Michelle Obama urges Black America to wake up and smell the black coffee on The Morning Grind:
“I’m completely confident: black America will wake up, and get [it]. But what we’re dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility…You know, there’s always that doubt in the back of the minds of people of color. People who’ve been oppressed and haven’t been given real opportunities. That you never really believe. That you believe that somehow, someone is better than you. You know, deep down inside, you doubt whether you can do it, because that’s all you’ve been told, is ‘no, wait.'”
Is he white enough?
That doesn’t sound like something someone completely confident would say.
I agree. Is New Girl back? How are things? I induced JD to join Facebook, and furriskey, too. I’ve done my evil deed for the day.
Yeah, I meant to thank you for that, Dan. I started clicking around in there, and that is 2 hours of my life that I will never get back. But, good idea (smooth move) to be able to call Liz a “friend”.
My better half prefers my “friends” to not be drop dead gorgeous. lol
Where has furriskey been? Are furriskey and Pellegri the same person? We have not heard from either one in a long long time.
New Girl is back. She is starting to formulate an agenda, you can tell, cause she’s asking more questions. I can only imagine.
Facebook. I mean, since this is really the only blog I comment at, I don’t think Facebook would have much point. Well, sometimes I comment other places, but not with any real enthusiasm.
furriskey is not Pellegri, no. He’s been in hospital in Singapore, bleeding internally, from what I hear. I thought perhaps the Facebook would be a good waste of time for him. It has lots of widgets.
JD, I know that mine’s ears prick up when that’s the case, but I’ve always had some women-friends, and she’s always had some guy-friends, and eros is by and large a very positive thing, which is why so many post-modern feminists are such miserable shitsacks.
Also your brother has not said hi in awhile, Dan.
Well, that’s true about Facebook, I suppose, happyfeet, but you’re imagining that pastimes on the web ought to have a certain utility, or provide a modicum of pleasure, which surely cannot be right.
In the old days, I would have challenged you to a trip across Europe, the only point of which would have been to see which of us could have collected more matchbooks. I don’t have to, anymore, though, because we have Facebook.
It’s hard to keep tabs on my brother. He thinks it’s important to be present in meatspace most of the time.
My grandmother collected matchbooks like that and kept them in a jar and after she died I took them to parties cause they were all so cool and used them to light cigarettes.
Internal bleeding does not sound pleasant. My best to you, furriskey. Hopefully the medical care in Singapore is as good as Cuba’s, and you have a rapid recovery.
We will have to invite Liz and guythatvlogswithLiz to our get together(s) this summer.
Matt is funny but mostly I remember liking the energy he can bring to an argument.
someone invited me to Facebook, and then I remembered that I don’t ever keep up with the MySpace thing I signed up for to keep track of my sister and a few theater people. so screw it.
When I meet Liz I’m gonna tell her my name is Scott Eric.
wasn’t it one of the trolls here that suggested that Singapore had a wonderful healthcare system? government run and everything.
Yes, Maggie. Singapore’s system is vastly superior to that of any other nation.
I’ve talked to a couple people kind of recently who passed through Singapore on the way to Indonesia and I think that I would be quite happy getting off in Singapore. It always looks so shiny.
I’d be afraid I might do something that caused them to cane me. I might not be sure what it was, but I’d be pretty sure I deserved it.
Matt’s actually a lot funnier in person. He has a very Belushi-ish kind of physicality about him. He’s a sort of a redneck mime, in a certain regard.
I’ve never been where the Asian peoples live except here.
We wanted to go to Singapore last time we visited VietNam, but we could not fit it in. We got re-routed to Hong Kong on our way there, and screwed up our entire schedule by a few days.
happyfeet – Some of the best Vietnamese food in the world, outside of Vietnam, is found in LA.
Next year I will start my tour of LA. I’ve actually probably seen more of New York than LA since I’ve been here.
Um. Where’s cynn?
Other than being half-black, what qualifications does Osama have to be President?
He gave a speech once and the media think he’s pretty. Mostly though he was against democracy in the Middle East from the very beginning. He’s a special guy.
“People who’ve been oppressed and haven’t been given real opportunities.”
Just imagine where Barrack and Michelle might be had they been given real opportunities. It breaks the heart.
They think they must be given opportunities? Who do they think they are? Kennedys?
(B Moe – I was also thinking that, but you got it in first, so I came up with another one. Not quiet as original or clever, but it’ll do.)
Well let me throw a slightly different perspective.
The “lack of opportunity” operates in two different spheres. Michelle is operating in the first where the “oppression” by Euro-centric whitey has beaten down the black community. However if you talk to African Americans many of them will tell you that within the black community” some of their leaders and members are justifying failure by using the “oppression” meme to convince young blacks that they will not amount to anything. It’s not a perfect system but opportinities exist in droves for minority students. They must fight to overcome the lingering effects of racism and work to ignore those within their own race who would convince them of the futility of it all.
People like Michelle Obama.
Talking about Singapore, growing up in Sumatra, our family spent a lot of time in the city-state.
My fondest memory is of fried wan ton at Fatty’s Restaurant at the open-air street market. Yummm.
“The “lack of opportunity†operates in two different spheres. Michelle is operating in the first where the “oppression†by Euro-centric whitey has beaten down the black community.”
It would also be interesting to ask the average African* how they figure their opportunities stack up beside the average African-American.
*And I am refering here, in the words of one of Atlanta’s outstanding TV Anchorpersons, to African-American Africans.
Unfortunately, the victim mentality is highly seductive. Highly seductive. More than anything else, it demands eternal vigilance.
I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to a question I have:
How do the Democrats get away with treating blacks like political lawn jockeys?
I recognise that there is a “chicken and egg” element to the view that I laid out. The question becomes one of balancing the obstacles between “oppression” and those, both within and without of the African-American community who are either convinced in the inevitability of lack of opportunity or have something to gain politically by fostering that view.
There’s your answer, Mr. O’Brain. Depite the pleas of Bill Cosby, Michael Steele, J.C. Watts and (yes) even Mr. T many blacks are still reinforced in their views of hopeless victimization, too often by others of their race and within their own community. It’s both sad and infuriating. The irony is that the Democratic party does take the 85% – 90% black vote for granted. If only the evil ‘Tuglicans could get those yahoo white evangelical theocrats to vote in those percentages.
Even professional level blacks still deal with racism, both institutional and individual (I’ve heard too many first person stories about constant traffic stops and the like.) While those who tell me these things don’t like them, they’ve still achieved a certain level of individual success by overcoming those obstacles and embracing the opportunities that society made available.
N.O’Brain – When identity politics clash within the Dems, they never seem to take the positions favored by the black community. They mock Christianity, yet the black community is highly religious. They oppose school vouchers yet the black community is strongly in favor of vouchers. They are in favor of same sex marriage (in words) but the black community is strongly against SSM and hpmosexuality in general. Other than lip service, the Dems do nothing to actually help them, and in some cases, work in stark opposition to their wishes.
“How do the Democrats get away with treating blacks like political lawn jockeys?”
Brainwashing. They control the schools.
Where are blacks going to go? The Republican Party has been completely demonized and ostracized with the African-American community. GOP Congressmen of color (Have I used all the proper current variations now?) are even banned from the Congressional Black Caucus, presumably on their lack of felony convictions. Blacks are a captive vote for the Democrats and the Dems don’t have to do a damned thing about them.
The amazing thing is that African-Americans accept this from the party that killed 600,000 people for the right to keep them slaves, that invented the Klan, that invented Jim Crow…
Again, it’s the seductiveness of the victim mentality. It’s just easier to believe that some malicious “other” has gathered up all the power and would be using it to exterminate you, if it weren’t for the fact a slightly less malicious “other” finds you useful for staying in office. “Hey, the Democrats may treat us like crap, but at least we’re live crap.”
The fact of slavery in our nation’s history only makes the whole dynamic that much stronger, especially since the Democrats are so adept at keeping wounds from healing.
Best Vietnamese food I’ve ever had was at a little restaurant in Casper, Wyo. It was a bit too authentic for the local authorities though. Seems those good-hearted people had adopted 80 dogs from the local pound in a six-month period. Operating under the premise that no good deed shall ever go unpunished, the health department shut them down.
But back to the Obama quote, it always bothers me when someone complains that they haven’t been ‘given opportunities’. Successful folks make their own opportunities. Those who sit and wait for someone else to give them something often have a long wait [insert standard ‘racism is real’ yada yada disclaimer].
Fostering a passive dependent mentality doesn’t strike me as a good thing, but it certainly seems to be central to the Dem playbook. Bill Cosby should slap Obama upside the head.
Racism isn’t the failure to hunt people down and hand them opportunities; it’s denying them the opportunities they try to take for themselves.
Would Michele Obama admit that the democrats have fed the line to blacks for over a hundred years to keep them in poverty. They throw them a crumb (welfare) every couple of years for their ‘vote’ and forget them the rest of the time. Democrats and the KKK are still connected and the new ‘slaves’ for the democrat cause are the criminal Mexicans slipping into the country. Soon, well, it’s going on now, the crumbs of welfare are being diverted to the criminal Mexicans at a cost to the blacks. Not racist, just the facts of what is happening in the former party of the, what, people.
As the resident “I know black people” asshole…
A quote from the autobiography of Jayson Williams (yeah, that asshole):
I suppose how much you can get from that is based on the degree to which you actually do “know black people,” men specifically, and I could be wrong, biased sample and such, but to me it looks like everything you need to know is right there. Here’s one of those things that you might miss:
People who don’t care about politics much (which thankfully is most people), when moved to vote (which thankfully most people can’t be), choose the beneficiaries of those votes for entirely non-rational reasons. Rational-sounding objections to the identifications those votes represent (and/or cause) don’t make voters consider changing those identifications; they only harden them. Don’t explain. That’s not how shit works.
The rest…ask a black guy.
(Obama isn’t one.)
Now there’s a great idea for a web column, psychologizer.
“I’m still like a Democrat, fighting for the poor. Having made all this money, you want to act like you’ve still got your sly off the street and you can still pull a scam.”
Democrats are thieves and scam artists. Straight from the jackasses mouth.
Fighting for the poor by ripping someone off. I bet he’s a real good tipper too.
So busting the dealer down in the ‘hood is racist? Okay, I keed. But we have been hunting people down and handing them opportunities, or at least trying to in a government run, unintended consequences kind of way. The response to affirmative action in school and the workplace? Getting an education is “acting white”. Getting a job, showing up, and putting in a day’s work is “acting white”.
Cosby’s right, this is a very deep-seated dysfunction and it’s disturbing that someone who’s husband wants to be the leader of our country would buy into it. She’s right in a way though, it’s past time to stop saying ‘we’ll take care of you, just wait’ and start saying ‘you can do it, just get out there and try’.
I guess what puzzles me is, other than Cosby, where are the black leaders with this message? I served in the Army with blacks who attended segregated schools. Somehow, they managed to go to college or West Point and become damned fine officers. I’ve visited in their homes and met their families and parents; there was no shortage of work ethic there that I could see. I’m sure this is still going on. So where are these folks?
Oh, wait.. They’re Republicans. Nevermind.
I’d say about 25 percent of the guys in the NBA rig the hotel TV boxes that way, especially the guys who came up from the CBA. Why? I guess to show that we’re not Republicans, that even though I’m rich now, I’m still like a Democrat, fighting for the poor. Having made all this money, you want to act like you’ve still got your sly off the street and you can still pull a scam.
This delights me to no end. I don’t know which part I like better, that Democrats “fight for the poor” or that they can still pull a scam. (They aren’t exactly alone in that regard, of course).
Obama/Williams ’12!