Obama Does the Race Dance

Obama's big moment to tackle the race issue turned out to be nothing but more running around it. Americans want to see this put to rest. Unfortunately people such as Rev Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the Democrat party won't stop stirring the pot. They have made too much money and gained too much power exploiting race divisions to want to see the issue laid to rest. Obama could have stated driving the stake through the heart of racial exploitation but chose to leave flowers instead.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings...

... In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

These two paragraphs sum up the problem Obama has. He sees race first. Black people who feel defeated because of their race and White people resenting the lack of privilege they should have because of their race. It is all bologna. If he had called it such he could have addressed the crutchs people use to excuse their own failure by blaming someone else. If he held racism as being so abhorrent as he claims he would not have spent twenty years with a church that tolerates this nonsense.

The time is right to deal with this issue but Barack Obama is not the right man.






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Obama, Politics, Racism