The race baiting of camp Barack Obama has pissed me off since the primaries. His “post-racial” both sides of his mouth, in your face, hands off, passive/aggressive, taunting/pleading has been both painful and frightening to watch. As I head off to the voting booth tomorrow, I will do the one thing in my power to stop such “race-rallying by proxy,” I will vote against it.
“Selma got me born” was a bald-faced lie. Selma, the violence associated with the historic march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge and it’s impact on the Civil Rights Movement had nothing to do with Hawaiian teen hot pants for Kenyans, and to even have the gall to suggest such a thing is worthy of rebuke and scorn.
Lyndon Baines Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill. Martin Luther King’s leadership created an environment where doing the right thing by the president became imperative, regardless of the political implications. Saying that one will take a Johnsonian approach to today’s black issues is a promise to pursue a results-driven agenda. To demean this sort of commitment, as Camp B.O. did of Hillary Clinton’s Martin Luther King Day speech, is shamelessly inexcusable. That he got away with his lame, yet now predictable “unfortunate” characterization, is worse. Clinton’s “it took a president to get the job done,” is historically accurate grade school civics. It takes a president to sign legislation. Obama’s comment makes no sense for a “constitutional lawyer:”
“She made an unfortunate remark about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “I haven’t remarked on it. And she offended some folks who thought she diminished the role about King and the civil rights movement. The notion that this is our doing is ludicrous.”
“I’d have to see him dance.“ This one did it for me. The Jim Crow buck-and-wing stereotype is so ingrained in our culture that Barack Obama was not only not called to task for invoking it, he was applauded by blacks and whites alike. How dare they? Yet, when some marginal Hillary Clinton surrogate used the phrase “shucking and jiving,” it, along with other, more dubious examples of “race-baiting,” was decried as “proof positive” that the Clinton campaign was wholly comprised of vicious, unscrupulous, race-baiters willing to engage in the worst sort of low politics in their brazen attempts to smear a black man to their advantage.
The other, well documented instances of Obama and his minions crying foul at every reference to the color black, while at the same time claiming post-racial “above-it-all-ness,” while at the same time exploiting and demeaning black Americans for the sake of scoring Brownie points with “color-blind” white Americans, are too numerous to mention. Yet, guilt-ridden, smug-assed, supercilious white people of influence who have likey never been closer to an inner-city neighborhood than their morning commute will allow them to skirt, perpetuated the myth that there was something noble in supporting a “not-too-black” candidate, primarily for the symbolism involved.
Barack Obama and his merry band of assuagers have played the one-note racism song with virtuosity. They should not be allowed to exploit America’s troubled racial legacy this way. As we head into election day, the song sung black is getting louder and more discordant, yet, unfortunately there is no sign that it will be any less effective. The Christian Science Monitor is running one such piece online. In a story of an insular white man, coerced into canvassing for Obama by his wife, we are treated to his eye-opening epiphany that black people need something to believe in. Guess what Mister, they’re human. Buy a freaking clue. This sappy, drippy essay proves only that the author needs to get out more.
A New York Times article headlined, “McCain Finds Some Hope In Philadelphia,” assures us that the large number of bigots in the area gives McCain a shot. We have been told over and over again that being black is a disadvantage that could cost Obama up to six points due the “Bradley effect,” or the cowardliness of white voters determined not to vote for a black man, but too chicken to admit it. Or, maybe, a “reverse Bradley effect” will net him six points. What about the “novice effect,” or the “empty suit effect,” or do no other factors come into play when a candidate is black? What about the hoped-for increase in African American voter turnout? Where’s the cute, comfy, feelgood name for that effect?
As a black woman, I’m tired of watching my “positive image-starved” sisters and brothers be played by this overconfident “cock-of-the-walk” con man whose only accomplishment is running for office, and whose only known attribute is a willingness to win using any means neccessary. While la-di-da liberals and all other manner of starry-eyed white Americans vote for their own need to reinforce a mythical image of an America that never was, and is unlikely to be, as long as rubber-stamping Hollywood script-written “reality” is the extent of committment to real social change, I’ll cast my vote elsewhere. A lie of this magnitude should not be rewarded.
Exploit this.
Doo-fuckin’-dah.
[...] heads and allowed his minions in the media and blogosphere to engage in misogynistic race baiting on his behalf. None of which dampened our outrage in the slightest, in fact, as most any fool besides these [...]
[...] heads and allowed his minions in the media and blogosphere to engage in misogynistic race baiting on his behalf. None of which dampened our outrage in the slightest, in fact, as most any fool besides these [...]