Can you elaborate on your comment?…

“….especially those blue collar ones – what it’s like when we’re not condescended to or bullshitted.”

I am sure we are all very interested in perceiving more of your insights, if you have the time. (I know undergrads = aligators. So time might be a factor.) I am especially interested.

Best,
Catrina

P.S. I know your background is “BC” (as you say in your books). So is mine, “raised in a BC railroad town”. Yet, isn’t it true that roots create primary cultural perspective; yet intellectual capability, refinement through education, evolving sociological association, etc. can alter primary cultural paradigms? Personal beliefs sometimes don’t align with an overall effective national strategy. Don’t you think?

i think Obama just managed to show americans – especially those blue collar ones – what it’s like when we’re not condescended to or bullshitted.

& i think people may hugely underestimate how important that may be in the long run.

Barak’s speech borders on catastrophic when it is related to that goal. He did NOT listen to many advisors that warned him about turning the attention to “race”. He is now becoming the “black” candidate instead of a candidate that happens to be African American.

The speech should have focused strictly on disavowing the conspiratorial commentary of his Minister. Instead he moved into legacy issues that occurred two generations ago and shit on his own “white” Grandmother! That is not a way to win an election in 2008. It also neutralizes the core success driver of his campaign… that Barak’s cultural paradigm is past Jim Crow and the sixties!

He even made the error of politicizing race. His speech directly stated that if a voter believes in limited government, that that voter is a racist. He directly attacked Ronald Reagan branding him a racist reactionary because he believed in strict construction!

Has he not heard of “Reagan Democrats”? They are the swing voters.

Barak needs blue collar and lower middle class “whites” (demographically speaking) to win this election…. and he just “pissed” on them… That is bad, bad, bad, bad politics.

The polls in one day already show his negatives up 7.00% with undecided voters in that demographic. It is going to get worse as they pick the speech apart. If negatives go high, candidates are dead meat no matter how “pro” the core supporters are. A voter who perceives a candidate “negative” can never be convinced to vote for that person. Someone who is “pro” another candidate can be convinced to shift their allegiance. Thats politics and human nature.

That speech is “great” for progressive people. The speech would have got standing ovations if he made it in front of the “University Tenured Faculty Association” if there was such a thing. But, “It ain’t going to play in Peoria.”

A quick fact, more than 40% of blue collar “union households” repeat “Union Households” (private industry unions) vote Republican and that is after being bombarded by union influence. There is no way a Democrat can win an election without those votes.

Barak just caused himself more problems than he could ever envision.

“As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”

I encourage everyone to read the rest of it.

Let us pose it as a question, “How can the African American community transcend and move forward from the discriminative past when individuals that are entrusted with the community’s spiritual well being constantly spew conspiracy theories that focus on oppression and remind them the discriminative past continues to exist with examples so radical they are impossible to prove or disprove?”

Few blacks are lynched now (thank God!) Jim Crow and the KKK are affectively dead. The perpetrators of these vile acts are excoriated. Yet the Reverend attempts to reinforce the cultural perspective and beliefs in his congregation that such discrimination still persists by preaching that even more insidious conspiracies against black people exist. Those conspiracies are totally unfounded on reality.

This church is not main steam. There are many African American churches in Chicago that do not espouse conspiracy theories, hatred for whites etc. Their doors are open to all. They emphasize a brighter future for all humanity.

Such unfounded thinking and the pursuit to a separate nationalism for African Americans drives in the opposite direction of the transcendent unity which is the positive aspects of the liberation movements for all humanity. That nationalism isolates A-Americans even “more”, a result no one seeks.

This is going to be a big problem for Barak because the grounds for such commentary indicate a deep cultural psychosis and a separatist cultural paradigm that is not harmonic with the vast majority of Americans including traditional Democratic liberals. They see it for what it is, racism and hatred… the very thing so many have dedicated their lives to eradicate.

It is not correct to mention the hatreds and racism of the past, and equate it with racism of the present. Barak’s grandmother came from two generations ago. That discriminative prejudice is long gone as an accepted way of thinking in mainstream culture. However, Rev Wright spoke of God Damn America, white oppression, and HIV as a government conspiracy to kill blacks, “yesterday”. We can not allow those thoughts to have validity.

Such thoughts also need to be placed in the trash bin of history for African American’s sake.

Barak did “not” follow some of his advisor’s thoughts in his speech. He had to completely divorce himself in that speech, not just of the Reverend, but of the cultural underpinnings that intellectually drive “conspiracy nationalism” and the resulting general hatreds it manifests.

He did not do this in his speech. Thats bad politics. Lets watch how those poll numbers now sink….

many black people don’t have the same experiences in this country as many white people do. because of this little social, cultural, political called racism. so am i surprised that some folks in the black community are angry at the way they and their ancestors have been treated for the past several hundred years?

no.

am i surprised that anytime something like this comes up, some white people lose their minds? i shouldn’t be, but i am.

remember ray nagin talking about new orleans as a chocolate city? statement of fact, imo. remember the uproar around that? stupid, imo.

also: as we’ve discussed here, folks don’t always agree with their pastors. but if they agree on enough, and if they have a solid community, they’ll stay. we shouldn’t assume that obama shares every opinion that his pastor has.