have blacks themselves succumbed to what president Bush called, "the soft bigotry of low expectation"?
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Just a few days of listening to listening to local talkshows with black hosts has been a real education. For many of their callers, politics trumps race. The hosts were defending Secretary Rice from a nasty cartoon about her that appeared in Arab newspapers - the one where she was shown pregnant with a monkey.
The callers defended the cartoonist because 'everyone' knows that George Bush is regularly portrayed as a monkey, so the monkey in her womb was not a racial slur, just a comment on her relationship to her master. The hosts saw the monkey as a racial epithet, not so the listeners.
During the campaign a few months ago Senator Allen calls a person of non-caucasian ethnicity Macaca, and all of a sudden he is a major racist, because somebody claimed that that word is a major racial slur. Guess what - it's not because if it was we would all be saying "m-word" instead of macaca.
Also guess what - macaque is French for monkey.
There seemed to be two co-existing, but opposing themes from these talk show callers.
1) When a black person becomes successful in any non-liberal endeavor, he or she loses his black identity.
2) White people need to do more to enable black people to succeed in the US.
So success has to be authentic "black" success, but when blacks do well, the fact is ignored or vilified.
I do not know how this mindset can be changed, and feel very frustrated by the stumbling blocks such people put in front of their own success in life.