Are Americans really racists?
Bookworm on Sep 22 2008 at 8:45 am | Filed under: African-Americans, Media matters
The current “scandal” is that a poll shows that one third of white Democrats harbor racist views towards blacks. I have two problems with this poll’s approach and two questions about whether its conclusions have any real meaning.
My first problem is the poll’s underlying assumption, one that reveals entirely the pollsters’ bias: Why the heck isn’t Obama winning because, in pollsters’ minds, he really ought to?
The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush’s unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.
It doesn’t seem to occur to the pollsters that, as the election draws near, Americans, including Democratic Americans, may actually be looking at issues, not candidates, and may have concluded that Obama’s thin resume is not a helpful antidote to the issues confronting Americans — and that this is true irrespective of either the candidate’s or the voters’ race.
Apparently having dismissed that possibility out of the box, the pollsters, with their assumptions firmly in place about the fundamental abnormality in American’s failure to recognize what a vastly superior candidate Obama is, cheerfully set about using their all new methodology to prove that Americans are racists.
To this end (and herein lies my second problem with the poll results), the pollsters relied on a “unique methodology,” “pioneered” by one company, Knowledge Networks, that thinks it can delve into people’s psyches. First, they used online interviews, on the assumption that people will be more honest in the anonymity of cyberspace, which may well be true.
However, it may also be untrue. Once online, people may feel more playful or obstreperous and be less honest. Who knows? You can only prove people’s honesty if you have an objective measure of the absolute truth. And in opinion polls, what the heck is that measure? We’re in a gray area that sees the pollsters assuming that their own biases about people’s probable beliefs constitute absolute truth, if only the pollsters can arrive at a methodology to prove that fact (in other words, there’s lots of room for bootstrapping and circular reasoning).
If that wasn’t a gray enough area, pollsters delved into an even grayer one, which again uses their own beliefs about people’s biases as the objective truth their psychological evaluation will ultimately prove:
Other techniques used in the poll included recording people’s responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks’ troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.
In other word, they used a technique that many might simply see as a trick. When a Harvard gal first came up with the idea, which was to prove that people’s first, instinctive responses to imagines of different races inevitably proved them to be racist, I wandered over to check it out. What you get is a split screen with images of people and different words flashing. You then have to hit buttons on the right and left side of your keyboard to tie “appropriate” words with equally “appropriate” images.
What I discovered was that, just as I am a word person, I’m very strongly not an image person. I don’t see pictures very well, and quickly got confused. I’m also horrible at hand/eye coordination, or even hand/hand coordination. After randomly hitting buttons a few times, I got bored and stopped. It was as pointless and frustrating for me as a lot of the Wii games or Nintendo games my kids play. Rather than delving into the depths of my evil, racist psyche, it proved only that I lack eye/hand coordination.
Still, since I’m not a pollster or a social scientist or a statistician or someone who assumes that racism is the norm, I’m going to assume for purposes of the next part of this post that the poll is so closely attuned to reality that it can actually catch people shlumping at their home computers in acts of vile racism (blacks = lazy, boastful or irresponsible). Even assuming that, though, I still have my doubts about whether the poll proves that racism will be the problem when/if Democrats turn away from Obama.
To begin with, while the pollsters managed to prove that everybody is a racist (Republican or Democrat), they’ve admitted only that Democrats are so dumb they can’t look beyond their racial preferences, while Republicans are smart enough to be able to examine issues, not race. (And please tell me if the pollsters or the AP writers really meant to make this point?)
Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.
Second of all — and I know I’m wandering into sensitive territory here — is my suspicion that Americans aren’t racist, they’re “classist” or “value-ist.” Bear with me here as I try to develop this argument.
Historically, racism actually had to do with the genetics of race. Prejudiced whites believed that blacks, merely by virtue of the color of their skin, were inherently inferior. To the mind of the whites who held this attitude, and it’s one with deep roots amongst Europeans and Americans, the mere fact of black skin meant that it was impossible for the person possessing such skin to be intelligent or hard working (and the latter belief was true despite the fact that slavery put those blacks to hard work the likes of which whites never did, unless they were, in turn, unlucky enough to be enslaved by Muslims).
I suspect that things are different nowadays. Assuming American Democrats (oh! and, of course, Republicans) really are every bit as prejudiced against blacks as this study seems to show, I doubt that anyone of them would claim that their prejudicial beliefs are tied to blacks’ biology. That is, unlike your 1850s Southern planter, or 1950s Southern KKK member, no one nowadays would ever say that blacks are, from the womb, lazy or boastful or irresponsible.
What your average American, if taken in a dark closet and promised complete anonymity, might claim is that black culture — which is a learned phenomon — is less appealing to them than white culture. Is it racism to observe that a culture has values that you think are bad? I don’t know.
It’s certainly not racism to approve of a culture’s values. Your average Lefty would be delighted to tell you that the French or Nordic people (Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, etc.) have better cultures than ours. They wouldn’t say that these people are biologically better; they’d say that the values they hand down to each other and put into law are much better than the embittered guns and God culture that characterizes middle America.
Also, is it wrong to say that blacks have a culture? Again, I don’t think so. We’re constantly being bombarded with messages telling us that blacks are a distinct subculture. The whole point of the political correctness that has permeated the American landscape for the last 30 years is to do away with American commonality. We no longer believe in a melting pot. We believe in a chunky (and often inedible) salad, with disparate component parts that, in the PC mind, originate with America’s various “cultures” (racial, religious, sexual, country of origin, etc.), and that cannot be ignored or blended, even in the public square.
The problem, for both blacks and whites, is that black culture (not black biology, but black culture), publicly advances values that are antithetical to middle American values. In my earlier post about false syllogisms, I pointed out that John McWhorter’s wonderful Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
McWhorter also pointed to the advance Leftist guards of the Civil Rights movement (I guess we’d call them community activists nowadays) who told blacks that, after all their suffering, it was only fair and appropriate that the government should henceforth pay their way. So, while middle and working class America embrace the notion of hard work, substantial segments of the black culture believe (1) that work is a problem, inextricably and negatively entwined with slavery and (2) that it’s only fair that white America should financially compensate them for all the past evils done to blacks.
How about the drug/gang/boasting culture? Yes, whites use drugs in greater numbers than blacks, but that’s because there are greater numbers of whites. Even if that were not the case, in the post-psychadelic drug area, it hasn’t been middle and working class whites who developed an influential music form celebrating the drug/gansta life, it’s been black America that’s done this.
Even if, as many will assure us, gangsta rap represents only the smallest subsection of black culture, it is a huge public face. The complicity of blacks, the music industry (liberal) and Madison Avenue (out of Blue New York) means that whites are deluged with cultural (not biological) images of blacks waving guns, degrading women, and boasting about their prowess, especially when it comes to drugs, violence, and sexual abuse — and they’ve been deluged with these images for more than a decade now. You can’t profit off selling a violent, demeaning image about your own culture, and then wonder why people start believing the stereotypes you’ve created.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Americans also got some bad images of black culture. Significantly, all of these images came from the liberal media which, in its blind, manic rush to destroy the Bush administration, neglected to realize that it were broadcasting the worst type of stereotypes about blacks.
It was the Bush-hating media that said that blacks were eating each other (after only three days without food). That same media frantically announced that blacks were murdering each other (after only a couple of very uncomfortable days in the convention center). The media also shrieked at Bush-loving middle America that, because of Bush, blacks were raping each other (again, after only a couple of days in the convention center). Media’s talking heads blamed Bush for the fact that Blacks were robbing stores and houses to survive.
With a few minor exceptions, all those hysterical stories, meant to show Bush’s both perfidy and his victims, were untrue. Nobody was eaten, nobody was murdered, and I don’t think anybody was raped. The only victims of this mad journalism were the blacks themselves — because a whole lot of white people carried away the message, fed to them by the liberal media, that black culture is so degraded that, in times of crisis, it will turn to rape, murder and cannibalism.
So there are a lot of messages about blacks out there that might lead Americans to view the black culture with suspicion. As observant black commentators have noted themselves, the twin legacies of slavery and the community activists pushing a nanny state Civil Rights agenda is that many blacks view work with suspicion. Viewing it with suspicion, they either don’t do it at all, or do it with poor grace. It’s a cultural thing that may well lead outsiders who haven’t analyzed culture motives to conclude that blacks are lazy.
The perception that blacks are dangerous or boastful also finds probable roots in the modern black culture being sold to white America. Worse, it’s a sales pitch that originates in two liberal American bastions: Manhattan and Hollywood. It’s this liberal America that’s sold us on gangsta rap (boastful and dangerous thugs) and on black violence and helplessness (Hurricane Katrina). Having sold America on these images of a black culture made up of values antithetical to middle class white culture, these same liberal cadres now castigate us for being racist because some of us bought the garbage they were selling.
So do I think Americans are racist? Not really. First, I doubt the value of this novel polling technique, which seems to me to be intended, not to gather information, but to support the pollsters’ own biases. Second, even if the polls is accurate, I don’t think Americans believe that blacks are biologically inferior. I do believe, though, that Americans, both black and white, have been on the receiving end of sales pitches and manipulation, originating in liberal white America, aimed at presenting black culture as one hostile to work, and rife with drugs and crime and a very ugly type of boastfulness.
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I urge everyone to read the source article(s).
What really bothers me is that the focus is solely on white peoples’ “negative impressions” of black people. There’s not one word about black peoples’ “negative impressions” of white people. The percentages detected of negative impressions by white people is actually not that large, but if true, would be large enough to possibly influence election results.
But what about the negative impressions held by black people for white people? I haven’t seen anyone raise that question yet; it was my own immediate question once I finished the article when I first read it yesterday morning.
I’ll never take a poll unless I can review the entire set of questions prior to beginning. Which means I’ll never take a poll.
Take a look at the % of blacks who will vote for a white candidate vs. the % of whites who will vote for a black candidate when said candidates are competing.
Kooky!
Blacks have to work hard to overcome white prejudice. Whites have a responsibility to check, to take a second, even a third look, to see if their prejudices are accurate. Prejudice is not racism.
Everyone in our society, including black men, shares some version of the prejudice that black men are dangerous and stupid (even though we know it is not true most of the time). A racist sees no reason to second guess their own prejudice. The rest of us will look at the clothes the person is wearing, the hair style, the way they speak, if there is music playing that seems threatening, how they walk, the type of car they drive, their facial expression, and whether their behavior seems appropriate to the situation. It’s called reassessing or refining your prejudices.
Prejudices do not go away simply because we will them to. They are part of our nature.
Everyone is hurt by other peoples prejudices, black men are hurt by them more than any other group.
Interesting post, but how do you know whether the potentially prejudiced person is truly judging someone on the basis of their actions, beliefs, values, etc. rather than knowingly falsely attributing a black culture which they reject to a black person who doesn’t adhere to it? Do you believe that whites in West Virginia who voted for Hillary and who are now rejecting Obama although they have similar work ethics, academic and work backgrounds, values, and policy positions really are not influenced at all by racial prejudice? The generic Democratic candidate still runs 10 points or more ahead of McCain, according to polls.
Also, a “Harvard gal” didn’t invent the technique of tapping into the first emotional reaction–Rohrschach tests have been around for a long time and also rely on this technique, which from what I understand is based on pretty sound psychology and neuroscience–rather, they just put it onto a computer based test. By the way, I heard on NPR recently that there was another recent computer test using a similar methodology showing that self-described Republicans/conservatives show greater fear responses to unanticipated stimula than Democrats/liberals, and to my knowledge no one called the methodology into question on that research although the researchers had many critics. If this methodology gains widespread support, and I hold no strong view on the prospects of this, I wonder whether you are prepared to rethink your views on the level of racial prejudice in America.
Greetings:
Several years ago, on one of my internet safaris, I came across the US Department of Justice’s web site. In looking over the murder statistics, I discovered that a white person had a 3-4 times the probability of being murdered by a black person than a black person had of being murdered by a white person. This was a straight murder to murder comparison, unadjusted for the large disparity in the sizes of the two groups in the overall population.
Since that time, I have seen this observation mentioned just one time in the mainstream media and that was by Michael Barone in US News & World Report.
Maybe Senator Obama’s (TWP) Grandma knew something.
Scott in SF:
Get over it. Yes, prejudicial behavior exists. And prejudicial attitudes affect many, perhaps most people. Urban black men have done themselves no favors by allowing a culture of doom. Yes, much of the atmosphere in urban black areas is the result of liberal white prejudice or racsim, and the policies forced upon minorities by them, I agree.
But don’t expect me to sit back and let ignorant, unknowing fools charge me with racism simply because I don’t agree with the political ideas of a black human being. When I agree with a black person’s political views, does it mean I am incapable of prejudice?
This is a classic mistake in the use of polls. Using some of the same examples, plus others: Bush’s low job approval numbers; the country is headed in the wrong direction; worries about the economy; the unpopularity of the Iraq war.
Let’s assume a completely different view on each of those, and see how it might correlate to the current state of the race.
1. Bush’s low job approval numbers: people are weary of the rancor, and just want him gone. There is no evidence that this directly gives an advantage to Obama. The assumption is that, naturally this favors democrats. But, look at the low job approval numbers of the democratic controlled Congress.
2. The country is headed in the wrong direction: that could mean darn near anything. So, no net advantage for either. I suspect McCain’s “reform” stance might pull in some votes.
3. Worries about the economy: this is universal regardless of who is in office. The people know that the President does not “run” the economy. In fact only childlike people follow that notion.
4. The unpopularity of the war in Iraq: true, yet what to actually do about it might be a bit different than what some are assuming the American people want.
The whole point is, what the polls say might actually be different than what the people actually want done about it. It is equally possible that people are rejecting Obama’s ideas, as opposed to racism.
As every lawyer knows, because every lawyer incorporates this point into the opening speech he gives he jury, prejudices are an inherent part of the human condition. We all have belief systems based on (a) what we’re taught and (b) our own experiences. The trick is to look beyond your own prejudices to the individual merits of a given situation.
The example I always like to give of a person who was able to do this was Harry Truman, who was able to separate his prejudices from his moral sense of right and wrong. He was an anti-Semite who backed the founding of the state of Israel, because it was the right thing to do; and he was a Southern Black racist who integrated the US military, also because it was the right thing to do.
We can’t erase our prejudices. We can understand where they must bow before our principles.
But isn’t it true that what we must or should do, and what we actually do are often very different? It could turn out empirically that the methodology used by Knowledge Networks is pretty accurate and that roughly one-third of white Americans–who are not as noble as Truman–act in fact in a prejudiced way toward blacks despite knowledge of their bias or, more likely, because they are only vaguely aware if at all of their bias. Many people, myself included, could be missing “the trick” you highlight, since subjective evaluations of merit can be colored by prejudice. (For example, it is interesting that when US symphony orchestras started taking “blind” applications using recorded works, they found themselves suddenly hiring more women musicians. For the abstract, see http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5903.html)
Also, it seems to me at least that, historically, the progress toward lesser degrees of unjustified bias sometimes occur only after dramatic events allow for a shifting of perceptions. The founding of Israel profoundly changed general American views toward Jews from negative to positive as Americans subsequently saw what a strong ally Israel could be in the region. The integration of the military–well ahead of any other major employer in the country–likely did much to help reduce racial prejudice amongst whites by creating/forcing greater interaction with and reliance on blacks. The election of Obama would likely help in this regard as well, assuming he governs effectively.
..and if he doesn’t?
Then the stereotypes will be reinforced. Isn’t that pretty obvious?
Of course it is. The stereotypes that half-black people just can’t cut it will be horribly reinforced. So, the racists who believe that crap will have to fall back on Tiger Woods and feel comfortable accepting people of color where they belong — on the golf course.
Given the viciousness of the attacks against Sarah Palin and the out-and-out lies being promugated under the cloak of anonymity or the use of surrogates and the obsolete media, I’d say racism is the least of our worries. Truth, honor and courage are seriously in danger.
However, if it takes white racism to defeat Obama, then I for one am willing to take that hit for the team.
What an education I’m getting! I used to think that Pro-Choice did not mean Pr-Abortion and learned I had been wrong. I used to think that being racist meant having pre-conceived ideas about individuals based on their skin tone. Now I see that’s wrong, too. I am *required* to make judgements about a person based on skin color.
My what progress we have made.
Ellie2, unless you are Sarah Palin’s mother, I’d say it is odd that you would think that campaign or press “attacks” on a single individual are a greater social ill than racism. And if you would welcome racism to defeat a candidate that you oppose for legitimate ideological or policy reasons, then you are a utilitarian of greater proportions than most socialists, perhaps including Alinksy. Why stop at accepting racism? Why not call for voter intimidation and fraud?
By the way, no one is requiring you to make certain judgments about people based upon skin color, only asking that you try to avoid making false ones based solely on skin color.
That’s usually the province of the DNC and “community organizers” such as ACORN.
McLaren, maybe you didn’t hear about the Brooks Brothers revolution that helped Bush in 2000 mightily…or the strange pro-Bush voter outcomes produced by automated voting machines in Northeast Ohio in 2004. The problem of voter intimidation and fraud likely is not usually the province of the DNC, given that there were an estimated 34% more registered Democrats that Republicans in 2000 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/neuharth/neu057.htm) and the numbers appear to have shifted blue in the following years (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/us/politics/05flip.html), all of which makes the necessity of discouraging voter turnout a decidedly GOP imperative.
Uh yeah, except those references are not facts, but opinions. And those opinions are from decidedly liberal sources. So, being from Ohio and being deeply involved in the elections, I can say that there is no proof of ANY such thing as “automated voting machines in Northeast Ohio” resulting in any strange results. Perhaps John Kerry’s walking into an outdoor supply store in Northeast Ohio and saying: “Can I get me a hunting license here?” has more to do with the results in N.E. Ohio than any unfounded conspiracy.
As for all these states shifting Blue, Bush won a higher % of votes than Bill Clinton ever did.
And I can provide case after case of Dems. violating laws to keep voters from the polls. Cases of slashing van tires, registration fraud, a Dem. judge keeping polls open later in heavily Dem. precincts in St. Louis, multiple cases of voter fraud in Fla. in 2000 by Dems., and on and on can be presented.
Everyone in our society, including black men, shares some version of the prejudice that black men are dangerous and stupid (even though we know it is not true most of the time).
The only people that are “dangerous” are people that can use knowledge to kill.
And in that respect, only a infinitesimal percent of Americans have that knowledge. Not even all the members of the military, and that includes the Marines, have the knowledge to kill a criminal right there at the scene of the crime. (bad and really ineffective hand to hand training in the Army)
That means that most blacks are victims to other blacks. Sort of like Arabs. Doesn’t mean they are dangerous, but it does mean they are unstable and potentially capable of becoming a refuge for terrorists and other criminal gangs.
Yes, Americans are really racist. And some of us think fighting racism is an issue. We think electing Obama would be a step toward eliminating racism. And yes, we know we can never completely rid the nation of racists. What we want to do is break down institutional racism. Individual racism will be, as it always has been, an individual matter.
If Obama wins, it will be a step in the direction of defeating racism. If he loses, there will be no change for better or worse. We will not become a more racist nation by electing McCain, but we will do nothing to lessen racism. This matters only if you think racism is an important issue. I do. Many people don’t.
If Obama wins, it will be a step in the direction of defeating racism.
Given that he will have won based upon racism, that’d be an interesting thing to see.
Helen: Yes, Americans are really racist.
And bigoted etc. Yes, let’s get out the hairshirts, all of us except those who have seen the light.
Compared to other countries, we do not come off as the Great Sinner, not by any means. Example: I was invited into two homes in two different countries in South America that featured prominent portraits of Hitler in the living rooms. In the Caribbean an elderly black woman called me a white MFC for having to effrontery to wear Bermuda shorts. Shorts on men were very common in that country ,so it was not as if I were offending community standards. You should hear what the Chinese have to say about other races. For example: Chinese told me that the Chinese thought that the first Europeans who arrived in China were at the least, related to monkeys, if not actually monkeys. I have heard Chinese express opinions about blacks that are not exactly positive. Genocide in Rwanda: it ain’t happening here.
Compare minorities in Europe and here. Compare the way Europeans treat someone different from themselves and the way we do. The US is a much more open society for a stranger.
Yes, the US has problems, but it’s definitely improved in my lifetime, and compared to other places, we come across not badly at all. Just keep slogging along.
Helen Losse says in #19:
“Yes, Americans are really racist. And some of us think fighting racism is an issue. We think electing Obama would be a step toward eliminating racism. And yes, we know we can never completely rid the nation of racists.”
Helen, are you saying, “Americans are incredibly racist”, or are you saying, “Truly, Americans in fact are racist”? I think you meant to say the second, but you said the first?
If you meant the first, who are you comparing us to? The French, who force all Muslims into banlieus and would never allow that new caste system to be violated? When I peek outside our national borders I perceive seething cauldrons of racism, tribalism, “hatred of the other” everywhere I look, to a degree that makes ours pale utterly in comparison. What I see out there beyond America horrifies me. With notable exceptions such as perhaps Sweden, or any other homogenous society that has scarcely even had to try to come to grips with cultures in clash.
Or perhaps you compare us solely against our own ideals and find us vastly failing to meet them. I don’t think it’s fair to compare against the ideal and then to curse; better to proclaim and feel joy each step closer to the ideal that we succeed in taking. (It’s a hell of a wonderful ideal to strive towards!)
If the second, well, it’s a fairer criticism to me, but I think the same objections hold.
As to the election of Obama as President, I don’t agree that the election of just any black man, any black man at all, indicates that racism is being overcome. In fact that would be so paternalistic an attitude towards all blacks that it seems even more racist, at least to me.
Now, should the black candidate be more qualified than the other candidate, and WIN, that would indicate progress, that racism is not a factor in our politics. The problem is that for many of us, Obama is a hard-core leftist, bare-knuckles Chicago Machiavellian wolf in idealistic, reform-packaged sheeps clothing, and we want nothing to do with him. For me, Obama is also Jimmy Carter’s pod person, horrifyingly naive about the existence of evil in the world, unwilling to face UP to the rest of the world with full skepticism of their intentions toward us. Because he must be Commander-In-Chief and the Guarantor of safety, peace, and happiness for our next generation of children, I demand no less.
Indeed. As Mike says, if we assume the election of a person of color will somehow salve the human failing of racism, then we must admit how shallow our understanding is of true racism. If the candidate of color was a conservative, I know we would see how deep the racism is in this country. See Clarence Thomas for reference.
All,
I have to say that the discussion of racism in America is one that really needs to get shoved out the door. Personal racism is always going to be there; live with it. Xenophillia is not as common as Xenophobia; humanity (created or evolved) is made up of individuals who seek out small groups of like (minded, colored, whatever) for mutual support and furthering their goals. We are not ants; there is no commitment to the “greater good” in our genetic makeup. Don’t lie to yourself otherwise.
If America is racist, I posit, then why would one of the most watched individuals on television be black (Oprah)? Secretary of State? Immigrant governor of the largest single state? The bottom line is that “racism” as a societal wall does not exist. There is no stopping anyone from becoming anything. If more young black men are arrested than any other ethnic group, it says nothing about the police. It does, however, state that the largest number of crimes are commited by this particular sub-group. Is this racist? NO. It would be racist to round up every black man under the age of 25 and lock them in camps until their 26th birthday – which, according to the numbers, would eliminate a significant amount of crime. But it would be racist and wrong; we would be judging by skin color and not by personal action.
If Barack Obama were a white man, he’d not be in his current position. He’d have been blasted off the stage for his lack of experience, poor unscripted speaking skills, and shady background. He would, in that manner, be similar to Joe Biden or John Edwards. If Obama wins, it is a victory for racism. Because when you come down to it, there is only one reason to vote for Obama instead of McCain – and that is because you hate and fear white men who have served in the military.
SSG Dave – “Yep, my sarcasm lobe is screaming to the rafters today.”
Helen, do I understand that you’re willing to sacrifice the whole well-being of the nation, simply to make a sign of good faith to blacks? I don’t mean that too sarcastically either. My husband made precisely the same point. He thinks that Obama is grossly unprepared, and very problematic; he acknowledges that we live in dangerous times; yet he will vote for Obama just to feel good.
Is this what Presidential elections have boiled down to? 1970s style-feel goodism, combined with symbolic, but meaningless and dangerous, acts of political reparation. If that’s the case, I feel quite panicky.
Are conservatives who oppose Barack Obama racist?
I ran across an article this morning that provides a data point for this. Chicago public schools, like most urban public school, are a mess. For decades they have been utter failures at their key mission: to educate the children. And remember that the children are forced to attend these schools; they and their parents have no choice.
So, along comes Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC, below), set up in part by William Ayers, who along with the other organizers tapped Obama to lead it. It received large amounts of funding by the establishment to improve the state of Chicago schools.
What did they do with the money? A few excerpts describing what happened, from:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html
The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. [...]
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). [...]
CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
This illustrates precisely why conservatives oppose Obama (and Ayers, and the rest of this sorry sad lot). Where is the racism here in our criticisms? There is no racism. The CAC via their own audits mentioned above, confirm the total failure to improve education. Conservative criticisms are based on the hidden radical leftist agenda for how the money was spent, and the (usual) failure of that agenda to fix the problem the people wanted fixed.
This goes hand in glove with Obama’s one other major effort at reform in Chicago: improving the housing conditions for poor blacks. He funneled money to rich friends (i.e., Rezko) who built substandard housing, and then “controlled” that housing like slum landlords. The end result: The housing projects collapsed, and are now boarded-up condemned buildings and slums, leaving the poor of Chicago even worse off than they had been. Obama’s rich and well-connected friends, of course, skated away from this even richer. This is Obama’s second, and only, other major attempt at reform in Chicago, and in this as in the first, he totally failed.
Where is the racism in our criticisms here of Obama and his rich (and mostly white) cronies? There isn’t any.
Obama’s few attempts at providing leadership are total failures. He’s well positioned temperamentally to be “Mr. Congeniality” in the Senate, where he can work well with his other liberal friendly Senators, and the Senate is where he should stay.
This isn’t racism. This is a demand for accountability; that Obama admit his responsibility for failures; that he demonstrate at least a few of the kinds of reform successes that, say, Sarah Palin has achieved, before we consider him fit for the Presidency.
You should, Bookworm
My otherwise intelligent and educated friends swear up and down that there must be a higher minimum wage. After going through all the arguments for hours, it comes down to this: I feel I have no right to dictate to a business owner what he/she does with the payroll because it meddles with their balance of productivity and wages. The opposing side feels better about themselves by forcing all of us to dictate to business owners what they will do with their own payrolls.
So, in Ohio we had a constitutional amendment passed by referendum to raise the minimum wage. The tyranny of the majority won over freedom. But the good news is, my friend’s morality is now all over my wallet and the payroll of complete strangers who own businesses. The majority did it to feel better about themselves. Damn the consequences. Damn freedom. Emotion ruled the day.
Now, if I say to my friends that I want my morality to affect them, they say “Who are you to push your morality onto me?”
Well, if I can get enough people to think like me, and we vote, welcome to the tyranny of the majority. Live under MY morality.
Mike: This is exactly why the U of I @ C wouldn’t release these records until they were brow-beaten into it. But, leave it to the MSM to completely ignore the radical and damaging agenda of B. Hussein Obama and Terrorist Ayers who worked hand in hand on this “project.”
Bookworm, There’s no sacrifice involved. Our economy is in shambles; our country’s at war. Any change is positive. Obama can’t do worse than Bush and won’t do worse than McCain.
America still has much institutional racism. Electing Obama would help eliminate this. If individuals chose to harbor hatred of any kind, the government can do nothing about it. The government can alter behavior through legislation but do nothing about sentiment. People can feel to superior to anyone they choose.
Voting for Obama has nothing to do with appeasing my conscience (that’s between me and God) and everything to do with making life in America (please leave other nations out of it, folks. This is a national election.) more nearly equal for African Americans, which, of course, means more nearly equal for us all (because no one will have an unfair advantage).
There is no sacrifice, if one believes racism is an important issue, something evil hanging over us, and something we need to resolve.
>>because no one will have an unfair advantage>>
That’s naive. Someone will _always_ have an “unfair” advantage.
Is _every_ advantage “unfair”?
>>if one believes racism is an important issue>>
You may be correct in this statement. Our problem lies in the fact that the majority of those who think that racism is an important issue are those who would receive unfair advantage by establishing the underlying principle of racism. You – and those you have taken your philosophy from – seem unable to counter the racism you perceive as existing against blacks without establishing an equal racism against whites. That way leads to anarchy and chaos.
We were watching an old Cosby rerun last night. How do you account for it’s popularity if we’re all such racists? Every single black person in America watched it every show?
Compared to what? Last quarter the economy grew at %3.3 and today’s unemployment was considered “solid” when Bill Clinton was president.
Yes, it is. And Obama would surrender in Iraq, escalate Afghanistan and bomb Pakistan. Is this what you want? More bombing of villages filled with Muslims who will then turn to bin Laden? At least when Bush took us to war, we liberated 50 million Muslims. Which Muslims do Obama want to liberate?
Really? Higher unemployment, more war, higher inflation, higher taxes, less freedom through gun-control are all positive?
You wanna bet?
How? Which laws forcing less racism can or should be written and adopted?
Which behavior do you believe needs to be altered?
Again, what law will Obama magically enact that suddenly eliminates poor education, crime, illegitimacy, and a general culture of defeat?
We’ll remind you of that the next time we are subjected to poll after poll of how we are loathed around the world and if we only elect Obama, every day will be “America Appreciation Day” throughout the planet.
As some of you know, my wife and I adopted a Liberian teenager.
I’ve never considered myself a racist, though I would rather spend time with people like myself, which I consider more of a human trait.
We were advised that in this cross-cultural experience, we needed to be sensitive to his native culture and allow for its expression.
What happened is something unexpected. The very first thing Stephen did was buy a rapper hat, work boots that are conspicuously untied, and baggy pants that hang off his non-existent hips.
We explained to him that first impressions are hard to overcome and for him to be successful in America, he needed to portray an image that isn’t negative. It had no effect, claiming that “this is who I am”, and the battle began.
Some have said it’s merely a phase, and to ignore it, but I can’t. This gangster image is repugnant to me, it represents a debasement of our society that is dangerous, and when I saw him wearing that hat cocked to one side, all I could see is someone who looked like they had an IQ of about 80.
We argued that this dress style isn’t rooted in his Liberian heritage, which he agreed, but to no avail.
We’ve reached an uneasy truce in all this, his pants are at this waist, he doesn’t wear the hat, but we do let him wear the shoes of his choosing and he wears his hair braided. What I found astonishing, is his insistence that the rapper identity was HIS identity, even though he only saw it from afar.
What does this have to do with racism? Nothing. And I maintain many of our choices to associate or not with people also have nothing to do with racism.
Am I prejudiced against gangster rap? You bet. If I must accept parts of “black” culture to avoid the label, count me out.
>>I’ve never considered myself a racist, though I would rather spend time with people like myself, which I consider more of a human trait.>>
>>If I must accept parts of “black” culture to avoid the label, count me out.>>
And that’s what it’s all about. It isn’t the skin color, it’s the culture. Yes, the culture is commonly in tandem with the skin color, and that’s at the heart of the problem. Until they can be separated, we’ll continue in the false supposition that it’s actually about race.
Oh yeah…and leave it to kids to _know_ what gets under your skin the most! Kids are amazing about “reading” parents…
RE: “What does this have to do with racism?” Everything. He knew without you telling him that “[you] would rather spend time with people like [your]self, which [you] consider more of a human trait.” He knew “[you] never considered [your]self a racist.” I’m NOT Saying you are, but racists never think they are racists. The kid knew he had more in common with “rappers” than with his “parents” who didn’t like black culture.
RE: “If I must accept parts of ‘black’ culture to avoid the label, count me out.” You must. That’s what equality means: accepting the best of both cultures and acknowledging people as equals. (I DO NOT mean that kids ought to have equal say with their parents.) You don’t have to like rappers; many black people don’t. But if you can find nothing of worth in black culture, it’s because you don’t want to.
brian,
kudos to you and your wife for adopting.
that said, what exactly do you mean by “black culture”? rap has long since been limited to inner city black youths and even then, it was not the dominant form of music throughout hte wider culture. older blacks in general abhohrr rap in all of it’s forms. it was first and foremost, rebel music from the underground in the inner city.
granted, it has morphed into the beast it is today but that is largely because record labels knew they had a buck to make by mass producing and commodifying this “culture”. why do you think you see so many white, asian, hispanic and black kids walking around with doo-rags on the baseball hat pimped to the side while their pants hang off their ass. no, it has permeated all of youth culture at this point regardless of color.
your son sounds like he doesn’t know the history of the genre. it isn’t gangster rap, it’s actually spoken word artists such as gil scott heron, who were anything but violent and uneducated. same could be said for pioneers such as public enemy. it might be a good idea for you to study up on some the origins and beneficial aspects of the culture. that way when he tries to claim some of the bad attitude as his own, you can correct him that he is not being a torchbearer, but a follower.
as for your other statements about black culture, i hope you realize that this country is steeped in black culture. it’s only more transparent now because the younger generations do not have the same filter of segregation and racism that many of us grew up with. they absorb all cultures as naturally as breathing. that’s why it’s not uncommon to see a black kid walking around with a japanese manga t-shirt or an asian kid with dreddlocks. the cultural paradigms that you have been referring to have all but broken down for them.
therefore, it is better to learn where they are coming from and educate them. i can’t believe how many of these kids would rather listen to lil john rather than “the last poets” or better yet “sam cooke”.
peace
“RE: “If I must accept parts of ‘black’ culture to avoid the label, count me out.” You must. That’s what equality means: accepting the best of both cultures and acknowledging people as equals. (I DO NOT mean that kids ought to have equal say with their parents.) You don’t have to like rappers; many black people don’t. But if you can find nothing of worth in black culture, it’s because you don’t want to.”
Helen, by that reasoning do you have to accept female genital mutilation because it’s part of many African/Muslim cultures? Or do you have to accept the subjugation of women because it’s part of Muslim culture? Or do you have to accept gang bangers and their drive by shootings because they’ve become an accepted part of black ghetto culture? Or that the British should have just stood by and let the Indian’s continue the practice of suttee, by which widow’s “voluntarily” immolated themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres?
That’s a kind of moral relativism I can’t accept. I strongly believe that there are aspects of our culture that are indeed better than other cultures, just as I’m open to the argument that there are aspects of other cultures that are better than ours. One of the yardsticks for this is whether people, regardless of culture, are (a) achieving their highest and best self and (b) enabling others within their culture to do the same.
Those aspects of black culture (most notably the gangsta rap part) that encourage violence, demeaning women and drugs are amazingly destructive. Am I honoring my brother as I honor myself if I just say “well, it’s their culture and I have to respect it,” or am I according blacks the greater honor as fellow human beings if I call them on this type of degrading cultural behavior?
hi helen!
you beat me to it. lol.
peace
>>The kid knew he had more in common with “rappers” than with his “parents” who didn’t like black culture.>>
No…he knew what would be antipathetic to his parents. He’s a typical rebellious teen, trying out stuff he knows will drive his parents nuts. Remember that tv series…oh boy….parents were hippy love children, and were constantly frustrated by their straight, suit-wearing, conservative, profit minded son??? I’m drawing a blank here…star who played the son has parkinson’s disease, and did the misleading ads about the fetal stem cell funding issue in Mississippi….
suek,
the actor was michael j. fox, the show was “family ties” and i don’t know what you mean by he did a misleading ad. he’s an advocate for stem cell research, so was christopher reeve, so is nancy reagan.
peace
book
i wouldn’t say that those are aspects of black culture. i would say those are aspects of the gangsta rap genre. see the difference. btw, guess who buys gangsta rap in far and away the most numbers…..young white males.
peace
Bookworm, There’s no sacrifice involved
That’s what people told themselves about Vietnam. So long as they don’t suffer, there’s no sacrifice involved.
star who played the son has parkinson’s disease, and did the misleading ads about the fetal stem cell funding issue in Mississippi….
That’d be Michael J Fox, I believe.
People should look up Harlem’s Renaissance for an interesting history on how civil rights interfaced with music and art styles. Music and art is oftentimes an expression of people’s emotions and feelings. When the times are chaotic, chaotic music results. But there was also the consideration of whether such music and art armed the civil rights movement by portraying blacks the way whites wanted to see them as. Funny looking watermelon eating samons, for example. That kind of stuff sold to whites. But if blacks kept making it, then whites could just treat blacks as the stereotypically “funny looking African indigs”.
There were attempts to get blacks to deal in European art in order to directly compare white and black work on an equal “stylistic” plane, so that people’s prejudices couldn’t simply just shove the blacks into a neat little corner via patronage.
Now a days, blacks think that stuff was “their” Africa/black heritage. But it was just one of many methods to separate blacks from European standards.
brian
quick question. do you know the names of any of the artists that he listens to? i may be able to help you sort it out. you must understand that all rap isn’t gangsta rap. he may actually be listening to something rather benign or even thought provoking. i know, i know, it all SOUNDS the same to your ears most likely but that could be a generational thing.
see if you can provide a list of the artists that he likes.
peace
Helen,
Stephen had been in this country two weeks when the dress battles began. I think these are the only images of black America he saw in Liberia, and assumed that IS black America.
If gangster rap is all there is to black culture, it doesn’t say much about black culture.
Someone suggested we buy dvd’s of The Cosby Show, to give him a few positive black role models to point him to.
Stephen had started hanging out with the latino gang wanna-bes at shool, but fortunately the son of a Kenyan family who lives down the street befriended Stephen. Their son is extremely motivated, a stellar scholar and has no time or patience for this version of black culture. His mother claims he isn’t going to be a banker, he’s going to own the bank.
Dagon,
I admit I don’t know much about the history of rap, or where gangster rap fits in the genre, but I’m talking about the images portrayed on MTV. He doesn’t listen to the music, just wanted to dress the part.
The music of Liberia is more Carribean– Bob Marley stuff.
brian
i understand. that’s a popular way for kids to dress though brian; of all colors. it’s just like trying on shoes. you’ve still got the punks, the emos, the preps. sounds like stephen gravitated towards the b-boy style. it’s only a biggie if it becomes one, just like anything else.
liberia, as ALL other african nations has rap artists. although the rap is usually tinged with carribean or african stylings. one of the top world artist is a rapper dj from paris who calls himself dj sol. rap is a prevalent genre, akin to rock. it takes many forms in many places.
peace
“btw, guess who buys gangsta rap in far and away the most numbers…..young white males.” I know that, Dagon. That was the point of my post: which is that a visible group of blacks team with Madison Avenue and Hollywood (big liberal constituencies) to foist on the average American the most degrading images possible of blacks.
brian, then there was this:
are you sure you want to stand by that question? it reveals a lot more about you than you may realize.
peace
book
please do some research on the genesis of this genre. “a visible group of blacks”?
bookworm, who owns the record companies? who owns the distribution channels? who has contracts with clearchannel? there are a handful of black entrepreneurs who founded their own companies but most of them, like sean combs put out the most benigh, radio friendly music.
rap is no different than rock was in it’s infancy. some of it is danceable, some of it is goofy, some of it performed by little jewish guys from new york. some of it is downright nasty. even gangsta rap has it’s flavors. if all you CHOOSE to see is those images then that probably goes to your personal filter. it’s like saying the sex pistols (who influenced) a generation foisted the most degraging images possible of british youth.
sure, if that’s all you wanted to see, that’s the conclusion you could make. but most were aware that there were other things going on besides “anarchy in the u.k”. same thing here. check out talib kweli, mos def, common or any number of young black artists that i could name. you would have a different picture.
peace
He doesn’t listen to the music, just wanted to dress the part.
BrianE, you should really try telling him that anybody that dresses that way is about as easy for someone like me to kill as children under the age of 8.
THey can’t fight. They can’t run. They can’t do much of anything in those clothes except pull out the sawed off shotty. But if he don’t got that, he’s in big trouble.
People from Liberia should understand what death and life on the streets mean and preferably not try to imitate targets for death.
question for all of you?
you actually pay attention to the stuff that ymar writes?
was anyone as disturbed as much by the above post as i was?
peace
I thought I was clear when I said, “You don’t have to like rappers; many black people don’t. But if you can find nothing of worth in black culture, it’s because you don’t want to.”
I don’t like rap music of any kind. But that’s a personal opinion.
Y. mentioned the Harlem Renaissance. That period brought fine art, good literature, and engaging music to America from blacks. That was what I was talking about.
I meant look for the universal in black culture and embrace it.
No, Bookworm, we don’t have to embrace female genital mutilation. Alice Walker wrote a novel about how awful it is. Embrace Alice Walker not genital mutilation. We don’t have to say everything blacks do is better than what whites do to recognize excellence when we see it.
Some of this this is just silly.
this this is silly, too.
I think Y, in his own way, was trying to give a firm but friendly warning that real predators are out there, and kids who can’t move or defend themselves are very soft targets.
dagon,
Remember the Paul Simon album Graceland? The music is similar to that. I understand that is South African, and there may be subtle differences that escape me.
He brought some cd’s with him, but I don’t know who they are. He’s heavily involved in soccer, so there isn’t much time for music.
dagon, you’ll have to tell me why that comment you highlighted is offensive. I don’t get it. I would certainly hope there is more to white culture than head banger music. As to black culture in art, I’ll refer you to my wife, since our living room is quaintly called The African Room.
Y,
come to think of it, the small boy units were kind of rapper looking.
Helen,
I consider myself prejudiced against certain music, not racist.
Don’t get me wrong, Stephen is a great kid. And us adapting to him and vice versa hasn’t been easy for him, or us.
brian
it wasn’t offensive but it WAS unnecessary. of course there is much more to black culture than gangsta rap music. in chicago, the only place you can even hear gangsta rap is on white “jack” stations such as the clearchannel owned Q101. all of the black-themed stations play r&b standards or adult contemporary.
peace
Y is making a point, and unfortunately a very, very valid one.
I work with security issues when I’m not overseas, especially looking at trends in border regions and gang activity. Looking like a rival gang member is often the only criteria in selecting targets for “entry” credentials. Wearing the wrong color prominently, dressing in a particular fashion, or being the wrong skin color (black, hispanic, oriental, or white depending on the area) are all reasons that had given by perpetrators for murder and attempted murder.
And yes, that style is physically limiting; it was chosen to be thus – proclaiming that the wearer was armed. He had to be – he could neither run nor fight otherwise. Call it the bravado of the gun.
Anyhow, we’ve slipped away from the point of this discussion – and the fact we are having it makes BW’s point more poignantly than I can properly express. America is not a “racist nation” by any stretch. We don’t have to like each other or hate each other. Voting to assauge your conscience is a poorly considered action – did you vote for Jesse Jackson when he ran? Or did you put on your pragmatist hat and wait for someone electable? And what does it say about you that you were willing to let your guilt dictate your actions?
Final one for you Helen – I celebrate excellence in all forms, in any shape, size, and form. I take umbrage when the sole elevating point of an art form – be it dance, song, painting, sculpture, or literature – is described as an excellent piece of “insert racial/social type” artwork. If it is exceptional, it is exceptional – it doesn’t matter if the artist was black, gay, native american, or whatever. When the artwork must be prefaced by a social narrative to earn the distinction “exceptional” then we accept that it would not be an exceptional piece for an artist of unnamed or undisclosed social or racial type. You’ve separated and lessened their contribution – especially if the artwork could (SHOULD!) stand on its own without need for racial attribution. “Look, the poor primitive can actually paint! What an exceptional example of unattributed aboriginal artwork!”
Anyone else feel the warmth of the condescension in that phrase?
I’m glad I’m “green” as in Army. They judge me by my salad row, my rank insignia, my branch, and my service stripes. Those colors are quite nice and say that I’m a qualified soldier. They say the same thing for each one wearing the uniform and don’t say that he (or she) is a great soldier for an African-American, or a Hispanic, or whatever.
SSG Dave – “We are all individuals within our own prisons; tribe is nothing more than the cellblock defining which inmates share our view of the sun through the window slits.”
dagon,
point taken.
Helen L. says in #29
“Voting for Obama has nothing to do with appeasing my conscience (that’s between me and God) and everything to do with making life in America (please leave other nations out of it, folks. This is a national election.) more nearly equal for African Americans, which, of course, means more nearly equal for us all (because no one will have an unfair advantage).”
Helen’s argument is practically identical to one my liberal friend makes in one of our frequent debates, on which we never end up agreeing on anything. (My friend is more, well, expletively colorful than Helen, who via her website can be seen to be a truly gentle and clearly sensitive, kind-hearted person.)
It is why we keep seeing their position as being fundamentally anti-American: They examine us with the iron gaze of a cold-hearted and judgmental skeptic, and absolutely refuse to examine any other country or people. And they find us deeply at fault, and do not care at all to perform any comparisons. No comparisons to how far we’ve come; no comparisons to the horrors of racism and tribalism and other “hate the Other”-isms to be found nearly everywhere you look beyond our borders.
You know, I try to understand, I really do, but I simply cannot fathom it. The unfairness takes my breath away and I end up simply resentful, which doesn’t help at all.
I can go this far. I can compare us against our own ideal and see how woefully short we come. And try to stop there without my caveats.
I can understand how, if you look at the rest of the world, you can run the risk of saying, “See, compared to them, we’re fine”, and relapse into the shell of not caring at all, because in my nieghborhood, and among my coworkers and my friends, there isn’t any racism. And that leads me to relax in my comfort zone and simply pretend that there isn’t any meaningful racism in America, and I don’t have to therefore fight it nor genuinely feel bad or angry or outraged. And Helen and my friend are justifiably outraged at that resulting indifference when they encounter it.
But I still can’t excuse the shocking unfairness of the repeated one-sided criticisms of America. You’ll get pages and pages of criticisms of America, and only one sentence of admittance: “Sure, there’s terrible nastiness across the world”, immediately followed by “BUT…” and another twenty paragraph diatribe about the failures in America.
Sigh. Worldviews colliding. Little mutual understanding. The Big Chill.
>>was anyone as disturbed as much by the above post as i was?>>
What McLaren said.
But it raised a funny picture in my mind…last week, there was an LA car chase on TV. Live. Cops flattened the tires of the perps, then the two young men got out of the car. Passenger laid down on the concrete and was arrested. The driver got out and started running. Problem was, his pants were so low that they were in danger of falling off. He ran a half block one way, saw more cops. Ran back again…all the time hanging onto to his pants so they wouldn’t fall down around his ankles…finally gave up, but could only put one hand up until the cops got him down on the ground…otherwise his pants would have fallen down. Fortunately, no one got hurt. Some random car damage, but no injuries.
Pants worn so low that nothing really keeps them on…priceless!
Sorry, I have to add: When it comes to Obama, have you noticed that liberals cannot even admit in words that we are making a completely correct decision according to our politics? They refuse to even type that, to give us that small pittance.
And I can say that Michael Steele would make a fantastic presidential candidate, whom I would vote for over any Democrat I can think of… and yet I will still be viewed as a racist. I can find Clarence Thomas’ opinions consistently superior to those of five or six of the other Supreme Court justices… yet I am still a racist.
I haven’t encountered a liberal yet who can find the inner grace to admit in print that conservatives who believe these things aren’t racist, that though they disagree with us they can see that we have valid points. They simply… cannot… bring themselves to do it.
>>was anyone as disturbed as much by the above post as i was?>>
Thinking about this statement again…
How lucky we all are that we live in a time and place where you could find Y’s statement disturbing instead of simply a matter of fact.
>>People from Liberia should understand what death and life on the streets mean and preferably not try to imitate targets for death.>>
That’s the reality in many places in the world.
suek,
I think you’re referring to:
“I think Y, in his own way, was trying to give a firm but friendly warning that real predators are out there, and kids who can’t move or defend themselves are very soft targets.”
and I glossed over it; I suppose yes I can envision some terrible motion pictures in my head of some defenseless ten-year-old stalked by sexual predators in a car where the child simply cannot run away… or being shot at by a predator seeking a thrill kill and unable to flee or hide.
But in general, baggy-pants wearing kids in safe communities are generally quite safe, and the ones in dangerous communities have already learned not to leave themselves alone and therefore vulnerable, so yeah, I guess I just glossed over it and went on.
I tend to laugh reflexively and with great enjoyment at absurdities (even of serious situations, as long as they end well), and your description of the cop chase of the thug carjackers was a belly-roarer! Thank you!
Dennis Prager has an excellent essay on why Racism is the only explanation if Obama loses. An excerpt:
“The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election — where do all these Republican voters come from? And that in turn explains why liberals ascribe Republican presidential victories to unfair election tactics (“Swift-boating” is the liberals’ reason for the 2004 Republican victory). In any fair election, Americans will see the left’s light.”
read the rest of it:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/liberals_warnings_about_obama.html
RE: “Sorry, I have to add: When it comes to Obama, have you noticed that liberals cannot even admit in words that we are making a completely correct decision according to our politics? They refuse to even type that, to give us that small pittance.”
Okay. Conservatives are making a completely correct decision according to their politics. Of course, they are.
Conservatives ignore race and do not usually believe racism is an important political issue. They come up with some “exceptional” black person that they would vote for, if he/she ran. Only he/she isn’t running, so they can’t possibly vote for “the” balck person who is running. It all makes sense to them. And they will vote their consciences, which is the way everyone (liberal, conservative, progressive, black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, sane, crazy, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, or any other group or subgroup you can name or don’t know) should vote. Is that what you meant, Mike Devx?
I’m tired of this, I’m sick of this, I’m fed up with this.
If black Americans are justifiably incensed over the N word, white Americans should be equally intolerant of the R word being thrown around gratuitously.
And I blame journalists for some of this. I blame the education system.
I blame it on the thesaurus.
How many times did you pull out that tool of the devil late at night while feverishly working on the paper which had procrastinated over until hours before reckoning, looking for an adjective more colorful than the one previously used six times, only to be left
wantingabsentlacking.Maybe it was a certain dullness of thought, or the inability to articulate, or just plain laziness that prevented you from finding the right word.
So it is the Racism. Let’s play the word association game. I say right, you say…wrong. Up… down. Pretty…. ugly. Racism… KKK. I would suggest anyone over the age of 40 will have the same response. And here’s my objection. It is such an emotionally charged word, with associations that are so vile, it makes an easy choice for those looking for leverage, a gotcha word for which there is only a muted defense.
English is so imprecise. Greek has four words to describe love. English– we torture one word and thereby miss the impact the word deserves.
So it is with racism, IMHO.
Why not prejudiced when I’m willing to settle for sterotypes.
Why not bigot when I’m intolerant of others.
Why not intolerant when I’m unwilling to give others a chance.
But no, we throw racist out there, hoping to smear whoever it lands on, wherever it sticks. By doing so, we do injustice to those who suffered under the brutal oppression of the real thing.
>>Okay. Conservatives are making a completely correct decision according to their politics. Of course, they are.>>
No, it has nothing to do with “a completely correct decision”. It _does_ have to do with their politics.
Would you agree that Obama is _less_ inclined to stay in Iraq if necessary than is McCain?
Would you agree that Obama is more pro-abortion than McCain?
Would you agree that Obama is inclined toward higher taxes to be collected, in order to give stimulus rebates to low income citizens than is McCain?
If you agree on these three basic concepts, then it seems only logical that if I favor the Obama inclinations, I’d vote for him, and if I favor the McCain position, I’d vote for McCain. Skin color simply doesn’t come into the picture.
Obviously there are other disagreements in their positions, but these three just came to mind.
“They come up with some “exceptional” black person that they would vote for, if he/she ran. Only he/she isn’t running, so they can’t possibly vote for “the” balck person who is running. It all makes sense to them.” — Helen L
So, Helen, if I am willing to vote for some Black persons, but not all/any Black persons, then I am a racist? I must vote for “the black person who is running” otherwise I am a racist?
As I have said before, for me personally this election has been an eye-opener on many levels. To quote the schoolyard/Pee-Wee Herman retort: “I know you are but what am I?”
And us adapting to him and vice versa hasn’t been easy for him, or us.
I’m a libertarian on most social issues, which is different from a classical liberal for classical liberals care about justice, equality, and merit while libertarians don’t care what you do so long as it doesn’t impact in any way on me.
In that respect, I don’t care what Stephen wears. So I had a choice of saying that to Brian or respecting Brian’s worries. I chose the latter. But to do that, I needed a point of commonality. Something which I can use to agree with Brian, yet not violate my principles of liberty and care free social attitudes. The only thing that I would find reasonable enough to ban an individual from wearing such clothes as Brian has described would be fighting orientated. If it decreases the fighting capabilities of the user, then I can tell that to him and perhaps he will realize that making himself into an easier target is not such a wise thing all in all. This is a different argument than saying gansta rap is “x”.
There are three kinds of people in terms of societal roles. Not jobs, but just roles they play in greater society. There’s the predator who preys on everybody with no consideration of societal rules or limitations except the limitation of reality. There’s people like me who can prey on people but choose not to for various reasons. And then there are the sheep who are defenseless against both of us.
If a person likes the “culture” so much that he or she is willing to take a lower social position compared to people like me and people like Tookie/Saddam, that’s their choice to make. But let’s be clear on the consequences of such choices.
I find that fake liberals are very disturbed by this categorization of society. Their view of society concerns itself more with that Utopian social justice thing rather than the harsh realities of life and death.
In most social issues, I would be neutral in relation to Brian telling his son what to wear and what not. That is the best you can expect. However, I believe it is my duty to at least try to tell people that their choices in life may be prioritizing their culture over their life. If that’s okay with them, fine. If that’s not okay with them, then maybe somebody should tell them so.
If you ask my personal opinion, arguments of style or “culture vs culture” fades in comparison to the strength of the argument “do this and you’ll likely make it easier for others to kill you”.
If you want the sheepdog’s analysis of why or how, please read Dave’s comment up above. He has the experience, wisdom, and communication abilities to inform you of what is what. Those that don’t listen, take their own lives into their hands. Which is fine with me, for it is their life, not mine. If they want to throw it away, I have no problems with it. I do have a problem with it when it starts impinging on my own life, however. As is true with gang crime.
and I glossed over it; I suppose yes I can envision some terrible motion pictures in my head of some defenseless ten-year-old stalked by sexual predators in a car where the child simply cannot run away… or being shot at by a predator seeking a thrill kill and unable to flee or hide.
You have to think like a predator. The best security details are able to predict threats simply by putting themselves in the shoes of attackers and asking “if I wanted to kill this CEO I am protecting, how would I go about doing it”.
This is why the US military’s use of force, killing, and bombing can be so easily confused by Leftist propaganda with AQ’s use of force, killing, and bombing.
To the sheep, the sheepdog’s fangs look just like the fangs of wolves. How is the sheep supposed to know the difference when the sheep have no fangs?
Here’s a simple example from Target Focus Training. It’s not long or complex.
A good training, mentally at least, is to take a look at any man or woman, young or old, and think about how you would go about crushing their windpipe, destroying their eyes, rupturing their eardrums, snapping their knees backwards or sideways, and generally destroying the body of a peaceful and law abiding citizen of the United States of America.
It is building a better monster. Take a look at all the things you fear in a serial killer, mass murderer, ruthless sob, and then adopt what makes him powerful into yourself. It is building yourself into the monster you hate and fear. Only then will you ever truly be free of that fear once you realize that violence doesn’t care who wields it. Angel or devil, citizen or law breaker, retard or genius: it does not matter to violence who wields it. Violence will do what it does to the target regardless of the wielder’s intentions or “technique”. Violence is like any tool: it does only what it is told to do. If people give it dumb commands, it’ll carry them out to the best extent of physics.
Most people don’t want to do that. It has to do with empathy, you see. We like to think of ourselves as empathic, but we’re only empathic with people we believe are like us most of the time. It’s always been hard for human beings to empathize with the “Other”, you know. There’s also the matter that serial killers are shunned in society and part of how society enforces this is to make anyone who even thinks about doing what the serial killer is doing into somebody that is “evil” and a social pariah. Society does this to protect itself. However, we are individuals with free will, not just ants in a colony hive beholden to “society’s” desires.
(There’s a curious society in a society trend when the Left tried to protect Tookie from the rest of our society. That’s not beneficial for individuals, necessarily, either. It’s just beneficial to Leftist society.)
I promised shortness and here it is. That’s bout as short as you can expect, right
Tft has a blog up too, if you want to read some of their posts
Good stuff.
Most of the reason why people feel disturbed when folks talk about doing violence is because there is a societal conditioning in all of us, well except for the sociopaths, that convinces us that whomever uses violence is destroying society. It’s like guilt: it is designed to help society or a tribe survive lean times.
Violence is just a tool, like war. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it.
nservatives ignore race and do not usually believe racism is an important political issue.
This makes no sense, Helen. If conservatives ignored race, why did the Radical Republicans fight a Civil War to liberate slaves from the Democrat party? WHy did Radical Republicans, against Lincoln’s VP pick, try to institute laws that will secure the liberty and equality of freed slaves during Reconstruction? Why did Republicans push through Civil Rights legislation against the Democrats in the House and Senate in the 20th century if conservatives ignore race and do not believe racism is an important political issue?
Y., Weren’t JFK and LBJ Democrats? Didn’t much of the Civil Rights Legislation pass when they were in office? When did Republicans push Civil Rights legislation?
Call it the bravado of the gun.
Against true marksmen, their brains would be on the concrete with such limited mobility and inability to take cover/concealment even had they been armed.
Course, in our day and age, such are very rare. In fact, warriors of such caliber have always been rare. Whether one is a Miyamoto Musashi or a modern day Marine sniper. Always rare: always a small percent of the total population.
America is not a “racist nation” by any stretch.
I believe that should the Democrat party gain ascendance for a couple of decades more, that America would become a racist nation.
Didn’t much of the Civil Rights Legislation pass when they were in office?
Robert Byrd the Democrat filibustered the Civil Rights Act. JFK got killed, so who knows what he would have done. LBJ signed what he had to sign or else get even more problems added unto the ones he was facing in Vietnam. This does not really mean the Democrats or their leaders helped pass the bill. At most, one can say that they didn’t stand in the way of attempts to address racism.
Surely you don’t believe that everything that passes in Congress was created by the sitting President?
When did Republicans push Civil Rights legislation?
Most of the people voting for the Civil Rights Act under LBJ were Republicans, not Democrats.
http://www.targetfocustraining.com/articles/usanews.html
Don’t miss that. Executive of USA News reports on his experiences at TFT.
He mentions much about getting your mind around the new views on violence. For most people, fair play, martial arts rules, and so forth have been the standard of the day.
Y,
We’re back here again; yep, I’m a watchdog by nature. My wife still finds it funny that most of my family (except my Dad) are pretty much sheep and get really nervous around me. Especially after she laughed out loud when several members stated that I couldn’t have been involved in anything dangerous – I was an intelligence guy with an office job. I called home on all the right days and never talked about bad things. I had to talk with her about that – my Mom didn’t know what to do with me for the whole weekend visit, just fluttered and fussed.
Which was amusing in and of itself both to my wife and I.
I like your reference to target focused training. I use it constantly, even in the “real world” with non-violent objectives. The methodology of setting a near (very short term) target, hitting the target, and moving to the next target in your sequence to achieve the ultimate goal is a powerful tool for helping keep up motivation and reinforce positive action. It is also a very effective way of dealing with hostiles, potential hostiles, evasion routes, assault routes, and secure zones. Identify, orient, evaluate, engage, then start over.
I’m glad you’re a libertarian – I’ll turn into one when I get out of this line of work.
SSG Dave – “Everybody lies.” ~Dr. Gregory House
Helen
(please leave other nations out of it, folks. This is a national election.)
You have previously made the argument regardless of elections. The point about comparing ourselves to other nations is to interject some realism into the debate. I get the impression you are holding the US to standards you do not apply elsewhere. To the best of my recollection, I have not heard you decry bigotry or racism outside the US. BTW, does it not seem rather strange that Europeans overwhelmingly support Obama, yet by most measures Europeans are more ethnocentric, more bigoted , and more racist than Americans?
BTW, Helen, when you bring up racism, I feel as if I am being nagged. That is my reaction. My actions were on the right side from elementary school on, as the offspring of a Tuskegee airman will testify. In trying to make conservatives such as me feel guilty for “racism,” you simply aggravate me. I have previously noted that of the 15 Presidents who had previously been US Senators, only one had “none of the following” in experience: military service, state governor, US cabinet member, US vice-president. That would be Warren Harding. That experience/non-experience metric also describes Obama. If to vote against a grossly unqualified person such as Obama is racism, so be it.Or do you think that Warren Harding did a good job?
Conservatives ignore race and do not usually believe racism is an important political issue. They come up with some “exceptional” black person that they would vote for, if he/she ran. Only he/she isn’t running, so they can’t possibly vote for “the” balck person who is running,
Helen, before you make such a remark, you should take the trouble to inform yourself about the facts. I refer to Michael Steele running for US Senator in Maryland, Kenneth Blackwell running for Governor in Ohio, and Lynn Swann running for Governor in Pennsylvania. The first US Senator of Afro-American origin in the post-Reconstruction era was Ed Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, though admittedly not a conservative.
Y., Weren’t JFK and LBJ Democrats? Didn’t much of the Civil Rights Legislation pass when they were in office? When did Republicans push Civil Rights legislation?
JFK does not look very good with regard to what he did for Civil Rights. Texan LBJ deserves a lot of praise for pushing the Civil Rights Bill. LBJ’s stance was not popular at all in the South, though Jake Pickle in LBJ’s home 10th Congressional District was one of the few Southerners to vote for the bill. Lady Bird showed a LOT of guts in taking a whistle-stop railroad speechmaking tour of the South that summer, defending the Civil Rights Bill. Also note that Republican Senator Everett Dirksen played a key role in getting the Civil Rights Bills passed. As has previously been pointed out, former KKK member Robert Byrd ( D- W VA) filibustered for 14 hours against the Civil Rights Bill in 1964.
A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights legislation.
BTW, in my family, the Republicans, who had a family member who had died at Harper’s Ferry fighting on the side of John Brown, were for the Civil Rights Bill. The Democrats in my family, with the exception of my mother who no longer lived south of the Mason-Dixon line, who had slave-owners among their ancestors, were against the Civil Rights Bill.
Gringo,
How did I “bring up racism”? The title of this post is “Are Americans Really Racist?” Didn’t Bookworm write that and decide the subject we were discussing?
It is silly to call me out for discussing the topic, regardless of the fact that you don’t like what I have to say about it.
Helen, if you wish to ignore feedback, that is your choice.
Helen, you are correct that racism IS the topic of the thread. “Bring up” may imply that you discussed racism in a thread that did not previously discuss racism. It was not my intention to imply that. I will therefore rephrase. I am not a word person, and I need to be more precise.
Previous sentence.
Rewritten sentence.
Because I do. That sentence describes my sentiments precisely.
Helen, in #64 -
“Is that what you meant, Mike Devx?”
Helen, yes it was, and thank you! You are a rare individual on the left, capable of grace, at least in my (limited) experience. (But it was already clear that grace is one of your best points.) You’re the first that I know of that was capable of writing that and putting your name to it.
Though it *was* a touch snarky to say that I, or we, identify one exceptional black person who isn’t running just to say we *would* vote for him if we were, though of course we can’t… but that’s beside the point. You at least were able to do that, and I was beginning to believe that not one liberal could.
Sgt Dave in #75:
“Identify, orient, evaluate, engage, then start over.”
Is that the same concept as the OODA loop?
(Observe-Orient-Decide-Act)
It’s the same or close (there may be subtle differences in the approach)
The OODA loop includes concepts that allow you to inter-penetrate two people’s thinking together.
But if you are just talking about a person’s planning, then you can streamline their thinking by getting rid of a lot of useless stuff in the process.
Most people, for example about Iraq, think about all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with getting the job done there. They don’t identify, orient, evaluate, and engage, for example. Somebody else is doing that for them in part or in whole.
How did I “bring up racism”? The title of this post is “Are Americans Really Racist?” Didn’t Bookworm write that and decide the subject we were discussing?
Gringo means that white privilege is causing him to feel unnecessary guilt at hearing you talk about America being racist.
White privilege, as you mean it, of course.
This communication is translated for Helen’s benefit, so please beware of this fact when reading it.
For an addition to the racism thread, here is Ted Kennedy talking about Neanderthals in 2003.
Link courtesy of a commenter in Gateway Pundit.
Also from the Gateway Pundit article.
It does not provide links for the JFK/LBJ quotes.
Helen said:
Helen, we all spend time with people who share our interests, our outlook on life. We’re all on this blog for a reason– well maybe not you, because we share some conservative value in common. Doesn’t mean we agree on everything, but we start from a common world view– the view that government isn’t the solution to the problems facing the world. As a great American once said, “Government is the problem.”
I could care less what color your skin is, but to be friends, to share time together, there must be some common interest.
When immigrants come to this country, what’s the first thing they do– they find others who share their culture, their beliefs, their interests. Does that make them racist?
As to music, I don’t like any music that glorifies power without accepting the responsibility that comes with it. That’s just thuggery. I don’t like music that degrades women whether it be white, black or blue music.
Are you suggesting that I find a token black family to share cultures with so I can proudly define myself as not racist? And if I don’t I’m racist? What nonsense.
Helen, I’m under no obligation to accept anything. My only obligation is to treat others as I would want them to treat me. That doesn’t mean I validate their culture, their lifestyles, or their liberal beliefs. And you speak of black culture as if it were some monolith. Guess what. It’s as diverse as white culture and no I don’t like all of white culture. Does that qualify as white on white racism?
My point is this, we’ve turned the term racist into a badgering ram, a sort of liberal temper tantrum.
>>My point is this, we’ve turned the term racist into a badgering ram, a sort of liberal temper tantrum.>>
Funny. I read this and suddenly got the mental flash of “Submit”…as in islam.
Helen, as a conservative I voted for a state-wide black candidate in 3 elections in Ohio. I also voted for a black judge, and even went door-to-door for him.
Does that insulate me from being racist? If so, why and if not, why not?
Mike Devx (in reply to #80),
If it’s “a touch snarky to say that I, or we, identify one exceptional black person who isn’t running just to say we *would* vote for him if we were, though of course we can’t, . . .” it’s also a touch snarky to single me out as a lone liberal who will sign her name to a given statement. Seems to me ignorance of liberals and blacks abounds.
BrianE (#85),
Of course, we spend time with people like us. That isn’t racism. But ridding our nation of racism requires us to step outside our “comfort zones” (I hate that silly phrase). How do we treat others “treat others as [we] would want them to treat [us] without finding something of value in the way they live? If we ignore their culture, we must be lording our over them (as in, white is right).
And no, you don’t have to accept anything. You don’t have to buy my arguments, accept anything about blacks, or even agree that lunch comes about noon.
SueK (#86),
Heaven help us not use a “battering ram” to establish equality.
Sadly, as I read this and suddenly got the mental flash of “Submit”…as in to Jesus!
McLaren (#87),
No. It doesn’t “insulate” you from anything. It’s just a fact about something you did. Everyone can change from time to time (take Bookworm for example, a conservative but formerly liberal). Beside that. I’m not the judge. God is.
one correction helen.
bookworm was never liberal.
peace
I was liberal.
Anyway, Helen, it seems you ARE the judge. You seem to know that racism is inherent in conservatives, or “Republicans.” Therefore, you have made a judgment about an entire class of people. Seems kind of, well, bigoted.
Dagon, substantive statements and arguments are always welcome here. Heat of the moment snarks are tolerated. Your cold-blooded insults directed at me are no longer welcome. Good-bye.
McLaren,
Racism isn’t any more “inherent” in conservatives than anyone else. If I gave the impression I think so, I do apologize.
Every “class of people” is made up of individuals. Some conservatives are racist; some are not. Some liberals are racist; some are not. Some middle-of-the-roaders are racists; some are not. I write to thinking individuals (everyone who reads this blog or mine or anywhere else I leave a comment), not “classes of people,” in hopes that one more person might give up this illogical hatred called racism.
I do not know any of the people on this blog, except by their comments. I must presume little, and try to make the message clear. Some “get it”; some never will. But if just one does, then hallelujah!
BW,
Your choice, your place. I agree with your action. Dagon could someday develop into a good debate partner if he’d stop being so lazy in his writing and get his temper under control. Hopefully he’ll learn; if not, we’ll never have the joy of finding the good things that only come from loyal opponents and competing hypotheses.
SSG Dave – “In the end, it is never wise to fight battles when speaking will do. Contrariwise, it is utter folly to try and speak when a battle is required.”
Helen,
You know you’re my favorite liberal! I hope you don’t take anything I say personally.
Helen, thank you for the response.
By “class” of people, I was responding to a perceived classification by you. I stand corected.
McLaren,
I have the same message to everyone. If the shoe fits, wear it. If not, ignore me and keep on living.
My message is much easier to express what I believe in poetry than prose, but fewer people seem to “get it.” So I use both.
Unsought Revelation
by Helen Losse
I did not ask
to know what I know,
to stand before God
Spirit-filled to the brim—
a prophetic, new voice
within me. Why am I
chosen as speaker,
whose variant words
are oftentimes
questioned? It would be
easier to believe as
others believe, to label
what I didn’t seek
but often say,
call it false tidings
not ones of racial salvation.
It is easier to argue
than to listen, easier to
hear the roar of a preacher
than an out-of-place lion,
easier to look for
revelation only from
John. It is easier still
to walk on the white,
stone path toward a country
church or store-front church
than it is to chop one’s
way through the hot, humid
jungles of Azania—
the continent from which
native churches now send
missionaries to America,
so Americans, too, can find
their way toward the Truth,
and the Light, Who is both
dark-skinned and Jesus.
BTW, Helen, let me add my voice here to the others who have identified you as their “favorite liberal.” You are invariably polite and thoughtful, even when we differ on very fundamental principles. Yours is a rare quality regardless of political viewpoint, and you are always appreciated as a visitor here.
Thanks Bookworm. I’m a liberal. I aim not to be an obnoxious liberal.
Helen,
I appreciate your calling to religion; I just have no place for a messiah in the Oval Office.
I am an agent of Truth; Truth is not pretty, bright, easily found, or comforting.
Lies are comforting, lies are pretty and bright. Anything easily found is worth the cost to find it. Take that at its face value.
I find the call of Obama’s supporters to worship fearsome; if he is a deity come to earth as you imply he is then faultless. The closest parallel to this subsuming of self to religion in recent history is found in the godless cults of North Korea, the pseudo-godhead of Ahmadinejad, and the monumental brainwashing that was socialism in eastern Europe and Russia.
Wake up, take your religion home and keep it there – private and free. I don’t want it.
Though, as always, I shall defend to the death your right to speak as you will and worship as you wish. I am a citizen soldier; not a crusader. I am an intelligence professional, a scholar, and a teacher. And I am a man who fears G-d; as my ancestors in knowledge have written, the only path to salvation lies within your own heart. Looking to another for salvation is folly; no one can know the plan of the almighty. One must do what they can, as they can. Azania fell years ago; the wisdom we can carry from them is simple and profound. Learn and adapt. Or fail and become slaves to the whims of others who did.
I think I shall not be responding after this to evangelical cries to open my spirit.
I am tired of people trying to save my soul via politics.
I look forward to the day that I will be judged not by the color of my skin but by the content of my soul and the actions of my hands.
I look forward to the day when people stop hating and hurting each other.
But I know those days shall never come to pass. We are human. We judge; we hate; we hurt; and we prosetylize. When we have moved beyond these things we shall not be human any longer. And I don’t know if that will be a day for weeping or dancing.
Until then I shall stand my post, protecting that which I hold dear, and pray quietly for strength from the G-d I recognize within my own heart. I have less in common with the Apostles than with the Centurion. I shall live with that, then; it is to be seen if I shall be forgiven or these sins held bound.
SSG Dave – “If they claim to know the Truth, they are probably lying or mistaken. G-d keeps the truth to himself, lest mankind be overwhelmed.”
Very nice, Helen.
Let me ask you: Who are you to lay out shoes for people to fit?
It seems that would be a very unattractive trait if practiced by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Why try to fit shoes to anybody?
This is the path Helen sees God asking her to walk. She is merely asking others to join her, if the shoes fit.
I would guess the shoes don’t fit.
Fine. I have a pair of shoes for everybody to try on, but it’s the same pair I found on my own. Kind of hard to fit for everybody else….
McLaren,
BrianE (#101) is absolutely correct. It’s an invitation to join me.
BrianE, (#99)
Obama’s Official site http://www.barackobama.com/index.php states the following: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.” That sounds like he’s the preacher (the leader) not the messiah. Sounds like an altar call to me. Like what you’d hear any Sunday morning in many protestant churches. Obama is a fallible human being. A sinner saved by God’s grace. Just like rest of us.
What he is calling for is more attention (and breaks) for common people and fewer for the top few. That’s the change he hopes to bring to Washington. If you’re one of the top few, I understand why you’d want to vote Republican. If you aren’t, I don’t get it. . . . unless you (not you personally, anyone who holds this view) really are racist, and think it’s better to side with whites than to admit that financially at least you are more similar to blacks and Hispanics (as a whole, not citing the exceptions). The rich will stay rich in anybody’s plan. It’s just that the government will work for and by poor folks, too. Just think how many homes for the homeless that “bailout money” could buy.
I, too, “look forward to the day when people stop hating and hurting each other.” And I have hope that we can make the world – not perfect – but more nearly the way God has always planned.
Helen,
My position is fairly simple.
Economic opportunity doesn’t originate from the government. Government stifles economic opportunity.
While I’m not a big fan of the super rich, they are a necessary evil for a growing economy that in the end lifts all boats.
My wife’s family lived on a farm bordering an Indian reservation. If there ever was a policy that guaranteed a group of people remain dependant on the government, it was our Indian policy. Before I met my wife, in the 60′s, the government came in and built these folks nice ‘American’ houses, right next to their teepees. What did the Indians do? They literally chopped the houses apart for firewood. We only appreciate what we’ve sacrificed for.
I am happy to say, that the Indians are doing fine now, they developed a set of elders with business sense and are relying on themselves (no casino). Instead of being looked down on in the white community, they are respected members and I was at her nephew’s graduation this summer, which included a very moving Indian ceremony. That wouldn’t have happened even 20 years ago.
Whenever I consider how bad it is in the US, I think of Liberia. We support a group called All God’s Children that offers free education (education isn’t free in Liberia). They also provide a meal. This is for kids with families, not orphans. The reality some of those kids don’t eat for two days each weekend, waiting for the school week when they are fed.
This is bullshit. This is an opinion based on an abject ignorance of basic economics and human nature. You’re right, you don’t get it. I have news for you, Helen. There are more poor white people than black or hispanic, not that anybody’s skin color means a damn thing. But apparently it means everything to you. Your opinion is beyond offensive. Barry Obama and his wife are the top few, in case you hadn’t heard the news. Go ahead and buy his line of crap. I’ll pray for you while you wallow in that filth.
But ridding our nation of racism requires us to step outside our “comfort zones” (I hate that silly phrase).
You people here may or may not have already known this about helen, but when she speaks of racism, she is speaking of it from the “white privilege” and “institutional racism” world view. That world view shares the same fundamental class warfare thesis as communism. The thesis states that due to the fact that some races will be more successful than other races, this creates an inevitable race warfare much as Marx’s class warfare. The “racism” then is the perpetuation of the difference in race, economically and politically. Just like Marx, so long as there is a difference between race or class, whether that difference is justified or not, there will be an inevitable conflict amongst people of different races and classes. The rich subdue and oppress the poor proletariat, just like the whites subdue and oppress the weak blacks and minorities. This is white privilege. This is where helen is coming from.
When you think of racism, most classical liberals jump to issues of justice, fairness, and equal treatment. Helen is not talking about those things. They are not top priorities.
Your cold-blooded insults directed at me are no longer welcome. Good-bye.
Oh happy day.
“I have no name;
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee! -William Blake
Woot woot
Dagon could someday develop into a good debate partner if he’d stop being so lazy in his writing and get his temper under control.
You should have seen Dagon attacking Book a few years ago. Nasty misogynistic stuff right there. No surprise Dagon’s part of the pack trying to eliminate Sarah.
If you aren’t, I don’t get it
You don’t get that we’re asking you to believe that everything you have been taught your entire life was a lie, helen? That’s not that complex to get, compared to actually accepting it.
>>That’s the change he hopes to bring to Washington. >>
Sadly, Helen, you have been deceived. Look at the present financial situation. In three years Obama has received more in contributions from the FMs than all the Senators but one. He has earmarked nearly one _billion_ dollars during his short time on the Senate, some of which directly benefited him, through a tripling of his wife’s salary.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/obama_dollars.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/big_labors_billion_dollar_bet_1.html
Read these with an open mind. Does your faith in Obama supercede your reason?
The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring.
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells� cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.
Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
�Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.�
Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mother
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest;
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.
William Blake (1757-1827) P. 1789
This is true for the birth and death of anything.
By Republican principles, voting for Democrats is the same as voting to keep racism alive, prejudice alive, and discrimination and oppression of minorities vigorous. You, helen, can’t conceive that what you believe is true of the Democrat party is only ever true of the Republican party, and what you believe to be the truth of the Republican party is actually true of the Democrat party.
The Little Black Boy
by William Blake
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointed to the east, began to say:
“Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
“For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, ‘Come out from the grove, my love and care
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice’,”
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
Perahps the racism in this poem is evident. Perhaps not.
Nothing is evident in Blake’s poetry. Nothing is evident in poetry. That’s why it’s not prose.
Submitted 09/25/08…
The Watcher’s Councils nominations are up! Council Submissions The Glittering Eye – Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There – I’ll admit that I’m impressed that Sen. McCain has called for a suspension of the campaign in order to deal with the financia…
Oh, well when you put it like THAT. So really when I say “economic ignorance” and “…you don’t get it…” I mean it in the institutional way, as in a general vacuum of literacy in things that concern both micro and macro economics.
No offense Ymar…..just venting….