Apparently many blacks engage in far worse than stereotypes. I've heard whites express complete shock at Wright's lying rants & the ignorant reaction from his indoctrinated church flock. Why would anyone want to teach their children to hate their fellow Americans?..it's sick and identifies the breeding ground for some vicious violence over the yrs:
Obama and the American Flag
By JAMES TARANTO, wsj.com, March 20, 2008
Last October the Associated Press reported that Barack Obama had made a decision not to sport an American flag pin on his lapel:
Asked about it Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he stopped wearing the pin shortly after the attacks and instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his ideas to citizens.
"The truth is that right after 9/11 I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.
"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in the interview. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testament to my patriotism."
But did anyone notice that when Obama gave his "major speech on race" Tuesday--the one necessitated by the revelation that his "spiritual mentor" had, among other things, called on God to "damn America"--he did so amid a row of American flags? We checked the video and counted eight of them, of which four are visible in the photo nearby.
We didn't write about this back in October, because the whole kerfuffle was, at its root, silly. There are many ways of expressing patriotism, and if wearing a flag pin is not Obama's idiom, who cares? It was arrogant of him to imply that his own patriotism was more "true" than that of pin-wearers, but one could put this down to defensiveness at being asked a "gotcha" question.
But in light of his October comment, what are we to make of his extravagant use of the Stars and Stripes on Tuesday? If a flag pin on a lapel is "a substitute for true patriotism," is that not also true of eight flags on a stage as a backdrop to a political speech? Obama proclaimed himself too good for cheap symbolism, but resorted to it the first time he faced a real crisis. Is he really any different from the run-of-the-mill politician?
'A Typical White Person'
"Stick a fork in him, baby," writes blogress Taylor Marsh of Barack Obama. "If he makes it to the general election, he's done." Marsh, a liberal-left backer of Hillary Clinton, is referring to this comment Obama made on a Philadelphia radio station, explaining why he likened his grandmother to his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright:
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way and that's just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it."
Marsh asks, "Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton said someone was a 'typical black person'?" Never mind if a Republican said such a thing.
The Obama-Wright imbroglio is laying bare the racial double standard in America. The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof hints at this but doesn't quite get the point:
To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people.
That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.
"That's a real standard belief," noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). "One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you've spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs." . . .
Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.
Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.
What's happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation--and they are thunderstruck.
All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far more urgent challenges--for example, that about half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.
What it really demonstrates is that whereas whites are expected to be respectful, sensitive and fair-minded when talking with or about blacks, there is little expectation that blacks will reciprocate--to the point that a black presidential candidate doesn't feel inhibited from making a statement about "a typical white person."
"Racial reconciliation," the need for which we've been hearing so much about, demands a new etiquette--one in which everyone, regardless of race, is expected to treat others with equal respect.
If Obama is as skilled a talker and conciliator as his supporters make him out to be, he could lead the way here. If he wants to become president, he would be well advised to do so. After all, he'll need white votes, and references to "a typical white person" are not likely to win them over. |
