Boo tells an interesting story about an encounter he had after the speech:
I had a sad experience yesterday that, while anecdotal, gives saliency to the point. I had just left the Constitution Center after watching Obama's uplifting speech. I was walking through The Gallery, which is an urban shopping mall on Market Street. I decided to sit down on a bench and see if I could get a wireless signal. An elderly white woman sat down next to me and was silent for a little while. Then she said, "That's where my tax dollars go."
I looked up at her, not knowing what she was referring to, and asked, "excuse me?".
She nodded at a group of young early-20's black people (some with a baby carriage) walking by, and repeated herself.
The people she was referring to were nicely dressed and appeared to be enjoying themselves as they window shopped in the mall. I think I just mumbled something like "Mmmn" and returned my attention to my laptop. Then the elderly woman said, "Do you know that Hillary is coming here today?"
I nodded, "Yes. I just came from seeing Obama."
She frowned at this news and then said, "I'm very excited to see Hillary. She knows how to deal with [she swept her hand around to indicate the mall crowd] this."
I excused myself.
Race is going to be an issue in this race, and we can either worry about it or we can go to work to make sure tolerance and enlightenment prevail. Obama's speech accomplished a lot, but he is no miracle worker. Let's not forget that.
This confuses me. Why did you "excuse yourself," Boo? I mean, if we shouldn't forget that Obama alone can't overcome the racism of millions, isn't what you did passing up a golden opportunity? Here's what I would've said:
"How can you be sure they receive gov't aid? That's pretty racist of you. And anyway, more white people receive welfare than Black or other minority groups, and even so, spending on aid to poor people is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what we've spent on the war or worthless programs like Star Wars. The difference between them is billions vs. trillions. That's an order of magnitude, and if you care about waste, look there."
I'm sure it's occured to all of us that Obama's run is "historical" and presents us with wonderful opportunities to make racism and race a conversation topic like never before.
But Dood- ya gotta speak out, yo? I'm a Black, gay woman, and I've learned: Silence = Death. Mumbling and walking away are NOT effective techniques for social change.
I like Boo a lot. We disagree on candidates this year, but I still read his work and respect his efforts a lot. However, I think that this anecdote of his is really, really telling of the progressive community and many Obama supporters. You love him, you believe he's "transformational," but the only people whom you will yell at and get all "here's my detailed argument, bitch!" with are...progressives who support another candidate. Racists get a free pass.
That's just not right. It's certainly not going to help combat racism.
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Too bloody right.
It's not like it happens every time, but I have set some people straight and had it work.
The only way people will open their eyes is if someone opens them.
More liberal media at The Sideshow.
More liberal media at The Sideshow.
Check
Hillary supporters are old, white, women, racists.
Check.
Collect the anecdote, feed the narrative, feel good, move on.
Check.
I wonder if her last name was Bradley? Heck, he could at least have given her a can of dog food. There's a dollar store nearby, this being Philly.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
boo is unreadable
I used to go to his site every day, but he has become unreadable since New Hampshire when he went into a rage after Clinton won. Oh the despair of actually having a competitive race!
Interesting to see just how little separates...
Reich from left when the poo hits the fan. I'm reading Zero Sum by Wright now. Just finished 'American Made-How the WPA rebuilt America' and wow...just wow. Them 'conservatives back in '32 were using the exact same framing they use today. Which brings me to my latest projects.
Blogging about something besides Senator 'Hopeless', check yer McSame polling today....but after breakfast ok, and blogging about some of our esteemed A-Listers who can neither write nor think their way out of a paper bag...wet....
Seriously, this Obama thingy has shown some...er...weakness in Upper Left Blogistan and it's past time somebody started calling the likes of you know who on their truly shoddy thinking.
Example: Let's support an low-experience, untested machine politician for President. Never mind that nobody bothered to even look in his closet to see what might be in there. Good politics...not so much folks. Forseeable, yep just like Boosh and his excellent adventure but...gee....all the 'genius's' and dKos and OpenLeft and TPM and TalkLeft and...well I could go on but why bother. None of 'em could figure out what Karl Rove knew the minute somebody said, 'Obama for President...'
'I like it!' is what Ol' Pigboy thought to himself.
A. Citizen
Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.
Citizen, i read those polls
it seems the racism factor is starting to kick in in terms of mr. hope's popularity. like a lot of us have been saying it would. but never mind, the only poll that matters is in the fall. i don't let myself get excited by the rest anymore.
as for the a-list support of him, let's be fair: there were no strong progressives choices this year, as usual. so you pick someone and defend them. that's how it's done. most picked differently than i did, but i won't critique them in a negative way for defending their chosen candidate. it's what you are supposed to do.
now, the other part of your analysis i'm down with 1000%. finally, there is clear proof that some of our "leading voices" have logic and fact challenges. i'm actually happy about that. this race is going to cut the wheat from the chaff, and a lot of blogrolls are going to get shorter. as are bookmark lists.
quality reveals itself. intelligence perceives it.
I would generously say that
I would generously say that his story has a less than 1% chance of being true.
might be true
I have seen white people look at young black men and say stuff like that. I don't always speak out, but most of the time I make some push back, as in how do you know they are supported by your tax dollars?
that sort of racism survives because no one pushes back. I am old enough to remember school desegregation. Often it would take just one white child on the playground to indicate that that sort of talk wasn't cool to shut everyone up. Racism survives in part because people won't call people on it.
My suggestion to Mr. Hopey is to follow the example of Doug Wilder, who was Lt. Gov before he was gov. Take the VP offer.
Loss of Credibility
I have no doubt that things Boo describes have happened and do happen regularly. It may even have happened to him. But the Obama Movement has lost its credibility on this issue. Having done so much to smear Clinton and her supporters, I simply don't believe on faith anything they say. I don't doubt Obama is losing some votes because of racism (just as polling shows he gains votes because of sexism), but when you flush your credibility down the toilet, it's hard to have any kind of dialogue.
It's also hard to take concerns about racism seriously from a movement currently cheering and fighting for the disenfranchisement of Michigan with its significant African American population. But then this is also a movement that had no problem bullying John Lewis. Hey, they're just doing their part to reverse those excesses of the 1960s.
And cd I definitely agree with you that push back is necessary in the kind of situation Boo describes. Indeed, I think it's morally required. But that presumes his post is to have an honest dialogue on race and not simply use an anecdote to paint all Hillary supporters as racists.
what BDBlue said
It’s also hard to take concerns about racism seriously from a movement currently cheering and fighting for the disenfranchisement of Michigan with its significant African American population. But then this is also a movement that had no problem bullying John Lewis. Hey, they’re just doing their part to reverse those excesses of the 1960s.
Bravo, CD
Even if this perfect anecdote is true, if it really happened, which I also doubt, or let's just say that if a writer were to use it in a script, the critique would be "that's a little too on the nose," that Booman would think one such encounter could be presented as saying anything meaningful about Hillary Clinton or the people supporting her tells more about his own prejudices than anyone else's.
On the other hand, A. Citizen, please, whatever your feelings about Obama, to suggest that he has not run a credible campaign for President is beyond stupid. With much regret I've given up visiting Daily Kos, although by reading another blog I ran across a supposed post by Kos himself that suggested Kos readers get busy studying those released papers from the Clinton library to search for "dirt," and he apparently makes clear he means dirt, because we all know that both Clintons are both dirty and corrupt, so I know where your coming from. But please, please let's not mirror the craziness by using phrases like "machine politician." That's a major rightwing trope, right now, about Obama. It's got John Fund's greasy fingerprints all over it. It's as meaningless as all the talk by Obama supporters about "the Clinton machine."
Hillary has been a better candidate than I'd expected her to be, but she has run a worse campaign than I'd expected her to. I expected Obama to be a good candidate, I did not expect him to out organize and strategize the Clintons.
One of these two people is going to be the Democratic candidate for President, and the incessant, unthinking, tone-deaf attacks against Obama that I've been reading here upset me greatly.
In a sense I don't have a leg to stand on since I've not been posting, but that is largely because I've been too angry and too depressed to do so, and there's nothing worse than angry depression.
Instead of posting I've been spending my time doing a little organizing around the possibility of beginning some kind of grassroots effort to get accountability for what's been going on in the Bush administration for the last eight years outside of the framework of impeachment.
I do intend to return to blogging, but I truly hate feeling so angry all the time.
Another point, Rev Wright is not some kind of skeleton in Obama's closet. Wright is not outside the American mainstream. He can have an abrasive style, and it is fairly easy to make him seem like he is out of the mainstream, but we shouldn't be helping the rightwing to do that, damnit.
This is from another thread, but please vastleft, even though I know that you were being ironic, Obama didn't say that his grandmother was a racist, and it's a very sour kind of irony you get from pretending that he did. I'm aware that Joan Walsh in Salon found the comparison between the white grandmother and the black preacher mentor to be somewhat tortured and disturbing, but that doesn't mean it's right or smart, and once again, it's where the right is already on the attack.
I had the rare good luck to hear Martin Luther King make the big speech in which he took on the entire Vietnam issue at the Riverside Cathedral in N.Y, and believe me, it was both revelatory and deeply radical, in the best sense, of cutting back to the roots to take a good look at our American selves. Don't think it was seen, at the time, as anything but radical. Don't think the SCLM embraced it or Dr. King. The main charge was that he had finally stepped out of the American mainstream and had hurt civil rights in the process. I'm not equating Wright to King, who was the better writer and rhetorician, but Dr. King did not hang back and it was a deeply critical analysis of American policy and American society.
Just so I don't have to be the only angry one today, take a look at this beaut in The Nation by Barbara Ehrenreich; read the online letters; the author of the book Ehrenreich cites shows up to leave a letter.. That Hillary was part of "The Family" may be legitimately creepy, but what Ehrenreich does with it is a disgrace.
I can well believe that the story is true
Fortunately, none of us need fear being poor when we are old, or jealous of the young, or alone, or curdling into racism, either.
Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung!
And the story is no less part of the narrative for being true. It punches all the buttons.
So, yes indeed, nothing worse than being angry and depressed.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Grassroots Accountability
I'd be interested in hearing what you're thinking about, leah. I've been thinking about it, too. Even if the next president wants to hold the Bush Administration accountable, it's going to be difficult what with a quagmire to get out of in Iraq, a war to salvage in Afghanistan, the financial sector meltdown, and the recession.
One of the things I've been thinking about is how the next administration could help accountability efforts without having to devote a lot of resources to it. If there was some movement to waive executive privilege and/or declassify some of the materials that were improperly classified by Cheney's gang, I think that would be a start. And, of course, appointing U.S. Attorneys who will enforce Congressional subpoenas. But it seems to me that private lawyers with help from grassroots organizations could go through a lot more material, a lot quicker, than a Justice Department that's trying to rebuild itself after eight years of mismanagement.
x
Thank you, voodoo chile. That story sounded a little too made up for me, too. Particularly throwing in the parts that she was waiting for Hillary.
i'd prefer we not accuse other bloggers of lying without
some evidence. you can disagree with him all you'd like and hate on his candidate, but boo is a leading voice in the blogosphere and i've never had any reason to believe he's lying (anymore than i believe that about any of you).
he may be stupid and wrong, but let's not accuse him of such a great sin without proof.
I liked the idea of the FISA commission...
... one way to get to accountability might be to open source a ton of the data as part of the commmission process. Say, executive orders. Or torture memos. Or the Cheney Energy Task Force material.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Leah, to what would you be referring...?
"the incessant, unthinking, tone-deaf attacks against Obama that I’ve been reading here upset me greatly"?
Are you talking about any fellows' posts? Most readers' comments? Some readers' comments?
anti-affirmative action iniatives
from a diary at OpenLeft
investigate Ward Connolly
I'm an equal opportunity basher
I don't like hearing either HHHillary's Clintonista or the Unibama Oborg bash the other side while claiming their own is led by the feminine Mau'dib or the Messiah, thank you.
But that being said I will vote for whoever has the Democratic nomination for President, if the Feds don't make me soylent green first. Assuming, of course, Liz Cheney doesn't get it.
Leah, check out the farmer's place and the Staybehinders. Just sayin'. Your name is still up front there, at least on my browser.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
it's true--they both suck, &
are weak and very flawed candidates--the best candidates the media ever chose, they're thinking--the good obama vs. bad hillary narrative was set even before the first primary vote, and both candidates have danced to the media's tune all along--Obama fought when they demanded he fight, and the inevitable repeated Clinton comebacks require the media to kill her off first each time.