Obama’s Speech and Pastor

5 Responses to “Obama’s Speech and Pastor”

1. Zionism =Racisim on March 24th, 2008 6:12 pm

   Of course you would think his speech was good, and the pastor ‘nasty’ you’re easily moved by Oration, and have little respect for substance, or a knowledge of reality. You obviously have no clue of what being black in America is….Just like you pass judgement on Palestinian’s you pass judgement on black ‘victimhood’ in America. (For reality see figures at the bottom)

   Consider the following: (Lifted from a Chicago-an’s review of his speech)

   Where to begin? How about the beginning, when he refers to Independence Hall across the street from the site of his address in the following terms:

   ”Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery…”

   Sorry, but most of the people attending the Constitutional Convention had been born in British Colonial North America and had not “traveled across the ocean.” Some of their English and European ancestors had migrated to “escape tyranny and persecution” but a larger number likely came to advance their fortune or simply to make a living.

   Many of the “farmers” at the Constitutional Convention were large-scale planters and slave-owners. They along with many other Founders were architects and beneficiaries of “tyranny and persecution” in the New World, much to the detriment of countless Native Americans, black slaves, indentured servants, landless laborers, and impressed soldiers and sailors.
   ————-
   Early in his Philadelphia speech Obama went into his standard soliloquy about how he comes from diverse racial and ethnocultural origins and how he has lived in a rich (the U.S) and a poor (Indonesia) nation and has gone to elite schools and then says, “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate.”

   Sorry, but there are people with similar stories in other (if less powerful) countries all over the world.
   ————
   Later in his speech, Obama gets into big bad Reverend Wright, who Obama accuses of “express[ing] a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

   Wow.

   Sorry, but white racism is in fact endemic in the United States, even if the U.S. has stopped being what Wright calls (in one of the clips circulated by presumed Obama enemies) “the US of KKK.” As Obama certainly knows quite well, anti-black racism is deeply rooted in how U.S. real estate and labor markets operate, how the U.S. education system functions, how home mortgages are marketed, how credit is extended, how the U.S. criminal justice system works, how economic development is directed, how health care is structured, and much more. There’s a vast body of research (I have produced some of it) showing persistent systematic anti-black discrimination and bias in the schooling, feeding, training, hiring, promoting/demoting, healing, insuring, serving, reporting, patrolling, monitoring, arresting, sentencing, incarcerating, transporting, empowering, representing, funding, evaluating, assisting, analyzing, judging, televising, praising, punishing, rewarding, shaming. birthing, killing, and burying of the American people. Multidimensional institutional and societal racism remains deeply woven into the fabric of the nation’s institutions and daily life.

   What Obama really means to say is that many, maybe most white folks no longer see it as politically correct to be openly race-prejudiced in the U.S. He also means to convey that white America is now much less consciously and intentionally racist than it used to be.

   That’s true enough, but he fails to make the important distinction between overt racism (largely defeated) and covert racism (still endemic). He fails to distinguish personal and psychological racism from (endemic) societal and institutional racism. He does not deal with the difference between state-of-mind racism and state-of-being racism. And he fails to acknowledge that white America’s’ constant self-congratulation over dropping level-one (overt, deliberate, and conscious) racism — “look at me, I’m ready to vote for a black man” (yes, but only a particular kind black man…one who won’t press the deeper issues of societal and institutional racism and who doesn’t speak in the “angry” and “divisive” [Obama’s word] language of a Jeremiah Wright) – can actually further entrench the policies, structures, and practices of (often ostensibly color-blind) institutional racism by feeding the false “post-Civil Rights” notion that racism no longer poses significant barriers to black advancement and equality in the U.S..

   As for Obama’s Middle East comments, they are disgraceful. No, Obama’s “stalwart ally” is not the sole cause of Middle Eastern conflict. Fine, but U.S. client state Israel’s U.S.-protected apartheid and occupation policies and Israel’s related hyper-militarism – expressed in a terrible bombing of Lebanon that Obama shamefully rushed to defend (just as he immediately supported Israel’s recent blockade of Gaza) – deeply fuel Middle Eastern violence and Islamic fundamentalism. That fundamentalism is also fed by other U.S. policies, including the reckless bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, the remorseless application of mass-murderous “economic sanctions” against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, and the bloody and brazenly imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq (supposedly launched with what Obama repeatedly and ridiculously calls “the best of [noble democratic] intentions”) – a killer of 1.3 million Iraqis.

   The U.S. and its “stalwart ally” have long driven the expansion of the fundamentalist threat Bush II exploited to launch a criminal invasion Obama has given us numerous reasons to expect he will continue for an indefinite period.
   ——–
   Later in his speech, Obama said that “Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”

   Does Obama really expect black Americans to put aside “racially charged sentiments” and jump on board a big “UNITY” train when the all-too forgotten reality of institutional racism (still going strong beneath the ongoing national celebration about how America is no longer explicitly and openly racist) consigns a grossly disproportionate share of the nation’s black populace to the bottoms of the nation’s steep and interrelated pyramids of class and color?

   The disparities are much worse than Obama suggested in yesterday’s speech when he said that “race” is “a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” Yes, it’s still a bit less than perfect, alright.

   This sort of understatement is not new in Obama’s discourse on race. In his profoundly conservative book The Audacity of Hope (its title ironically lifted from a fiery Wright sermon), Obama tried to soothe white and black readers by claiming that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”

   During a March 2007 speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists – who he referred to as “the Moses Generation” – had brought black America “90 percent of the way” to racial equality. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” members, Obama said, to get past “that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.”

   To buttress the notion that blacks have entered the “mainstream” in The Audacity of Hope, Obama cited the example of an extremely wealthy “black friend” who lent him an airplane “one of the first times I needed a corporate jet.” He mentioned a different black “friend who had been the number one bond salesman at Merrill Lynch” and “decided to start his own investment bank.” He cited yet another bourgeois African-American who “decided to leave an executive position at General Motors to start his own parking company in partnership with Hyatt” because he wanted “to build something of his own.” .Obama also observed that the first half million dollars he raised for his Senate campaign came from black Chicago professionals and businesses and says that “blacks…occupy some of the highest management positions in Chicago.”

   Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty. Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a Third World nation.

   And never mind that Obama could have garnered the following facts from a Chicago Urban League study of racial inequality in his own metropolitan back yard – the city whose pronounced and persistent racial disparities have done so much to drive Rev. Wright to make “inexcusable” (by Obama’s description) comments:

   * Black median household income was just 58 percent of white median household income in the Chicago metropolitan area, according to the 2000 census.

   * Median annual black household income in Chicago in 2000 was more than $6,000 less than the Economic Policy Institute “basic family budget”—the no-frills cost of living (taking into account housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, and other necessities plus taxes)—for even a small family of one parent and two children ($35,307). The median white household income in the city exceeded that basic family budget by more than that $11,300.

   * More than a quarter of black households in the Chicago metropolitan area lived on less than $15,000 in 2000, and more than half of metropolitan black households lived on less than $35, 000. By contrast, less than a tenth of the area’s white households lived on less than $15,000, and less than 30 percent of metropolitan white households lived on less than $35,000.

   * A fourth of the Chicago metropolitan area’s black households were officially poor, compared to just 5.6 percent white and 16 percent of Latin households. Sixteen percent of Chicago’s blacks lived in what researchers call “deep poverty”—at less than half of the federal government’s notoriously low and inadequate poverty level. More than a third of the metropolitan area’s black children lived in poverty, compared to just 5 percent of the white kids.

   * The median income of the average neighborhood inhabited by African Americans in the Chicago metropolitan area ($36,298) was just 59 percent of the median income in the average neighborhood inhabited by whites in the same metropolitan area ($61,952).

   * Of the city’s fifteen poorest neighborhoods, with poverty measures ranging from 32 to 56 percent, all but one was disproportionately black and eleven were at least 94 percent black. Of the city’s top fifteen neighborhoods for child poverty, with rates ranging from 55 to 71 percent, ten were disproportionately black and none are disproportionately white, the rest being disproportionately Latino.

   * All but one of the fifteen Chicago neighborhoods where more than 25 percent of the kids were growing up in deep poverty had a black population percentage considerably higher than the city average. All but three were at least 94 percent black. There were six predominantly black neighborhoods—Oakland, North Lawndale, Washington Park, Grand Boulevard, Douglas, and Riverdale — where more than 40 percent of the children are deeply poor and in Riverdale it was actually more than half.

   * Just 4.4 percent of officers and directors of large Chicago-area businesses were African American by the late 1990’s.

   * Only 0.7 percent of 2,950 partners in Chicago area law firms were African American.

   * 93 percent of Chicago area federal campaign contributions come from zip codes that were 50 percent or more white. Just 7.2 percent came from zip codes that were 50 percent or more comprised of people of color (Paul Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago [Chicago: Chicago Urban League, 2005])

   But so what? Obama argued in Audacity that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites…tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” – a judgment that Obama repeated in understanding terms in Philadelphia.

2. Drima on March 25th, 2008 4:57 am

   Claiming that the United States government invented AIDS to infect African-Americans with it *is* an unfortunate conspiratorial mindset reflecting the Pastor’s victimhood.

   Go read a psychology book or something.

3. Zionism=Racisim on March 25th, 2008 2:12 pm

   Nice, so you take one point Wright said, and use that to show his Victimhood, and not address one of the many many things he has said?!?! You take one extreme view of his rather than the majority of his statements which do in fact hold water. Not surprising coming from an elitist sudani…how many servants does your family have in Sudan??? How many southern Sudanese do your family’s wash and ironing? And clean your compound?

   You truely are a clown, maybe you spend too much time reading those ‘psychology’ and rhetoric books with the goal of appearing as an educated Sudani and not enough time in reality with real people, with real issues that slap them in the face every day. WTF you know about being profiled? Or being told ‘you fit the description’? Or getting denied credit or an apartment or a job because your name is ‘black sounding’….all this has been tested, proven and documented. So if you want to pass judgement on African Americans in America and their ‘victimhood’,(God knows you already do on Palestine) come live in America,(Or go to Gaza for that matter) and live a month on the south side of Chicago…you’d get the shit slapped out of you for being what we refer to in Chicago as a bitch made man.

   -Fact of the matter is the majority of what Wright says holds weight.
   1. American Foreign Policy has some responsibility for 9/11…..uhhh Yeah.

   2. America’s treatments of African Americans, they’re better off singing God Dam America…..Uhhhh Yeah, and there’s stacks of facts and figures to back this up.

4. Drima on March 25th, 2008 4:33 pm

   Nice, more labels and epithets. Seems like you can’t just argue your points without resorting to cute personal attacks. You put words in my mouth and read into my posts shit that isn’t even there in the first place.

   I pass judgments on Palestine? Yeah, I surely do, on the so-called leadership there. I make it explicitly clear but over and over you ignore that and choose to view what I write the way you please as if I’m bashing Palestinians without any consideration to the suffering they go through daily. So why even bother with your comments?

   I haven’t lived in the United States and I’m not American. I do however have family and many friends (rich, average, “poor”) who are American and live in America. I’ve also been to the States for visits (and twice to Chicago).

   I didn’t experience the country much (obviously) but I’ve seen and met enough many people to confirm to me what I knew and have been told by American friends and family.

   Nobody denies that there is discrimination in the United States. I’m not denying it. Why would I even do such a thing? Historically, the injustices were sickening and disgusting. They still remain albeit to a much, much lower extent. But like I said, you put words in my mouth and read into my posts shit that isn’t even there in the first place.

   I haven’t personally faced any discrimination during my short stays in the States but *some* friends and family sure have. The keyword is some. For others, especially immigrant friends, America gave them a lot.

   This isn’t about denying or sweeping the reality under the rug. It’s about a mindset that believes a black man/woman can’t progress in America because of the white man’s this and that. It’s about being one-sided and not recognizing that the America people like Pastor Wright curses gave a member of his own church so much.

   Plus, have you even considered that African Americans themselves might be contributing to their own problems? Forget what I say, how about what Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle have to say on race issues?

   Regarding the inexcusable events of 9/11 and American foreign policy being partly responsible, yes to a tiny extent, after all the CIA trained Bin Laden and his gang against the Soviet Union. Blowback. That’s pretty much it. The rest has to do with al-Qaeda’s twisted ideology.

   As for not spending enough time in reality with real people, you haven’t got a clue but hey why would you even listen right? Why bother replying or reading the blog of this “elitist sudani clown”?

   Peace.

5. Andrew Brehm on March 26th, 2008 10:45 am

   Our Nazi friend doesn’t know that much but he sure has strong opinions.

   He “knows” so much about Israel and Jews and talks about “reality” and “real people”, but did he ever visit Israel and meet Zionists? Did he ever find Zionists who actually believe or say what he claims Zionists believe or say?

   I doubt it.

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