnin’ scared
his ol’ man’s in a bottle.
He done quit his 9 to 5 to drink full time
so now he’s livin’ in the bottle.
See that Black boy over there, runnin’ scared
his ol’ man got a problem
Pawned off damn near everything, his ol’
woman’s weddin’ ring for a bottle.
And don’t you think it’s a crime
when time after time, people in the bottle.

Even at our highest moment, corporate America wants us to numb ourselves enough to believe that a liquor company actually cares about the plight of black America.  GET REAL!!!  I love a good celebration. I am all for drinking and being merry in moderation.  But for a company to hawk liquor to a blues people under the guise of a tribute to Obama and Thurgood Marshall is a heavy insult to our intelligence.  And we should call them out from every mountaintop and valley low.

So in sum, folks can be culturally pimped if they want, but I am taking my goodies and leaving the corner.