I was just an impromptu guest on BBC Radio's Newshour where I offered up some quick thoughts on President Barack Obama's new initiative to help black and Latino young men and boys confront and overcome the specific challenges they face in the labor market and society at large.
You can listen to the interview below:
Hosted by Kiwi6 file hosting.
As I said to the BBC, the White Right/Republicans will hate Obama's plan. Why? While it is paid for with a combination of private donations and already allocated public monies, Obama is actually daring to confront how a race-blind approach to public policy is not a cure all.
In another venue, I would have been more direct: Obama is black, breathing, and nearby. The White Right is so hateful, and their allegiance to anti-black animus so profound, that they cannot put aside racism in order to support good public policy. What was once the "Compassionate Conservative" is now akin to the dodo bird or an 8 track tape. They are extinct...or so rare as to effectively have disappeared from the American political scene.
As we discuss here on WARN from time to time, do peruse the comment sections on Yahoo's story about Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative for a simultaneous case lesson in both overt and colorblind white racism. The comments there pivot off of "the model minority Horatio Alger" myth, and come back again to how helping a community help itself to deal with the particular challenges it faces is somehow anti-white and/or "reverse racism".
Smart and reasonable conservatives would also see expanding this program as an opportunity to reach out to people of color--and the rural white poor--both as a political strategy and out of common decency.
The White Right has been fully propagandized. For them, white supremacy is not an outlier of a political attitude. No, it is a way of thinking, breathing, living, dreaming, and processing reality. In all, white racism is a defect of the intellect and the spirit. White conservatives in the Age of Obama cannot be helped or healed. They must be left to wither away from the forces of generational replacement or be actively expunged from mainstream of the body politic for their allegiance is to mayhem, destruction, and obstruction instead of the Common Good and proper governance.
24 comments:
I was waiting for it, I wonder if right wing media will pick up on it. This one is my favorite:
"Somehow they seem to have grasped the stick at the wrong end...quite upside down and backwards!
Lesson one: One doesn't get a Mercedes, a BMW, or a white woman for that matter until one gets educated and gainfully employed to afford and support them.
Here. Let me repeat that again louder and slower in case they didn't understand me the first time:"
To which he repeats what he said in all caps.
The white right consistently demands that the black community solve some of its most difficult problems. Black politicians and leaders set out to do that, and the white right decides it isn't the right way to go about it. They would prefer to keep black folk under lock and key at all times. Thank you for teaching me to laugh at them even though they do wield real power in society.
Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper once said he didn't want to "commit sociology" as part of an effort to combat the radicalization of Canadian youth. I think that says a lot about the politics and goals of the right.
What a great quote from Harper. I will need to look that up. Troubling too. The comments show how a good segment of the public is sick--even allowing for the paid for trolls and hacks--this is the new old face of the GOP.
I knew it! They are just trying to go after our white wimmin! /snark
Also note that white women and expensive cars are equally just things that you have to be able to "afford" and "support."
Thanks, Myshkin, for finding and sharing the "best" one of those comments. I know it is educational, but I just don't have the spoons today to go look at those Yahoo comments and I can pretty well imagine them anyway.
Excellent post, and that interview was terrific. I especially liked your analogy about the medicine -- I'm totally going to steal it if this comes up in any conversation I get in!
Only one small comment about on other very small thing. I am pretty sure that "Compassionate Conservatism" was a completely bullshit concept from before Bush 41 even uttered it out loud for the first time. It was a campaign meme that Peggy Noonan vomited up, probably in one of her more lucid moments. They never meant a bit of it.
There was a pretty good segment on this this morning on PRI, I think on 'The Takeaway'. They interviewed a black Johns Hopkins Professor. He argued the same things about Obama as you often do. That he treats a whole community like a stern, disappointed father and by depending on charitable donations, it removes from the discussion any responsibility government has to level the playing field. The host tried to knock his concerns down a bit, but he kept to his argument. I was a little disappointed with the host, which doesn’t happen often for me on PRI. Instead of allowing him to expound on his point, he just argued with him. Does that happen to white professors?
The possessiveness I've seen by folks on the right over women is appalling. they act like they are rightful owners of their bodies. This comment was too good the idea that a white woman is trading up for a black man or that black women aren't deserving of the same type of income security, the protectiveness over white women's bodies. The notion that Obama is delivering BMW's and Mercedes through this program... too funny.
I should add that this person's user name is Navy_Corpsman, so, there you go.
compassionate conservative a propaganda bluff?
it was a great interview too. Devega hit a lot of points concisely with them.
What Obama is doing here is a good thing. And if the GOP wasn't insane with hatred, instead of babbling about "reverse racism" they would offer support for this effort and maybe a few tokens of their own to at least attempt to appear human to the black community.
I was rushed--quite literally 5 minutes out of a cab with no prep, but not too bad. I was able to hit the notes I wanted to and that is what counts. You are right about that claim. I wish I had clarified by saying "supposed" compassionate conservatives.
The great white racist negro conundrum. The negro is damned if he or she does and damned if they do not.
Where da white womens at!
I find this comment disingenuous. "Why is Obama helping black people?" is a right-wing meme while criticism of Obama from the left for not doing enough for black communities is a legitimate complaint.
I applaud Obama's, "My Brother's Keeper" initiative. But it's weak. He's secured $200 million of private funds much of which would have been spent helping black communities anyway. No public funds have been promised. This program is more along the lines of the "optional" mortgage relief for underwater homeowners. Or the hire a vet program.
Similarly, our government (which Obama is the head of) had no problem allowing unemployment benefits to expire, cutting food stamps, cutting the federal workforce and education cuts through Obama's sequester initiative.
See what's going on? Government programs that cost money get cut and replaced by programs that don't cost the government a thing. It exemplifies the Democratic Party perfectly: the are just Republicans with a slightly softer side and a pretty face. A pox on both their houses.
"Smart and reasonable conservatives would also see expanding this program as an opportunity to reach out to people of color--and the rural white poor--both as a political strategy and out of common decency."
And you do know that you are not speaking of the whole of today's republican party?
They need to speak up then as they are guilty by association and complicity.
Obama and today's Democrats are Republicans from the 1990s and 1980s. The American people have two options--Right-wing and very Right-wing. Sad isn't it?
Re: "Obama and today's Democrats are Republicans from the 1990s and 1980s."
Hmm...that would explain why so many Republican defectors have made themselves right at home within the Democratic Party. ;)
Re: "The American people have two options--Right-wing and very Right-wing."
I don't believe that. There is always a choice. At first glance it seems that all out-groups have no choice but to vote for the Democratic Party. Certainly, voting for the wing-nut Republicans is out of the question. So the choices are Democratic Party, some third party or not vote/spoil ballot/etc. Now power concedes nothing without a demand. To have any influence over the Democratic Party, one's vote cannot be automatic. In the last election there were at least three left of the Democratic Party: Justice Party, Socialist Party and the Green Party.
Ah the siren song of the 3rd party.
I didn't hear it. Was it Brother Lester Spence? I don't know if race necessarily has anything to do with it as the format can be restrictive and some folks don't know how to fight for their spot, and also some interviewers are not very good and or just have an off day.
LOL. In conjunction with massive protests in the streets: http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/stopme/contents.html
Indeed...
Yet I request to be unpainted from this broad-brushed stroke ;(
Really, you did a great job. I listened to it four times to pick it all up. Talking about "race" while remaining fair and neutral is no easy task - one that you do so well. My favorite line was, "People of Color are the miner's canary." That is so true. When rights are taken away from one segment of the population, they are taken away for everyone. Not to mention the injustice of it all but injustice doesn't register with everyone.
Maybe I should rephrase as I seems my words are misunderstood. "Smart and reasonable conservative" is an oxymoron if you are referring to republicans!
I have some conservative leanings when I comes to the Earth and occupational forces and as part of my Progressive nature, Most, if not all of what you say here, I agree. You do, however, react at times like those who practice white privilege, and against my words in that you consider my statements as bigoted against whites. I believe you do simply, within a framework you need to discover, and because of my apparently assumed browness by you!
And I know my history as well as I assume you do yours. I know, have known and I am learning more of the black experience in this hemisphere. I can expect a little of that framework from time to time as we POC try to define our inclusiveness in a very inhumane society.
It may have been, i honestly don't remember. But he taught in the Africana Dept. The host was basically saying "Well why can't they just pull up their pants?" to all his (quite good) points. It was one of those time the conversation could and should have been more meaningful.
But yours, great job.
Racism does produce massive cognitive dissonance.
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