Gayle Madwin (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} queerbychoice) wrote,@ 2008-03-31 23:04:00 |
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| Current mood: |  aggravated |
| Current music: | silence |
Shocking Revelations: Barack Obama Talks to Black People Who Say Racism Exists!
I'm getting extremely sick of hearing people express shock and horror and outrage every time they come across any quote suggesting that anyone Barack Obama even associates with has ever openly acknowledged that racism exists. Like how Snopes.com feels a need to clarify his wife's statement in her senior thesis at Princeton:
Much scrutiny and discussion has been focused on a single phrase within the thesis, the statement that "blacks must join in solidarity to combat a white oppressor." This phrase has been repeatedly quoted out of context and presented as if it reflected Michelle Obama's own philosophy, but in its full context it is clearly her speculation about what she thought some of the respondents she surveyed for her thesis (i.e., students who had attended Princeton in earlier years) might have been feeling.What the hell would be wrong with saying that, even if it were her own philosophy? Can it honestly be news to anyone whatsoever that black people are being (gasp!) oppressed by white people, or that they will have a better chance at ceasing to be oppressed if they (double gasp!) work together "in solidarity"? Isn't this just stating a rather blatantly obvious, objectively verifiable fact?
Why am I increasingly getting the impression that much of the United States, including much of the Democratic Party, is perfectly willing to vote for a black presidential candidate only on the condition that the candidate in question must frantically deny that black people are in any way oppressed by white people at all, and must also avoid ever associating with any other black people at all unless those black people also frantically deny that black people are in any way oppressed by white people at all?
And he can't really associate too closely with any white people at all, either; I'm sure that if he were married to a white woman, a sufficiently significant number of people would see that as a sign of him being "uppity" that he wouldn't be the Democratic Party frontrunner right now at all. He should probably just lock himself in an airtight biosphere all alone from now on, because if he associates with any other human being at all, the other human being will probably be classifiable as belonging to some race or other, and no matter which race(s) it is, the presence of anyone of any race(s) anywhere near him will always manage to remind people that the candidate himself is (despite actually being biracial) classifiable as belonging to a race too, and that the race he is classified as belonging to is not (triple gasp!) the white one. How very shocking and horrifying and outrageous.
