Category Archives: Race

Not So Cool

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doga: It’s a shame that the world doesn’t unite to criticize the racist government in Israel.

eatbees: I was annoyed at the Europeans who walked out of Ahmadinejad’s speech, but at the same time, he was deliberately trying to provoke.

doga: Yes.

eatbees: Of course Israel is a racist state. Especially its actions in the occupied territories, but also its laws that discriminate against non-Jewish citizens are racist. And you’re right, that’s not something we usually say out loud.

— • —

A couple of hours after having this conversation, I was exploring the blog Cultural Anarchylist by British Muslim convert Yakoub Islam, when I came across this video which illustrates Israel’s assorted crimes against humanity. So I guess there are people willing to say it out loud.

Congratulations

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Following the longest, most expensive, best organized, and perhaps most bitter campaign in my lifetime, Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States.

Not only is the the first black president, he is the first president to come from any ethnic group outside of northern Europe. I believe he is the first president to have an immigrant father, a man who never even became an American citizen.

Besides his funny name, he spent years of his childhood in a foreign land, Indonesia, attending their schools and learning their language. We’ve had presidents like Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon who grew up poor, but when have we had one who grew up in a foreign city?

To me, none of this is exceptional, because it’s what America is all about. What’s exceptional is that it’s taken so long for it to happen. I think that means our image of ourselves is changing.

Except for a few of us who cling bitterly to the way things were, we no longer see ourselves in Joe the Plumber. Even if we do see ourselves in him, we are learning to accept the full diversity of the world around us, both within and outside our borders.

Borders are meaningless in a nation of immigrants. Obama represents the aspirations of all of us who believe we can rise to a position of responsiblity through talent, discipline, and an ability to bridge differences.

Americans have elected a global citizen as president. At times during the campaign, it didn’t seem possible. Obama’s middle name was hurled as an insult. He was accused of faking his birth certificate, pretending to be a Christian, using an Indonesian passport in his youth, choosing radical leftists as mentors, and having corrupt ties with his relatives in Kenya.

Some people fear what they don’t know. But rather than curing their ignorance through learning, they let their fears run away with them. Obama’s “foreign” identity was an excuse for these fears, but in American culture, simply being black can be enough to ignite them—even for people whose ancestors have been here for generations.

I’ve long felt that there are people who fear those who are unlike themselves, and others who are drawn to diversity because it gives them a chance to grow. Obama’s mother was drawn to diversity, and she imbued her son with that spirit. In turn, Obama is a symbol of diversity for the rest of us, someone we may either embrace or fear.

America as a nation is torn between these two extremes, embracing diversity in a changing world, while at the same time isolating ourselves within a shell of angry patriotism. This year’s election was a choice between those two extremes. Miraculously, fear lost.

After the election, three of my Moroccan friends wrote me notes of congratulations. They know I support Obama, but I think they were really congratulating America on being bigger than our fears.

Which America?

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This guy and a friend he met online wanted to kill Barack Obama. They were going to wear white tophats and tails while doing it, and shoot from their car windows. They didn’t expect to succeed, but they were happy to die trying. Before that, they wanted to go to an African-American school, shoot 88 students and decapitate 14 more. Apparently, the numbers 88 and 14 have a special meaning in “white supremacist culture.” This kid is 20 and lives with his grandparents in a small town in Tennessee.

On the other hand, there is the superb speech Obama gave today in Canton, Ohio, summing up the major themes of his campaign one week before the election. He showed off his fiery populist side, which was was well received in this working-class state. I wouldn’t be surprised any more if he wins a landslide victory. My favorite line today was where he rejected John McCain’s attempts to paint him as a scary socialist.

    Now, I don’t believe that government can or should try to solve all our problems. I know you don’t either. But I do believe that government should do that which we cannot do for ourselves…. It should ensure a shot at success not only for those with money and power and influence, but for every single American who’s willing to work…. That’s how we’ve always grown the American economy, from the bottom up. John McCain calls this socialism. I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that.

[flashvideo filename=videos/obama-closing-argument.flv image=images/obama-closing-argument.jpg height=286 width=440 /]
This video is from CNN and was made available by Raw Story.

UPDATE: More scary McCain-Palin supporters. There must be about ten different videos like this now. This one was made yesterday in rural Pottsville, Pennsylvania. I’m still optimistic that Obama has most of America on his side, and that these people are angry and scared precisely because they are on the wrong side of history. But as Nordin points out in the comments, the problem will be how to deal with this anger after the election. These people believe that America is being stolen from them by a terrorist sympathizer whose mission in life is to destroy everything they love and believe in. The rage will only increase once Obama as president has to choose from a menu of unpopular options.

Hillary: Three Shameful Quotes

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I didn’t have to choose between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton until May 6, because my state of North Carolina was one of the last to hold a primary this year. After hesitating for a long time, because of doubts as to who would do more to transform America after the Bush years—Obama has good intentions, but that isn’t enough—I finally went with Obama, based on my respect for him after seeing how he handled the controversies that have dogged his campaign in recent weeks.

I still felt bad for Hillary because of her fighting spirit, and because I had no doubt that she would make an excellent president. However, rather than dying with dignity, her campaign has been acting ever more mean-spirited and bizarre. Hillary herself has said a number of things over the last two weeks that truly scare me, forcing me to question her thinking and reconsider the respect for her that I once had.

I have in mind three quotes in particlular. The first was in response to a question about how she would respond if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. Rather than challenging the question as absurd, speculative, or warmongering, she said this.

    I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. … Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next ten years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.

Next, after proposing a summer “gas tax holiday” that economists of all political stripes have criticized as useless or counterproductive, she was asked to name a single expert who supports her plan. She responded by attacking the very idea that experts have a role in shaping policy.

    I’m not going to put my lot in with economists. … We’ve been, for the last seven years, seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans.

Finally, while making the argument that she could do better than Obama against John McCain in November, because Obama supposedly has failed to win the confidence of white working-class voters, she said this.

    Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and…whites in both states [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here.

In other words, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to win her party’s nomination, Hillary is painting herself as more warlike towards Iran and less interested in listening to experts than even George W. Bush. On top of that, she has indulged in racial chauvinism, joining the terms “hard-working Americans” and “white Americans” in a way that makes it sound like non-white Americans don’t like to work.

There is no doubt in my mind, I voted the right way. Barack Obama has run the nobler campaign, the campaign that will bring the biggest change from the Bush years, and on top of that, the winning campaign. I’m just waiting for Hillary to leave the stage so we can move on to the national debate we need to have before starting a new era in 2009.

Transcendental vs. Old-School Politics

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Barack Obama’s speech on race, whose honesty and nuance are all too rare in American politics, deserves to be read or watched in full. For the first time, I’m persuaded that Obama is a unique politician. He may be opportunistic like the rest, but his horizons are broader. He doesn’t accept the rules as written. He educates, broadens the debate.

We could quibble and say that Obama delivered this speech because he had to, after being forced into a corner by controversy over the words of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But what matters to me is that he seized the moment, transforming a corrosive political dispute into a teaching opportunity about what divides us in America.

Far from sugar-coating our differences as politicians tend to do, he proclaimed that black anger and white anger are both real, and have a legitimate source. Both blacks and whites have seen their dreams evaporate over the past generation. Powerful interests stir that anger, dividing us against each other, when in fact our problems are much the same. America is turning into a nation where the privileges of a few take priority over the common good. Rather than being divided by race, we should unite to overcome this crisis which is hurting everyone.

This is a fairly radical idea in American politics, and I’m not suprised that most commentators have passed over it in silence. Here is the core of Obama’s argument. Judge for yourself.

    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… all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. … 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. …. 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. …
    In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. … As far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away…. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments… have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. …
    Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze—a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. … This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. …
    We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. … If we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. …
    Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools…. This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care…. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

Here’s the tone-deaf response by Nixon speechwriter, anti-immigrant crusader, and right-wing dinosaur Patrick Buchanan. It’s such a perfect example of white paternalism that it parodies itself. I remember hearing this sort of talk growing up, but I thought it was gone.

    First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships… reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. …
    Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s… to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. …
    We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

What’s ironic is that Buchanan’s constituency of working-class whites, many of them second- or third-generation immigrants, are the very people Obama is trying to enlist in a common cause. Whether Obama becomes president, and America takes a step away from its legacy of division, depends in large part on whether disillusioned whites are able to hear Obama’s words, or whether they respond only to Buchanan’s us-versus-them rhetoric of the past.