Posted on 09/15/2008 4:59:45 AM PDT by pabianice
The hopes of black America ride on his shoulders. But the outcome's way up in the air.
I am a black man born in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Fleeing the abuses of Jim Crow, my parents moved from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., later that decade. Tales of racial oppression and racial resistance were staples of conversation in our household. My father often spoke of watching Thurgood Marshall argue the case ( Rice v. Elmore) that invalidated the rule permitting only whites to vote in South Carolina's Democratic primary. Memories of that story played a large part in producing the tears I shed on the evening Barack Obama won this year's primary in the Palmetto State.
Related memories -- the most haunting being our visit to a D.C. funeral home to pay last respects to Medgar Evers, the courageous head of the Mississipppi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who was murdered by a segregationist -- helped reduce me to tears, again, on the night the senator from Illinois accepted his party's nomination as its candidate for president.
Never before have my emotions been so exercised by a political campaign. For one thing, never before has a candidate so fully challenged the many inhibitions that have prevented people of all races, including African Americans, from seriously envisioning presidential power in the hands of someone other than a white American. With intelligence, verve and elegance, Obama has opened the public mind to the idea of a black president and made that idea broadly attractive.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I have heard that Obama is more American Arab than African
American is that true?
My next question is if he is elected and fails will the Africans Americans blame the white man the Republicans or both.
Temper tantrum writ large.
The same was done about Ferraro and the latest Hillary. Given the right candidate, anyone can win.
Yep.
p.s.
I like my Kimber.
The way to overcome predjudice is to demonstrate that a group is really not significantly different than another. For example, there used to be alot of discrimination against Irish and Italians. Over the years these groups demonstrated the same capabilities and values as mainstream America. They may celebrate different holidays, or have some distinctive traditions, but they are generally inconsequential. Very few people give a second thought to whether someone is Irish or Italian these days, it tells you nothing significant about the person. If groups continue to demand special benefits, openly reject mainstream American thoughts and tradition, and if racial or ethnic differences can be strongly correlated with negative behaviors and attitudes, predjudice will never disappear.
One thing that would help overcome that is for blacks to stop making fun of blacks for “acting white” (take the Fresh Prince and his insults to Carlton).
My teenage grandchildren have a black father. Therefore they like Obama. I was thinking about them last week, how it wouldn’t do any good to try to change their minds, when I realized how angry they would be when he loses. I guess it is like trying to convince a teenager with a broken heart from puppy love that this will pass and a better person will come along soon.
Nobama has “intelligence, verve, and elegance”, but what he lacks is a valid birth certificate. What he also has had is an Indonesian passport that he used to travel to Pakistan. He also has a flat butt from sitting for 20 years in the pews at “Rec” Wright’s wrong church. What he also has is a shrill wife who hasn’t been proud of America until a year of campaigning.
The blacks have been sold a true pail of crap.
I really feel sorry for them.
It won't set it back, it will merely reveal just how far we have to go.
B.L.O.A.T.
Watts hasn’t been rebuilt.
I, too, am struck by the transformation in the Democrat Party. From a party of white racists, who denied to right to vote to blacks in South Carolina and killed Medgar Evers, to a party of black racists, who ask the country to elect a man who is not qualified for any public position President on the basis of his skin color.
An amazing tranformation!
The author of this piece of dreck is a professor of law at Harvard University. Think about that for a moment. Harvard is, supposedly, the best law school in the country, and yet they have a spot on the faculty for this guy.
Randall Kennedy is a professor of law at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal."
I have it on the authority of two white Obama supporters in my area that the only reason Obama could lose is because of racism and that if America weren’t racist Obama would be up by at least twelve percent in the polls. If a couple of central Illinois crackers have bought into this mentality I can’t imagine the inner city storms that are brewing.
I don’t think urban Black America is engaged in any political person or process enough to incite any level of discord. They just couldn’t care less.
Sounds like the race baiters are trying to burn a Crescent on our front lawn. I thought this behavior was frowned on. Lest we forget Reverend Wright...
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