Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?
Misty sent me the following story from CNN.com more after the break…
“We had a dream. Now it’s a reality.”
That’s the slogan on a popular T-shirt linking Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential run to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality. It’s one of several T-shirts — including “Barack is my homeboy”– that reflect African-Americans’ euphoria over Obama’s White House bid.
But there are others who warn that an Obama presidency could hurt African-Americans. They say an Obama victory could cause white Americans to ignore entrenched racial divisions while claiming that America has reached the racial Promised Land.
Paul Street, author of the forthcoming book “Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics,” says Obama risks becoming an Oval Office version of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. She and former Secretary of State Colin Powell are African-American figures whose popularity allows some white Americans to congratulate themselves for not being racist, he says
“They’re cited as proof that racism is no longer a significant barrier to black advancement and interracial equality,” Street said.
“This isn’t new. Go to the 19th century, and Southern aristocrats would point to a certain African-American landowner who was doing well to prove that whites are not racist.”
Nick Shapiro, an Obama spokesman, says Obama believes that America has made tremendous progress in the past 50 years. iReport.com: Biggest challenges for black America
“However, the suggestion that somehow Senator Obama’s campaign represents an easy shortcut is not realistic,” Shapiro said in a statement. “Senator Obama believes that we still have a lot of work to do, and that’s not just true for the issues facing blacks or Latinos, but for women and other communities struggling to secure the basic necessities in life like jobs, housing, health care and quality education.”
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First of all this story is a precursor to the two party CNN special they are having about called: Black in America.
First the CNN program is in my estimation embarrassing and insulting.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this because this program is just another attempt to put us all in categories or groups. Will CNN run a series on Asians in America, or Hispanics in America highlighting their uniqueness. CNN obviously believes that white folks racism through their collective ignorance of Negros needs to be addressed. Lookie here whitey, these Negros are more like you than not, but they ARE different.
I said it a million times I hate the notion that I am on some fucken Negro team as if all black folks have my best interest at heart.
Niggas are incarcerated at an alarming rate, Niggas are killing each other still at an alarming rate, and they are not going to school, not even managing to graduate from high school.
The reality is shows like this are in my mind extremely divisive. It tells other ethnic groups that the “black” experience is different and irreconcilable with the American experience. Blacks are the only group in America that has the benefit of 
constant excuses and explanations, which is not really a benefit. It serves to the detriment of black folks.
As for this web story “Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?” Hurt Negros, of course not, but what I have said before and I will no doubt repeat often if Obama is elected Negros will act like damm fools. I can see the ghettoized types partying in the streets, becoming more belligerent towards law enforcement and just about any other white authority figure. You will see more discrimination lawsuits as racial tension builds in workplaces.
Just think about the utter stupidity displayed by Negros after the OJ verdict and magnify that times ten.
Oh don’t get me wrong your uneducated silly idiot whitey redneck attitudes towards black will become more strained and the typical glares and looks rednecks give me anytime I walk into certain establishments will no doubt last a bit longer, however my take is basically black folks will no doubt see and Obama presidency as an invitation to engage in more societal retardation than normal.
The Magic Negros presidency will be seen and an invitation for black folks to exert their new found “perceived” power and status. As the story states a Magic Negro presidency is payback and “atonement for America’s ugly racial past.” You racist ass white people owe us, no doubt some ridiculous call for “black unity” will arise and every community in the country will be called on the carpet to address racial injustices having a Negro president will be the symbolic club to beat the racism in injustice out of you racist white people.
Anywho, this reminded me of a good blog piece I posted some time ago “The Old Guy Perspective” Obama and race from Instapunk.
This CNN web article and the CNN TV program is just the beginning of the barrage you white people will have to endure if the Magic Negro is elected.
More of you white folks will no doubt be echoing the sentiments in this piece.
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This is from Instapunk, interesting read.
Some liberal bloggers are having a cow, but I get dudes vibe. Check it out.
Sphere: Related ContentDEALING WITH IT. Obama says we should talk about race. He thinks that will help him. It won’t. Most of us have spent a lifetime absorbing the lesson that seeing what we see automatically makes us racist. Do you want to talk about it? Do you? Really?There are a few areas where, by virtue of age and experience, I think I can speak for the overwhelming majority of Americans. We want to get past racial problems. We recognize that slavery was a sin and that we have a moral obligation to see to it that our institutions and our own behavior are fair to everyone. We share a yearning so fierce that it amounts to an ache for a color-blind society in which all may prosper on the basis of abilities, not skin color. It is this intense emotion which facilitated the honeymoon period of Obama’s campaign for the presidency.
But the color-blind society has not been achieved. What’s more, we are constantly told — lectured, hectored, propagandized — that this state of affairs is our fault. We tend to accept the charge because the truth is we don’t spend all our time thinking about race, and so we defer to those who think about nothing else because, well, we almost never get up in the morning thinking about how privileged we are to be white, which we’ve come to accept as yet another of our endless insensitivities about race.
We’ve come to accept a lot of things, in fact. Although no one alive in America has ever owned a slave, we accept that we are all somehow guilty for slavery in the American past. We accept that in our lifetimes racial discrimination has become a routine official practice against those of us whose remote ancestors were not slaves. We accept that there are doctors and lawyers and police officers and firefighters whose credentials may not be completely up to snuff because of the top-secret compromises associated with affirmative action. We accept the popular — and tiresomely repeated stereotypes — that black people are more gifted at sports and dancing and music and sexuality, although there is no other arena in which it is fair to say that white or yellow people are better than black people. We accept the premise that there exists some kind of super black woman who is a naturally better mother, matriarch, empirical philosopher, and leader of men than 5,000 years of civilization has produced in other cultures through education, discipline, and morality. We accept that any fear we feel of young black men on the sidewalk is more a reflection of our own prejudice than the cold statistics of crime. We accept that it’s improper for us to object to obscene rap recordings, thug sports stars, flagrantly corrupt politicians, and hypocritical clergy if any of these happen to be black people. We accept that the first major inroads against the hallowed First Amendment began with a political correctness about matters of race that have since ballooned to a distortion of all human interactions. We accept that everything we disapprove of in black behavior is derived from our own lack of understanding about what they’ve been through.
But Obama has invited us to talk about race.
Okay. I’m accepting the invitation. He can regret it at his leisure.
I don’t hate black people. I can’t pretend to be color-blind because absolutely nothing in my culture will allow me to be. I admire Thomas Sowell, Duke Ellington, Roberto Clemente, Muhammed Ali, Alexandre Dumas, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Count Basie, Tiger Woods, and Bill Cosby. There are many others but that’s a sampling of the famous folks whose courage, genius, character, and achievements I would be proud if I could get anywhere in the vicinity of. The bald truth of the matter is that they’re better than I am, and it doesn’t arouse a flicker of racial feeling in me to acknowledge it. They have enriched and elevated my own experience of life.
On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn’t it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees — and jeans belted just above their knees. I’m an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It’s impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. It’s like a broadcast dare: Go ahead! Call me a nigger! And then I’ll cap your ass.
Here’s the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public.
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March 28th, 2008 at 9:57 am
That’s brilliant!
Thank you very much for exposing me to it.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:43 am
Came to your site from the Rott, and I think you’ve pretty well nailed it. There are things that all of us notice, but aren’t “permitted” to discuss, especially middle-aged white guys like me. It’s off-limits for me to say things about the car with the bass notes so low and loud that it can be used to communicate with submarines on patrol, or about the edgy-looking “gangsta” behind the wheel, or publicly mention the possibility that there are too few David Robinsons in the NBA and too many Dennis Rodmans. (I’m a hockey guy myself, so I don’t really follow basketball, but I’m well acquainted with lily-white thugs from my on-ice experience. Seems to me there’s not much difference from the black variety). But notice we do.
Rest assured that some of us do not have “white guilt”, and do not wish to fall on our swords (or open our wallets) for what other “white people” may have done generations before my parents were even born. (I guess we’re supposed to have the good taste to ignore the connivance of Africans in the slave trade). My ancestors didn’t arrive from Eastern Europe until the early part of the 20th Century, and then settled, as most immigrants from there did, in Northern cities. Therefore, there’s no way they could have contributed in any way to slavery or its aftermath. If anyone from the race-baiting establishment want to debate this with me, I’d be happy to take them on. But unfortunately, I fear you’re right, and society as a whole has been bludgeoned over the head too much to resist the thought that all of us “white folk” are somehow responsible for what happened, say, on the West African coast in 1750.
People like Tiger Woods and Wynton Marsalis enrich all of our lives, but so do Phil Mickleson and Yitzhak Perlman. May they all prosper and long continue to give us enjoyment (and a few golf tips wouldn’t hurt, either). And Mumia surely impoverishes our lives in exactly the same way Charlie Manson does. They deserve what they got, and the sooner they’re called to face their Creator, the better for all of us.
As a comparative cultural note, in the FWIW catergory, I’ve lived and worked in Asia for much of the last dozen years, and many times, mine has been the only white face in a sea of “kulit sawo matang”, which is the Indonesian term for Southeast Asian skin coloration. It’s common in this part of the world to see the local women, whether you’re in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, or wherever, spending huge portions of their usually very limited incomes on skin whiteners. These are women who could not be considered “ugly” in any conventional sense of the word, and many are downright knockouts. Yes, TV, movies, and modern cosmetics marketing have something to do with it. But there’s an older reason as well. Lighter-skinned people in this part of the world have usually been of upper class origin, or of Chinese descent, neither of whom worked in the rice paddies from dawn to dusk. And working the rice fields in the SE Asian sun will make anyone’s skin darker. So, to make themselves “more beautiful”, i.e, more “upper class”, lots of SE Asian women try making themselves look more white. Go figure.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:57 am
“First the CNN program is in my estimation embarrassing and insulting.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this because this program is just another attempt to put us all in categories or groups.
“
Hmmm…
But isn’t that what the now-fabled Rene Marie intended as well, with her “special” redition of the national anthem? -
“When I decided to sing my version, what was going on in my head was: ‘I want to express how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person,’”
…being of a different category and group than you stupid Krackas…
Isn’t CNN really just mirroring her ‘patriotic dissent’ - of inclusion with America?
- MuscleDaddy
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Your back link doesn’t make it to the original which is here: http://www.instapunk.com/archives/InstaPunkArchiveV2.php3?a=1306#
Here’s a blunt truth, learned in Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, Oakland, Dallas and lately Allentown: the most racist people I run into are black kids and hispanic kids. Being aware of race (and avoiding late night chance meetings with groups of either) is mere self-preservation, and it isn’t Racist per se. After all, as they put it, I’m just some old white guy.
I am old enough to know myself and I have worked hard to eradicate what learned bigotry I soaked up as a kid. (With a single exception: I have been unable to come up with another term for a large rock in a river that does not break the surface but will stop a boat or canoe. Typically, it is moss covered and hard to see except as it influences the flow of water around it. Though now I find that ‘tar baby’ is racist too, though I disagree. Tar pit will have to do, I suppose, but it lacks guile. I like Remus as a person, I guess I’ll just keep that to myself henceforth. Not that it comes up much.) What I see around me now are generations upon generations of white-hating stereotyping people of color, engaged in a self-reinforcing cycle of counter-racism. I do not envy them for their future; their labors to free themselves from their hatred will be much, much harder than mine.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Thanks for the link update….
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Well the real truth is as old as dirt. The more uneducated the people you come in contact with the more likely they are to be racist whether that be white people, black people, Mexicans whatever.
Not a single black friend I have ever had in my life could even be remotely considered racist or prejudice.
I managed to stay the fuck away from ignorant ass ghetto black dudes. As even Jessie Jackson once said even he would move to the other side of the street too avoid a crowd of Niggas.
On the other hand, growing up in Oakland, being the only black family for the first few years, we have multiple items stolen, house egged, I was called Nigger more time than I could count and we were shunned by neighbors.
Getting to know us as a family finally changed most of the racist behavior, except for the police officer who put me in the back of a police car, in handcuffs when I was 8 because he did not believe that I lived in our nice whitey neighborhood.
I have experiences more racism than anybody reading this blog can imagine, yet I still have the attitude I do. I learned early on what I said in paragraph one above. Only the less educated and socially retarded are racist. Racism is a mental disorder pure and simple.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 pm
good post.
lol at the i have deram posters. i wonder if they looked at eachother’s posters and got confused.
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:43 am
I agree with you 100% about OBAMA! If you are BLACK and think that any motherfucker running for the “dis-UNITED SNAKES” of America is gonna help you then you are FUCKIN’ FOOL regardless of what color he or she may come in. But answer me this… Why should I vote for a CRACKA?? That’s odd! THE only good CRACKA is a dead CRACKA. The same applies to uncle tom NIGGERS. You are probably one or the other so I think you will be able to identify with either?