Posted on 07/22/2013 3:48:29 AM PDT by markomalley
To African-Americans, President Obama just gets it.
Obama’s notably personal comments on Friday about the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, and on race in America, struck a chord. They vividly underlined the fact that, for the first time, the person in the Oval Office has lived an African-American experience.
To black supporters, that is more important than Obama’s inability to narrow racial inequalities during his four and a half years in office, something that has frustrated members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a former head of the black caucus, was in the middle of a phone interview with The Hill when Obama appeared at the White House briefing room podium to address the raw feelings exposed by the “not guilty” verdict on the man who had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager.
Pausing to listen to an office television for several minutes, Rangel said: “I don’t see how a person not-of-color could possibly do the job that he’s doing.”
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said, “I was glad that he spoke about it in a very personal way. I thought it was very powerful conversation. He could really make a significant impact in terms of race relations and in terms of not sweeping this under the carpet.”
For the vast bulk of the African-American political class, the sense of identification and empathy with the nation’s first black president has almost always taken primacy over whatever disappointments they have with his record.
The disappointment is perhaps strongest on the economy, since black people are worse off now than they were when Obama first took office, according to virtually every major indicator.
They have fared worse than whites throughout Obama’s time in the White House. Their plight, therefore, cannot be pinned on the general malaise that has afflicted the nation since the financial crash.
In January 2009, the month Obama took office, black unemployment stood at 12.7 percent, outstripping white unemployment, which stood at 7.1 percent.
The national unemployment rate and the rate among whites have both ticked down since then, but African-American joblessness has actually worsened. It now stands at 13.7 percent, while the white rate is just 6.6 percent.
Statistics for home ownership tell the same story. The most recent figures, which cover the first quarter of 2013, show that 43.1 percent of African-American families own their homes, a decline of 3 percentage points since Obama came to power.
White home ownership also declined over the same period, but the fall (from 74.7 percent to 73.4 percent) was only about half of that experienced by black people.
The pattern repeats itself on income. Adjusted for inflation, white per capita income declined by only a negligible amount ($36) from 2008 to 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. During the same period, black per capita income fell by $502.
Back in 2005, the first year of President George W. Bush’s second term, black per capita income adjusted for inflation was $801 higher than it is in the most recent figures.
Most black liberals lay the blame for the widening gaps at the door of history, and what they see as present-day Republican obstructionism. But Obama has not been immune from black criticism.
Academic Cornel West and broadcaster Tavis Smiley have leveled especially strong charges. Back in 2011, West accused Obama of being a “black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”
Obama’s remarks on Martin evidently did not alleviate Smiley’s dissatisfaction.
“Took POTUS almost a week to show up and express mild outrage. And still, it was as weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid,” he tweeted soon after Obama left the briefing room. But if Smiley and West have become the standard-bearers of black dissent, there has been a conspicuous lack of other prominent people rallying to that flag.
Rev. Al Sharpton, the activist and MSNBC anchor, has been among Obama’s staunchest defenders.
“Do people want rhetoric to make us feel better or action that makes our lives better?” he asked in a phone interview with The Hill.
Many people argue that because African-Americans have always been poorer than whites, it is natural that they would suffer more sharply in the Great Recession and its aftermath.
Sharpton offered a more specific observation, noting that black Americans have tended to find proportionately more employment in the public sector than the private sector, in part because of discrimination from private employers.
It was therefore virtually certain that blacks would be harder hit by the succession of cuts and fiscal crises that pared public sector jobs.
He added that a number of the White House’s top priorities, from the stimulus to ObamaCare, served to help poorer people most, and that many African-Americans benefitted.
“Have they done it in the names of African-Americans and Latinos, like I would do? No. But would that way have produced a more positive result? Probably less positive. The right would have said, ‘They’re just doing it to help them.’ ”
Among black progressives, there is also a wariness about fueling the fires of Republicans and conservatives who are seen as too often being personally disrespectful toward the president.
“Many progressives and Democrats will avoid like the plague giving ammunition to the professional Obama haters and the GOP,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political analyst and author.
Still, he added, “It would be totally irresponsible not to raise principled, political criticisms and offer constructive criticisms, whether it be on his drone policy or urging him to do more for the black poor.”
Black lawmakers are highly reluctant to voice those criticisms, however. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) repeatedly criticized Obama in 2011 for being insufficiently concerned with blacks’ economic circumstances. But she was an exception rather than the rule — and has largely muted any expressions of negative recently.
“I was thinking you maybe wanted me to say bad things about the president,” Rangel noted at one point in an interview with The Hill, making plain he had no intention of doing so.
He acknowledged merely that any disappointment he felt was “only based on my expectations. I know that nobody else understands the problems we face as a people better than he does.”
“Race Trumps All”
In our country’s recent history we’ve celebrated diversity in our population as if it were a good thing. However, one look at world history will show you that no country with a diverse population of different races, languages, and religion has long survived.
Countries don’t naturally form with a diverse population, and when in the past they’ve occurred it’s usually been as the result of armed conquest. These unnaturally formed countries have either melded together into a single population made up of one mixed race with one language and one religion or they’ve come apart, and they’ve usually come apart with extreme violence. The longer these diverse populations are forced to coexist with one another without mixing and becoming one, the more the hatred grows among them and the more violently they break apart, but break apart they will, or genocide will settle the issue once and for all.
Why is this and why can’t we all just get along? The truth of the matter is that we (the human race) just aren’t as civilized as we would like to think we are. Genus Homo sapiens isn’t that long “out of the trees” and the veneer of civilization is very thin, to non-existent, upon us all. We’re all carrying the genes that got us here and some of those genes carry a very basic survival instinct that has allowed us to survive thus far.
This most basic of all survival instincts is self preservation and it is the one that warns us to be very wary of those who are different than us, our family, and our tribe. Those who possessed this survival instinct survived and reproduced, and those who had no fear/distrust of strangers didn’t survive. Over the years, this survival instinct has been referred to as tribalism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, and various other isms, but it’s an inborn instinct carried in our genes whether we like it or not.
BINGO!!!!
...and worth repeating!
Their current behavior has simply sealed their fate to another century of marginalization.
There have been several biological disasters resulting from the importation of alien species into the Occident. The chestnut blight, rock pythons, zebra mussels are examples.
Then there were human slaves. We are now realizing that the people rejected and sold by their superior African neighbors have become a disaster.
You can look all across sub-Saharan Africa and see the results of this kind of infantile mentality.
“Race trumps all”. Very true statement. Recently there was a Rasmussen Poll that found that Racism amongst Blacks is much higher than any other group. Take a look at your large urban cities with significant Black populations (Like Detroit). They keep electing their Black politicians even if they are known to be corrupt or incompetent. As long as they are Black,that is all that matters.
Interestingly, you can look all across sub-Saharan Africa and see how rulers, to a man, have all condemned Obama for his attempts to push the homosexual and abortion agendas upon their countries.
Seems like the leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa are more honorable than THE WON™
I do not believe it is race or ideology as a whole.
I believe it is that he plays to their general lack of understanding of economics and their general give a $hit less of what happens in America.
And how does he do it? By using the race card whenever he has a chance. This is how he stirs them up. This is something they “think” they understand, but they do not have a clue here either. Only thing they understand is that Obama is feeding and clothing them. Not yours and my tax dollars or the economic growth of the economy.
Obama is a wedge driver, plain and simple. Has been one all his life. Learned it early on and practiced it.
That’s not going to end well some time soon, either. Whether it’s blacks or OWS types, that sort of personal intimidation at someone’s residence is not going to end well.
To quote another poster, why didn’t the southerners pick their own damned cotton?
Black conservatives are exiled from the tribe. They are preaching a different view of the world. The tribalist doesn't want to hear about getting ahead for himself. He wants to glory in the rule of a tribal member.
Many years ago when I was working in Africa, my African counterpart was one of the most intelligent men I had ever known, and one day I made the comment, "Mr. Dau,in my over fifty years of living in the United States, I never met a black man, as intelligent as you are.
His reply was, "Why do you think we sold them to you?"
Would they vote for a black conservative over a white liberal? Hell no! Ergo, ideology trumps all. Don't doubt me.
It is bizarro world, and while I think some of it among the uneducated comes from a sort of strange tribalism, as many people have suggested, I think a lot of it among the educated comes from the fact that keeping blacks race-identified gives a lot of power to the “civil rights establishment,” whose cause has long since disappeared but who need to keep up that sense of race-identity in order to maintain their relevance. And this is encouraged by the white leftist groups that ride along with them.
There’s a very good article by Shelby Steele in the WSJ that discusses this today.
In that same paper, was an interview with Obama’s Secy of Education, the radical leftist Arne Duncan, who gave a talk where he told a group of conference attendees discussing the “Race to the Top Program” (a federal education give-away without even the quality and transparency requirements that Bush included in his earlier program) that they were “too white” because this doesn’t reflect public schools (actually, it does) and then went on to discuss his love of basketball, which now seems to be code for how black you are. He leaves signed basketballs at the schools he visits.
How condescending and disgusting. And yet even intelligent, young blacks are completely confused by the steady diet of the warmed-over leftist racialist garbage which the civil rights movement devolved into once the battle was won and there was no longer any reason for its political existence.
Well DUH. Like this is news? I and any number of other posters have been saying since the turd first announced his candidacy that race isn't only the most important thing to blacks when it comes to voting. It is the ONLY thing.
But that's 13% of the population, and even counting the massive voter fraud that demosh!ts routinely commit, at best it's 18%.
Where are the remaining fools coming from and what is their rationale for voting a fiscal disaster?
Race trumping all over job performance... isn’t that partly why Detroit went to sh*t?
Thought so...
2 Thessalonians 2:11-17
So God will send great deception upon them, and they will believe all these lies. Then they will be condemned for not believing the truth and for enjoying the evil they do.
Spirited: IMO, the greatest deception is Darwinism. Darwin’s theory took the axe to the very foundations of Christian theism beginning with the Genesis account, resulting in the replacement of the spiritual brotherhood of man created in the spiritual image of God with multiple and ever unfolding ‘races’ of human animals that at bottom are nothing but chemicals/DNA.
If we are our DNA, and DNA controls and determines everything about us, including our “race” (which now includes orientation)then we have no choice but to be and to do whatever our DNA determines.
Over and against this are genetically determined human animals (i.e., most generally ‘white skinned’ true conservatives and faithful Christians and Jews) whose “evil” DNA determines them to oppress the previously mentioned “races.”
Marxist Soviets and Hitler’s Fascists held to some variation of genetic determinism which licensed them to fall upon and murder the genetically unfit and evil.
Genetic determinism also explains breeding programs (eugenics) meant to produce superior super men.
Western and American “elites,” whether of the occult New Age pantheist persuasion or secular materialist hold the very same Darwinian views which explains their seething hatred of all true conservatives/faithful Christians and Jews (evil DNA) while acting as the “self-congratulatory” liberators and protectors of unfairly treated and misunderstood genetically determined blacks and ‘gays.’
The end result of “race trumps all” and “keeping one of our own” in charge is Detroit.
So he lived with an oil exec & a possible CIA worker, then a bank VP. How is that deprived? /rhetorical
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