Korean Job Discussion Forums

[stevemcgarrett]

To hear him speak recently before a mostly black audience at Hampton College in Virginia, you'd think he was the Reverend Obama.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8PIUO380&show_article=1

No, not a wannabe like Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, who don't even have their own churches.

But a minister like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself.

Aside from the tiresome incongruous use of a down-home preaching style to a black audience that now lives mostly in the suburbs or upscale urban areas, what annoys me the most is his presumption that blacks are still victims of the system.

Dr. John McWhorter, the young black social commentator and former linguistics professor at UC-Berkeley, lamented the constant call to whine in his superb bestseller Losing the Race.

He eloquently assaulted the persistent reliance on a cult of victimhood by the old guard of the Civil Rights era and its new devotees.

Lorraine Hansberry once observed in her famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, that all blacks know how to do if pray, moan, and have babies. Of course she was mocking the white stereotype of the time but today those bitter words by Walter Lee Younger, Jr. have an ironic and rather uncomfortable ring to them.

Sen. Obama was doing a lot of moaning at Hampton College the other day, so much so that I wouldn't be surprised in the nearby cows were confused whether they should head for the barn or the campus. Worse than that, he's appealing to the base instinct of fear in talking of a "quiet riot" simmering in the black community.

It's especially disheartening coming from a man who is clearly as well educated and self-reflective as Obama. But at least he's putting his cards on the table well before the election, letting voters like me know that if anything, he will reinforce flawed affirmative action policy and rather than "mend, not end it" like Clinton, actually appeal for the need to help those who won't help themselves.

What I contend is that in this era when the majority of blacks no longer live in poverty, where lower bars of admission to university programs and educational opportunities specially financed by taxpayers abound for black students who demonstrate even a modicum of academic effort, and where even the hint of racism aimed at African Americans leads to public rebuke, the last thing shining lights like Obama need to be doing is whining about how awful it is.

Such a call to arms is also at great variance with his campaign pledge of hope, itself a variation on a theme first promoted by Jesse Jackson. Of course, more can and should be done to help the hurricane victims and to provide decent housing and medical care to the truly impoverished.

But what is most needed, I contend, is a new vision of black leadership that embraces not only the spirit of hope, but the language and letter of it. Making excuses for the social malaise afflicting a growing segment of the black community is not getting us there. Insinuating that the highly disproportionate number of incarcerated black males, unwed mothers, and college dropouts is somehow to be blamed on the indifference of the current administration, or lax enforcement of the laws of the land is naive at best and disingenuous at worst.

Not only as a concerned American but as one who lived and taught by choice in a poor black community in the South for more than a decade, I too have a vested interest in seeing a return not to the strictly self-help vocationally minded days of Booker T. Washington, nor to the subsequent somewhat elitist talent tenth days of W.E. B. DuBois, but to the next generations--the confidence of cultural expression exhibited during the Harlem Renaissance and the moral perogative of the early civil rights movement before affirmative action policy unwittingly led it astray.

Note: the preceding is an article now under review by a leading newspaper in the U.S. Please do not cite in documents for publication.

So, what say you about Senator Obama: do you think this tactic will serve him well or ill in the presidential campaign in the months ahead?

[mithridates]

Obama Warns of 'Quiet Riot' Among Blacks

[Tiger Beer]

He is right about a 'quiet riot' among blacks.

White people try to ignore the crime, violence, anger, resentment.. they move out of those cities.. everytime the TV crews go to Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, wherever.. you just see third-world ghetto poor black people absolutely everywhere.. so much so that no white person can hardly even walk down the street without the feeling of 'something might happen'.

When it comes to medicare, healthcare, retirement.. the government is always talking about how each American needs to diversify his portfolio.. invest for the future.. there is an incredible huge disconnect when it comes to the normal American reality and the Wall Street/Hollywood/DC world that the politicians/media projects every American to most likely have.

[stevemcgarrett]

Tiger Beer wrote:

[Doutdes]

[stevemcgarrett]

Doutdes:

Actually, smartazz, it's a mainstream publication and state circulated.

And what, pray tell, was racist about it or are you one of those knee-jerk liberals who presume that anyone who calls into question the motives of a black person is just another David Duke?

Buy a vowel and get a clue.

[thepeel]

[Doutdes]

[stevemcgarrett]

Doubtdes:

Well, there's light at the end of your tunnel. At least you interpreted one thing correctly: I am implying that Obama has yet to demonstrate that he is of the stature of King.

As a politician who is not a minister, talking like a minister is dissembling and pandering to the stereotype that black audiences respond best to that image.

King appealed eloquently to people's moral conscious.

Obama whines and triggers their base instincts.

Hardly the same tone.

[Doutdes]

[Rteacher]

At this point, pragmatic politicians have to pander to some interest group or another (eg: NRA, Hispanics, Christian Coalition, feminists, etc...) in order to stand a chance at becoming a major party's candidate for President.

I think that a (more-or-less) black President would be better positioned to defuse the prison culture mentality that's now prevalent in ghettos (and perhaps an admitted past-user of cocaine could deal more frankly with related drug issues...)

[endo]

[insam]

received this in an email, will post here:

n a 2000 debate, Al Gore said that during wildfires in Texas he'd met with the director of FEMA. In fact, Vice President Gore had met with the deputy director of FEMA. Although I had been at the meeting as well, I didn't remember it either. But the press, spoon-fed by the Republican smear machine, used the misstatement to damn Gore as a "serial exaggerator."

So I expected the 600 journalists covering the GOP debate at St. Anselm's College to spank Mitt Romney when, in answering the first question of the night -- knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq? -- Romney said that if "Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction...we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in."

Wolf Blitzer followed up, trying to get a straight answer. But again, Romney repeated this story...

So, in Romneyland, Pres. Bush invaded Iraq because the Iraqi government would not allow weapons inspectors in. The lack of inspectors led Bush to believe Saddam had WMDs and was preparing to use them against us or our allies. So Bush had to invade.

Boy, oh boy, I thought, Ol' Mitt's gonna take some *beep*. Because everyone knows that Iraq did allow weapons inspectors in. Everyone remembers that day -- September 17, 2002 -- when Saddam capitulated to Kofi Annan and allowed inspectors in without conditions. (The CNN story that day was headlined, cleverly, "Iraq Agrees to Weapons Inspections.")

Everyone remembers Hans Blix and over 250 experts scouring the countryside, looking for weapons of mass destruction. Everyone remembers the Bush Administration deriding their work...

...And everyone remembers that, after months of searching and finding nothing, the weapons inspectors asked for more time. Begged is more like it. But President Bush refused. On March 17, 2003 and kicked the weapons inspectors out, and on March 20 he launched his war.

So for Mitt Romney to say it was Saddam who kicked the inspectors out, well, I thought he'd be crushed for his ignorance -- or his dishonesty...

But after the debate, nothing.

...Republicans want to blur the record, to revise history, so we don't have to confront the fact that if Mr. Bush had given the weapons inspectors more time to do their job, they would have concluded Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. No weapons, no threat. No threat, no war.

But I was -- and am -- stunned at the lack of scrutiny by the media......

And so I yelled again last night when a leading Republican again lied about why we went to war...

[stevemcgarrett]

insam:

Interesting post but wrong thread. Go to the back of the line.

Doutdes wrote:

[stevemcgarrett]

endo wrote: