Would this, then, be a “typical black person” speech?
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.
The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.
…
Obama’s criticism of Bush prompted ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University’s Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset.
Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city’s black neighborhoods.
“Those ‘quiet riots’ that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths,” Obama said. “They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better.”
The article notes that Obama “doesn’t regularly focus on racial themes in his standard campaign speeches.” Only when he’s speaking to predominantly black audiences, I suppose…and then in terms of how badly blacks have it in this country. He seems here to be pushing the netroots theory that the Bush administrations poor response to Hurricane Katrina was based on racism as well.
If that’s not enough for you, guess who else made an appearance in the speech?
He introduced his own pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United as “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” He credited Wright with introducing him to Christ, and peppered his speech with scriptural references, at one point invoking the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.
It’s getting tougher to believe that Obama hasn’t been campaigning as the black candidate in at least some venues, isn’t it? Oh well, at least his new pastor is a more reasonable type.
Not that his supporters are oversensitive about it or anything, mind you. At least not to the point where they’d try to smear someone by association (and fail miserably in the process), since that’s, um, a bad thing to do. As Sullivan reminds us, this sort of thing never happens to white people, right?
Or does it?
Hmmm…
I wonder why it is that we don’t have frank discussions of race in this country?
via McQ
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Politics, Race
“Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.
The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.”
So basically, unless we elect him, there’s gonna be trouble.
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!
I live in Southern California and remember quite vividly the ‘92 LA riots. I remember watching innocent motorists being dragged from their cars and severely beaten on live TV. I remember watching shops being looted for days, that is, the stores that were not burnt to the ground for being owned by Koreans (a population that had nothing to do with the Rodney King incident). I remember seeing the tags “black owned” on shops that were spared the torch.
And here we have Obama, as usual, placing the blame for these racist actions on people other than those responsible. It was the jury’s fault. Just like it will be Bush’s fault if New Orleans experiences the same thing.
People seem to be paying more attention to one poorly chosen word rather than the rest of what Obama has said.
GW Bush has multiple brain farts in the same paragraph so they have to look for one isolated word that they could put a good spin on.
It reminds me of the guy who farted and someone says “That is the most intelligent thing you have ever said’
The guy who farted says “I have said lots of smart things but this is the first one you understood.”
“He seems here to be pushing the netroots theory that the Bush administrations poor response to Hurricane Katrina was based on racism as well.”
Well, Joe, actually, no. Maybe it seems that way if you haven’t actually read the speech. If you read the speech you would see that he expressly denies that: “Look at what happened in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast when Katrina hit. People ask me whether I thought race was the reason the response was so slow. I said, ‘No. This Administration was colorblind in its incompetence.’”
“It’s getting tougher to believe that Obama hasn’t been campaigning as the black candidate in at least some venues, isn’t it?”
What do you mean when you describe Obama as “campaigning as the black candidate,” Joe?
“I live in Southern California and remember quite vividly the ‘92 LA riots. I remember watching innocent motorists being dragged from their cars and severely beaten on live TV. I remember watching shops being looted for days, that is, the stores that were not burnt to the ground …
And here we have Obama, as usual, placing the blame for these racist actions on people other than those responsible.”
Except that he doesn’t. This is what Sen. Obama actually said:
“This is not to excuse the violence of bashing in a man’s head or destroying someone’s store and their life’s work. That kind of violence is inexcusable and self-defeating.”
You’re not listening to what he’s saying.
Having his cake, and eating it too, if you ask me, twc. This:
And this:
Don’t compute.
If Bush was colorblind, then why are blacks “rioting quietly”?
Do you honestly not see a difference in the way he speaks to black audiences and white audiences, twc?
I do generally see a difference, Joe (although I can’t pretend to have done an analysis of speeches to various audiences comparing them by race) . I just don’t think that speaking differently to a black audience is, in and of itself, a problem.
For example, it probably would have had a different impact if he had said the following to an audience other than to a largely-black crowd gathered in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s former Atlanta church to celebrate Dr. King’s national holiday:
“Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.
I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.
I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
…
For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.
Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.”
Blacks are rioting quietly because the worst-affected parts of New Orleans were overwhelmingly black, Joe, and the majority of people still displaced frustrated from the storm are black.
This guy simply does not believe anything like the sentiments expressed so colorfully and so forcefully by Rev. Wright in the famous video clips. He does speak differently to different audiences. But that doesn’t make him a “racist,” or a “race-hustler,” or someone looking primarily to exploit, foster, and capitalize on racial grievances. Because Barack Obama is evidently not such a person. We don’t need to look for clues to what he thinks based on the statements of people he knows. The evidence is in plain sight: everything he has said and done over his lifetime.
I don’t agree, twc. As more and more comes to light, I think it’s fairly obvious that Obama is more than willing to use those sentiments expressed so “colorfully” by Wright to win the nomination. He’s certainly been very careful to disassociate himself from those “colorful” statements while remaining strongly associated with Wright himself.
He’ll disavow those statements publicly, but his continued support for and association with Wright is a wink and a nod. There’s no amount of explaining that can gloss it over.
His hometown paper acknowledges his use of race to “make a point” as well:
That’s different from what Ferraro said how?
Of course he didn’t. We might note as well that Wright himself is not exactly someone who could accurately be referred to as a “brother from the ‘hood”.
Neither of these men would shy from the description, though, in the appropriate venue. There’s a reason for that. You and I just disagree on what that reason is :-)
More here from the Wapo:
It’s not just me, twc. If it were, Obama wouldn’t have a problem…Hell, I get about 200 readers a day, so I’m not influencing many opinions (especially given my readership was, in all likelihood, never going to vote for Obama anyhow).
It’s like wearing a Red Sox hat.
When you are around a bunch of Red Sox fans, they will assume you are a fellow fan. You don’t have to say you’re a fan. They see your hat, and that is good enough for them. You’re accepted.
But if you are around Yankees fans while wearing your Red Sox hat, you can claim “I don’t like the team, I don’t even like baseball, it’s just a hat.” And you and your claim will be accepted.
That is what Obama does.
He wears his racial hat when he is around people who will accept him for wearing it. And when he is around others who will disapprove of what the hat says, he claims he’s not a fan and it’s just a hat.
By simple action, he is accepted by the first group, and by denying that the action means anything, he is accepted by the second group.
Joe, the article you linked to in the Chicago Tribune says this:
“That said, in his ambitious array of plans, becoming the leading spokesman of black America is not atop the list.
‘We have a certain script in our politics, and one of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people,’ Obama said in an interview. ‘And then if he puts a multiracial coalition together, he must somehow be compromising the efforts of the African-American community. To use a street term,’ he added, “we flipped the script.’
In winning the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois, Obama drew as many as two white votes for every black one, showing nearly unprecedented crossover appeal for a black candidate in a statewide race.”
So, is the problem that he shouldn’t appeal to both black voters and white voters? He’s got to choose?
How is he “using” the sentiments expressed by Wright to win the nomination? He denounced them. He has never said anything remotely similar to them. In fact, he consistently espouses diametrically opposed sentiments, including (even particularly) when speaking to black audiences. The sentiments expressed by Wright have clearly hurt his chances in this race, not helped them. If he were a scheming politician, wouldn’t he have cut Wright loose and tossed him under the bus?
” ‘Obama didn’t bother correcting the pastor by pointing out that his upbringing in Hawaii, where his mother and father met, almost certainly would not qualify as the ‘hood.’
Of course he didn’t.”
Now we’re really picking at microscopic points.
If Barack Obama intended to try to cover up his own bi-racial upbringing in Hawaii, writing (and then re-issuing) an entire book about it is certainly an unusual way to conceal it. Of course, maybe the pastor was referring to Obama’s decision, after graduating from Columbia, to forego a corporate job and move to the South Side of Chicago to do modestly-paying neighborhood organizing work for three years, then moving back to there after graduating from Harvard Law as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, foregoing his pick of virtually any legal job in the country, to practice civil rights law. He has lived on the South Side of Chicago for 20 out of the last 23 years, with the only exception his three years in law school
And you really find it significant, Joe, that a politician with that background didn’t carefully correct the introduction? You expect him to point out that, “well, although one could characterize me as coming ‘from the ‘hood’ in many senses, I was actually born and grew up in Hawaii, and Indonesia, so I must respectfully take issue with your introduction…”? And since he didn’t, this shows that he is giving a “wink and a nod” to the racial-grievance crowd?
You sure you’re not just looking for slights?
“It’s not just me, twc.”
Oh, I understand. You just made the mistake of running an interesting blog.
Red: but in what he actually says, isn’t he explaining to the Red Sox fans that the Yankees have some good players, and telling the Yankee fans that the Red Sox fans are correct when they point out that certain things about the Yankees do, in fact, “suck” so they should stop the arrogance, and telling both of them that it’s important to keep in mind that the main thing is to pick the best American League players and then unite together as a team to beat the hell out of the National League in the All-Star game?
O.k., one metaphor too far. I’ll stop now.
Nice!
Let’s just say that Barack Obama has probably been at greater risk of sniper fire on the South Side of Chicago most days over the past 23 years than Hillary Clinton was landing at Tuzla airbase…
twc lol
Hehe, I think you posted that one on the wrong thread, twc :-)
Want me to move it?