A true enough statement. We are all Americans. But I give you exibit A.
President Panther speaks...
Feel comfortable now?
Posted on 07/21/2010 5:32:20 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.
Instead, the conversation just got dumber.
The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.
“I thought we were going to move beyond this,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative historian of race and a Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who called the current racial climate “a catastrophe.”
“There’s a kind of heightened racial consciousness that’s very worrisome. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for the very fabric of American society,” she said, objecting in particular to the claims of racism against the tea party movement.
The turn toward racial farce drew an embarrassing, reactive reversal from the Obama administration Wednesday morning, as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack promised in a terse statement to reconsider the firing of Shirley Sherrod, his hitherto obscure Georgia director of rural development. In a video posted Sunday on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website, Sherrod recounted a story in which she considered refusing a federal grant to a white couple based solely on race. The deceptively edited video seemed to present yet another racial stock figure turning her resentment into a kind of petty tyranny, and the Obama administration did not hesitate in demanding and receiving her resignation.
But an extended version of Sherrod’s speech suggested she was in fact preaching the exact opposite message. The story she was recounting had taken place more than two decades ago – and she was using it to tell a far more nuanced tale. She had, the white farmer from the anecdote emerged to testify, saved his farm. The line delivered just before the excerpt began introduced the anecdote as a lesson from God that “the struggle is really about poor people,” not race.
White House officials Tuesday pinned the decision to fire Sherrod on Vilsack, who said the appearance of the edited clip was — regardless of its actual meaning — simply too damning.
“The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question, making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia,” he said in a statement.
The White House, an official said, backed Vilsack’s decision – drawing, in turn, mockery and outrage from both sides of the ideological spectrum, and a second reaction from the White House, where aides took credit for pressing Vilsack to back off.
“I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a second statement.
“Above all else, it is hilarious to watch the White House scrambling out of fear for Andrew Breitbart,” wrote RedState.com founder Erick Erickson.
Liberal bloggers called for Vilsack to be fired instead of Sherrod.
And other observers simply shook their heads at the scramble to condemn Sherrod.
"What's striking to me about this Department of Agriculture fracas is that everyone was so quick to jump to conclusions: Someone reports a few ambiguous comments out of context and, before checking with the woman or getting the whole story, concludes: 'She's a racist!'" said Richard Ford, a law professor at Stanford and author of "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse."
"This is the way race plays out all too often these days — as soon as the accusation of racism is made, good will, the benefit of the doubt, presumption of innocence all go out the window. It's seen as a virtue to jump to the least charitable conclusion when the issue is race — those who reserve judgment are accused of naivete or complicity," he said.
Though Obama’s candidacy was widely hailed as a new day for race in America, there were always dissenters, and the Sherrod episode seems to suggest the skeptics had a point. On the right, writer Ramesh Ponnuru warned against freighting Obama with too much racial baggage: “What if Obama becomes our first black president, and he comes to be seen as a failure in office?” he asked, calling the notion that voting for Obama would improve race relations “a risky gamble.”
Meanwhile on the left, some black leaders quietly worried that the election of a black president could fuel a racist backlash.
Obama – who called race “an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now” in his widely praised 2008 speech on the subject -- has responded largely by shrugging off that explicit racial conversation.
“He’s not the race man in chief in the way that he was before – and that’s understandable in many ways -- but these issues keep coming up,” said Farai Chideya, the former host of NPR’s “News and Notes,” which covered African-American issues. Chideya said she thought Obama’s 2008 speech on race, and on black and white grievances, had focused America’s conversation, but that it had since become incoherent.
“Some people are talking about economics. Some people are talking about feelings. Some people are talking about whether Obama is still charming. People are talking about different things.”
Obama has declined the pulpit Bill Clinton sought when he announced in 1996 that he would lead the country in a “national conversation” on race during what were, in retrospect, boom years for black Americans. One administration official, Attorney General Eric Holder, did briefly seek to revive that conversation in tougher times with a speech in the administration’s second month.
"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," said Holder, the country's first black attorney general.
"Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race," he said. “If we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us."
Holder’s condemnation drew criticism from the right, and a quiet rebuke from a White House determined to avoid just such distractions. It hasn’t been repeated, even as charges of cowardice are thrown at the White House as a result of the Sherrod affair.
Veteran observers of America’s stilted racial dialogue differ on how it got to its current low. Breitbart, who has led the right’s charge, blames a civil-rights establishment accustomed to using allegations of racism as a partisan tool. He offered a reward for evidence that tea party protesters had used slurs against black members of Congress, as two members had claimed; none emerged.
Others believe that Obama’s election, with its implication that America was over its race problem, has paradoxically brought out the bigots.
“People who in the past would have been reluctant to express their feelings [now] feel free to do so,” said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the liberal Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.
Others say that the current uproar is simply a symptom of the country’s enduring racial obsession – something only the naïve could have expected Obama to banish.
The recent public flaps “tell us that all the talk about post-racialness aside, the race question is still a burning question in American life. People will use it in all sorts of different ways. But it doesn’t surprise me,” said Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy, author of “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”
Blair Kelley, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, put a similar observation more bluntly on Twitter Tuesday in response to this reporter’s inquiry.
“The ‘national conversation on race’ has always been this stupid,” she wrote. “Just much less frequent.”
The only thing the election of Obama did for the race situation is to increase the race-baiting and incidents of racism committed by so-called “minorities”.
A true enough statement. We are all Americans. But I give you exibit A.
Feel comfortable now?
And yet, even with such a healthy conversation about race, race relations appear to be deteriorating. No one knows why.
Let’s have a discussion about race where it counts.
The Illinois political class forced an independent populist off the ballot for Lt Gov in part due to his ethnic name and despite winning a plurality in the primary. The close runnerup int he primary was clearly the loyal political class member-in-waiting who should have been chosen to fill the vacancy. But the political class vetoed him due to his race.
In a legislative contest, the political class put up only 1 candidate for the November election. A tea party leader followed the rules to get on the ballot and make it a contest in November. But the political class will not let her on the ballot clearly because of her race.
Those are two clear racist events that are a lot more significant than what some yokel said in haste on a blog.
How much national attention is given to those instances of racism in our election system? How much attention are they given, even in IL?
Translation: We started this fight and now it's backfiring on us, so we'll try to label it as stupid to minimize the blowback.
“Above all else, it is hilarious to watch the White House scrambling out of fear for Andrew Breitbart,” wrote RedState.com founder Erick Erickson.
Regardless of what happens with Sherrod, they know HE’S GOT MORE TAPE!
“There’s a kind of heightened racial consciousness that’s very worrisome. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for the very fabric of American society,” she said, objecting in particular to the claims of racism against the tea party movement.”
The ‘race’ issue in American politics/society was on a very straight road to recovery before Bill Clinton began campaigning for the WH.
Clinton, in shameful and naked self-interest, disinterred the all but resolved inequities and racial prejudices America had worked so hard to remedy. To court votes from a minority element which was (remains) on the road to full parity across the board, Clinton made it out that minorities in America were exploited, oppressed and underserved. There is no lie more greedily gobbled up by the masses than this one…never mind that fully two generations of American minorities were, as I say, on the straight road to full parity in this country. For shame!!!
Then… along comes Mr. ‘Nobody-from Nowhere’, Barak Husein Obama! He rode the crest of a manufactured (I believe) economic catastrophe. “O” has not the necessary personal honor or strength of character to be equal to the times and circumstances in which he has been EXTREMELY fortunate to find himself as President of the UNITED States of America!!!… so he just beat the same drum as Bill Clinton, for the same reason, and with the same results. “O” further eroded the decades of sincere effort Americans have made in resolving minority complaints.
These two political bounders have poisoned the well and it will be many years before the damage is rectified.
The problem is that the African-American community has developed so far away from the mainstream that they are no longer "us" they are "them". They speak a different language, hold different morals, have an entirely different mindset. How can a rural white person relate to an inner city black? There is no common ground. It's been bred out of the inner city over a couple generations.
Second topic. Since someone mentioned it already. We were having a discussion here in the office about a word. Why does the word "nigger" have such a negative connotation to blacks? After all it just means "black" (derives from the Spanish) and teh blacks use it to describe themselves. So what's the issue with it?
Unfortunately due to the incredible thin-skinnedness of most minorities, the question cannot even be asked in polite conversation.
Which returns us to our racial issues. Why do we have lingering racial issues? Because we are not allowed to discuss them. Point out the increased crime (general lawlessness) or cultural pressure to not succeed (acting white) in the black culture and you are branded a racist.
Refusing to solve the issues simply reinforces the steroetypes. The blacks have dug themselves (and partially through their slavish devotion to obama continue to dig themselves) a racial hole that will take them a couple generations to climb out of.
I trusted blacks more 30 years ago than I do now, and that was during the era of forced desegregation at my high school. Oddly enough, the native blacks at my school were just one of the guys. No one noticed or cared that they had really good tans. The ones they brought in were so culturally different that they were "them. Not "us"
I’m prejudiced against bureaucrats. One bureaucrat fired is one step in the right direction.
Any discussion about the rabid racism in the Kenyan’s administration is RACIST.
Can we say the white house “acted stupidly” on this and needs to hold a bear bash with itself, kegs and all? This is less about race than a white house that always, always acts out of self interest and in haste... we have a three alarm race bating fire, and the white house mouse is standing in the corner with a book of matches.
Tell it to the New Black Panther Party, oh, I mean the Democrat Party. They will never relinquish their race card, because if they did they would be judged objectively on their merit. Can’t have that happening.
“Any discussion about the rabid racism in the Kenyan’s administration is RACIST.”
Its the Kenyan Regime, not administration. Remember, Mr. Skittles refers to those in his employ as “his”. Its all about Mr. Skittles.
The Collectivist-in-Chief wholly supports the collective. Another collective. Another ploy. NAACP - National Anti-American Collectivist Ployers turns fugly. Barack Insane Obama loves it.
HOORAY Andrew Breitbart!
Content of character of collectivists BUMP!
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