Discussion for article #231229
It’s not too surprising that many Americans believe that racism would end upon electing Obama. Americans have a high tolerance for contradictions; it liberated itself under the belief that “all men are created equal” but refused to set the captive free upon establishing a democratic republic.
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A twist on Dave Chappelle:
Fox News is making Barack Obama sound like Malcolm X.
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I confess that I had hoped his election would at least be the vehicle for building bridges. And I still think that could have happened if the economy hadn’t turned to shit, creating the classic conditions for psychopathic politicians to engage in racist demagoguery. But I think his election at least lanced the big festering boil. If white people (or “Americans” as Fox News calls them) don’t like looking at what’s coming out, I’d advise antibiotics, not blinders.
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Barack is doing his part and gave America a big shot at healing, unfortunately, curing racism is like curing bad breath. The racists that cling onto racism like its mothers milk are not only not healing, they are retrenching and more determined than ever to exert their imagined dominance and in turn there is a reaction racially against them.
Its a vicious cycle that wannabe white overlords must make the biggest move on or we continue to push backwards.
Todays teabaggers are just America’s bad breath and ugly face really. The breath can be freshened, the face sadly may have to become extinct before we can all smile.
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The sad reality is that Obama’s election brought the racists out of the woodwork, like cockroaches. His ascendancy to the White House infuriated those who see their all white nirvana built on the backs of minorities and women crumbling. Now they have to work just as hard as everyone else, sit next to “colored people,” and hire women. I always thought racism would get worse after 2008, not better. But it’s not Obama’s fault.
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It’s human nature to impose inferiorities onto other people. The election of an black president simply brought that repressed urge to the forefront of the white supremecist. As long as there was a white male in the Oval Office, that simple fact gave people with racial insecurities a wedge of comfort that “they” were still in control of the world. I will predict a similar backlash and exposition of sexism when this nation elects a woman to the Oval Office. We’re currently witnessing some of that happening right now as women rise to higher seats in Congress and offices within the Administration. Women as equals, or other races as equals is heresy to their intellect. Humanity’s insecurities with ceding control to another race, or to the oppositte sex is beyond their intellectual capacities to accept. Racism and sexism will never end. It’s human nature, and it’s up to humans to overcome their evils.
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Very well said NC Steve.
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Hear Hear.
We are making “slow and steady progress.”
And, in my opinion, the Ferguson and Garner incidents, which resulted in unfortunate fatalities after both individuals resisted police commands, are not the the most clear cut examples to move the process forward; on the contrary, they have just muddied the waters.
It’s hard for anyone to move America to “post-racism” when there are dedicated media outlets whose sole purpose is to keep that racism alive.
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Brought the racists out of the woodwork. They were there all along, they just didn’t have Twitter and Facebook before these days. They just used their guns for target practice and used their sheets for sleeping. Now, with the internet tubes, they have found out that other racists were hiding in the same woodwork somewhere else in America, and they feel emboldened. Add to that, police departments that hire bubba, and courts that refuse to make the police accountable, result: the issues of racial disparity are brought to the foreground, and Fox News is all to willing to add that to their long list of why Obama is, (according to them), incompetent and shouldn’t be president.
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My immediate reaction is that the people who would hold him entirely responsible for our failure to achieve full racial harmony (given our particularly tortuous history) are the ones who are most likely to keep us from reaching that goal. To a certain part of the Fox base, post-racial means Jim Crow – with the added modern “post” benefit that they don’t have to be told by “libtards” that it is immoral. It is pretty hard to demand results from a president when you have denied his legitimacy from the beginning, based entirely on his race. Their dog whistles have never been quite subtle enough to hide that.
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When right-wingers speak of their desire for a post-racial society, they don’t mean a society in which individual racism and structural racism – in our police forces, our criminal justice system, our schools, the workplace, in our lending and housing practices and in all the other arenas in which structural racism has been enforced for the last 400 years – have been eliminated. To right-wingers, a post racial society is one in which black people stop objecting to those things.
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I think what many of the people blaming Obama are blaming him for is making it so blindingly obvious how thoroughly racism still pervades our society. Always shoot the messenger.
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This is the simple unvarnished truth. Racists found they had a lot company and egged by right wing radio and TV and bloggers, they shed all their previous inhibitions. The president could not take on their anger and try to appease them or at least assure them, because in doing so he would have taken the chance of being called an angry black born in another country and embracing a religion that preaches violence, they’d say.
He could have been the uniter dubya only talked about it, but the opposing forces were too great.
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You fundamentally misunderstand both the Ferguson murder and the Garner murder.
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There’s someone, anyone in America who expected him to do this? That’s pretty sad. And its proabably a Republican.
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I disagree. The incidents have shed a stark light on our fears and created movement for change.
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It can’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that the Fox News narrative is to blame the black man for the ills of the black man. It’s what they do. Obama’s election hasn’t made things worse. It’s made things public. And in being public we know what we’re up against. Frankly, it’s not the overt racists that worry me. Right now they are ringing a death knell for power that they have already lost. It’s the well meaning white folks that worry me the most.
The majority of white people in this country still like to pretend that race is not an issue in our country or that it’s not an issue that impacts them. Spending the last 20 years raising an African American son has taught me that the well meaning liberal white ladies who tell you that they have raised their children not to see race (and really, I think the next person who tells me that is going to be so surprised when she gets knocked on her ass) are the first ones to grab their purses closer when my son walks by. It’s not until more of those folks wake the fuck up and realize that this is a problem for all of us to solve that things will begin to change.
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