Crow wrote:8bitagent wrote:However, it's also painful to see a man lovingly serving the very racist(dare I say fascist) machine that has nothing but pure hate for blacks. I reluctantly have to agree in retrospect with Nader with his controversial comments that pretty much ended what remaining support he had. Why is it countless black scholars, writers, pundits, etc have all said he's let down the African American community?
8bit, I love your contributions here and the forum wouldn't be the same without you. So I want to share my own experience as a white woman partnered for almost a decade with a black man, currently carrying a mixed-race child. I considered myself open-minded and anti-racist before I met my husband, but if there is one thing I have learned over the years of up-close-and-personal but still not DIRECT experience, it is that as a white person I know very little about the lived experience of racism in this country. It is a lot like the movie They Live, and I only get the occasional opportunity to look through the sunglasses.
Pronouncing how black Americans ought to individually or collectively respond to our racist society is a terrible (but common) presumption on the part of white people. I've done it myself. (I've done it all, with good intentions harvested from the cobblestones of the road to hell.) Using the words of black people about another black person on issues of race is also...a good thing to stay away from, as a white anti-racist person.
(I am assuming you're white, in part because of what you've written here and the way you've written it. Apologies if I'm fully or partially mistaken. And I know you are also anti-racist.)
I also get frustrated with Obama's middle-of-the-road approach. But we can critique him without "going there," racially. It adds nothing to the debate.
Okay, back to lurking. I usually don't have much to say here. Everyone else typically covers everything I would say, and then some.
Edited to add: Go me for not finishing the entire thread. I see you've already fessed up and eaten more than enough crow on this issue, and that you're not white, either. Apologies if it seemed like I was piling on. Just wanted to contribute my thoughts and experience.
I am not white, I'm Korean. But eh, I might as well be...interest, speech cadence, personality wise I've been told I don't seem at all Asian. It sucks how people feel they have to act a certain way. My black friend is always talking about how his cousins and co-workers give him shit for not "acting white enough"
Yeah it's fucked up...I can spend a lifetime researching the nuanced details of the black experience in America via book, documentary, etc(and oh lordy, I have) but I can never understand what it is like to
be judged and second guessed instinctively your entire life. Now yeah, I mean I was called "chink" and "gook" in high school. But not one time has that happened in the last two decades. So I can't begin to grasp what that is like.
I am thankful to for that tone I struck to be pointed out, because it shows how riled up we can get in our writing.
It's funny you know. I saw this interview with a well noted media hog CIA agent today on MSNBC(Malcom Nance) who aggressively was touting the most neocon raw-raw American fuck-yeah mentality. A black man, yet for some reason I didn't have inclination to accuse him of being a "UT" or "Sellout". Yet I made the slip with Obama. In examining why I did that, I wonder if maybe it has to do with the creeping notion people allude of "an other". Not quite black, not quite black...and as some anti war people like to bark out "Obama is just Bush with a tan".
This sucks, and I realize now more than ever how important it is to leave race out of it, lest we edge into feeding from the troff of the Tea Party or racist contingent.
It also sucks, as everything about Obama other than his actions I would like to try and embrace. He seems almost too perfect for this iGeneration of smart phones and instant texts/tweets/updates on fb.
Someone who is able to articulately strike a tone of civility and such would be welcome...but I've seen the pictures and videos of unrecognizably maimed Afghan and Pakistani men women and children from direct attacks Obama has personally ordered.
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
