Color Blind: Chait’s look at race during Obama era is missing one thing: black Americans

If I were outlining a racial history of the Obama administration, it would begin with policy: A housing collapse that destroyed black Americans’ wealth; a health care law attacked as “reparations” and crippled by a neo-Calhounite doctrine of “state sovereignty”; a broad assault on voting rights and access to the polls, concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy. Indeed, it would focus on the deep irony of the Obama era: That the first black president has presided over a declining status quo for many black Americans.

In short, it would treat race as a real force in public life that has real consequences for real people.

You should contrast this with Jonathan Chait’s most recent feature for New York magazine, where the story of race in the Obama administration is a story of mutual grievance between Americans on the left and right, with little interest in the lived experiences of racism from black Americans and other people of color. It’s a story, in other words, that treats race as an intellectual exercise—a low-stakes cocktail party argument between white liberals and white conservatives over their respective racial innocence.

“If you…set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life,” Chait writes, “you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before. Hardly a day goes by without a volley and counter-volley of accusations of racial insensitivity and racial hypersensitivity.”

That might fit the experiences of a mostly white pundit class, but it has nothing to do with race as experienced in the “day-to-day” lives of ordinary people. When a twentysomething black New Yorker talks about race, she isn’t as concerned with the rhetoric of Republicans as she is with the patrol car that trails her teenage brother....

I fear that he'll draw the wrong conclusions from that observation, though. "We need to get more violent so that they have to notice us" or some such. There is a huge, welling anger just under the surface in this country right now, from many different things. I don't think it would take much of a spark to set it off.

I quite agree.

And part of that "huge, welling anger" is legitimately coming from blacks who are starting to realize that their party and their patrons, white liberals, really don't give a damn about them, save their vote.

Under the circumstances, I'd grant there could well be some misdirected violence. But I don't see anything that can be done about it, either.

Our culture today is a devil's brew concocted by liberals, for liberals -- and damn the consequences.

Hope for the best...prepare for the worst.

OBAMA ON RACE RELATIONS AND ISLAM

From Dreams of My Father, “ I FOUND A SOLACE IN NURSING A PERVASIVE SENSE OF GRIEVANCE AND ANIMOSITY AGAINST MY MOTHER’S RACE”.

From ‘Dreams of my Father’, “The emotion between the races could never be pure..... THE OTHER RACE WOULD ALWAYS REMAIN JUST THAT; MENACING, ALIEN, AND APART”.

From ‘Dreams of My Father’, “I CEASED TO ADVERTISE MY MOTHER’S RACE AT ABOUT 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites”

From Dreams Of My Father, “NEVER EMULATE THE WHITE MAN and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. IT WAS INTO MY FATHER’S IMAGE, THE BLACK MAN, SON OF AFRICA, THAT I’D PACKED ALL THE ATTRIBUTES I SOUGHT IN MYSELF..”

From Dreams Of My Father: “THAT HATE HADN’T GONE AWAY,” he wrote, blaming “WHITE PEOPLE- SOME CRUEL, SOME IGNORANT, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

From Dreams Of My Father; “There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “IT REMAINED NECESSARY TO PROVE WHICH SIDE YOU WERE ON, TO SHOW YOUR LOYALTY TO THE BLACK MASSES, TO STRIKE OUT and name names”

From Dreams Of My Father, “I HAD GROWN ACCUSTOMED EVERYWHERE TO SUSPICION BETWEEN THE RACES”.

He tells us in his books of his love and admiration of Islam: Quote from Barack Obama’s book, Dreams Of My Father: “THE PERSON WHO MADE ME PROUDEST OF ALL, THOUGH, WAS MY [half brother], ROY..HE CONVERTED TO ISLAM”.
From ‘Dreams of my Father’, “IN INDONESIA, I SPEND TWO YEARS AT A MUSLIM SCHOOL” “..I STUDIED THE KORAN..”

From ‘Audacity of Hope: “LOLO (Obama’s step father) FOLLOWED ISLAM....”I LOOKED TO LOLO FOR GUIDANCE”.

From ‘The Audacity Of Hope, “I WILL STAND WITH THE MUSLIMS SHOULD THE POLITICAL WINDS OF WAR SHIFT IN AN UGLY DIRECTION..”

From The Audacity Of Hope, “WE ARE NO LONGER JUST A CHRISTIAN NATION, we are also a Jewish nation, a MUSLIM NATION, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

And if THAT isn’t enough, there’s his Muslim past. He was BORN into a long line of Muslims- and spent his formative years as the stepson of a practicing Muslim.- who without a doubt did his duty and sent his son to Muslim school and worship. Obama so much as admitted this in his book and today his handlers deny it!

What about the 26 or so years before he ‘joined’ a ‘Christian’ church? He states the joined the church and is a Christian, but where is his baptismal record? None can be found. A man undercover called the church and said he was a Muslim and asked if he could join. The answer was yes. They told him they had many Muslim members. (!!!)

Obama went to Kenya to campaign for his cousin, the Muslim-backed terrorist, Odinga, who caused riots when he lost the presidential election- riots that caused the deaths of over 1500, including 50 burned alive when a Christian church was burned down. Obama campaigned for this man! But then he told us he’d ‘stand with the Muslims’.

Then there is his pimping the illegal aliens: Obama’s speech to La Raza: (La Raza (The Race), Largest Hispanic organization in the U.S. Lobbies for racial preferences, bilingual education, stricter hate crimes laws, mass immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens ) Obama said the recent Senate immigration debate “was both ugly and racist in a way we haven’t see since the struggle for civil rights.” !! Obama told La Raza that the mass protests lately of for immigration rights of Mexicans is equal in greatness to the civil rights protest of the past!!

Obama supports La Raza’s, the “DREAM Act,” which would mandate states to offer in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens — thus providing them with benefits not available to U.S. citizens from other states, as well as amnesty and other atrocities. Obama urged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign the Dream act.(Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar measure last year.)

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