Obama, Racism, and As'ad
The Angry Arab doesn't care for B. Obama. He doesn't care for H. Clinton or J. McCain either. In fact I have been unable to detect anyone on the political scene, here or in the Middle East, that he does like. This shows how being angry is like having a boa constrictor wrapped around your brain.
A day or two ago, consistent with his usual views, Arab, or As'ad, published the following post:
Aside from his conversions on issues of foreign policy, one of the disturbing things about Obama is that--out of fear of offending white voters--he has not once spoken about his experiences as a victim of white racism. This is an African-American man who studied in New York City and in Boston, and traveled around the country but does not have the courage to speak about racism that he encountered in his life. I had an African-American graduate student once at Georgetown who would share with me his experiences as a victim of racism on a weekly basis. DC police used to stop him while he was walking. And do you notice that Obama sounds more like Clinton the longer he campaigns?
Among Arab's regulars is an incredibly obscene bunch that for now I will call the "Garbage-Mouth Gang." But they must've been busy slinging offal on each other on one of his other threads, so I took advantage of their absence to make a retort. His Obama post had hit home in a couple of ways.
Blogger Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) said...
That post is absurd, Professor. I think you should've looked at that grad student closer. Are you sure you weren't a victim of what you wanted to hear?
My observation and experience while being of the dreaded color and living here for much longer than Obama, 76 years to be exact, is that "white" folk have far too many other fish to fry, as unbelievable as that sounds.
In all that lifetime of moving around all over the place, including 45 years in D.C., the police have only stopped me twice, both while driving -- once at a shooting-fish-in-the-barrel speed trap and once at a license check where they were stopping everybody. If I had been looking for racism I might have had more success in finding some, but I never thought that was worth doing.
This retort was one of several that popped into my head after reading As'ad's post, and I only hit the button after I tired of trying to decide among them. I don't think it was necessarily superior or inferior to the others.
As usual, that wasn't the end, and afterward many other ways of framing a reply muscled their way in and out of my head, on into the next day. That's what happens when somebody touches on a subject that you've been mulling over all through your thinking career.
The trouble is that, besides the dozens and even hundreds of ways I could have thought of to respond if I could move myself to it, there are actually millions -- as many as there are Rainbows and Euroes in the U.S. That's because most of the time racism is subjective and a matter purely of perception.
I also believe that a lot of racism adheres tightly to the principle of you get what you give.
B. Obama appears to be much like me, a naturally non-salty person and therefore unlikely to have had much salt thrown on him in return, racist or otherwise. For all this country's problems there is still no state in the Union full of raging skinheads ready to spit on every "undesirable" that they see. There's not that much room for them. They're bad for the American Dream, which is still a tangible entity. So it's entirely possible that B. Obama has had very few personal experiences to relate that would be of interest and that would meet his own truth tests, since the subtle occasions -- which are more likely -- are too susceptible to being mere suspicions. Also they wouldn't have enough bite, while testimonies of more open cases, on the giving or the receiving ends, appeal only to those in the racism industry. For one thing, they're embarrassing.
A day or two ago, consistent with his usual views, Arab, or As'ad, published the following post:
Aside from his conversions on issues of foreign policy, one of the disturbing things about Obama is that--out of fear of offending white voters--he has not once spoken about his experiences as a victim of white racism. This is an African-American man who studied in New York City and in Boston, and traveled around the country but does not have the courage to speak about racism that he encountered in his life. I had an African-American graduate student once at Georgetown who would share with me his experiences as a victim of racism on a weekly basis. DC police used to stop him while he was walking. And do you notice that Obama sounds more like Clinton the longer he campaigns?
Among Arab's regulars is an incredibly obscene bunch that for now I will call the "Garbage-Mouth Gang." But they must've been busy slinging offal on each other on one of his other threads, so I took advantage of their absence to make a retort. His Obama post had hit home in a couple of ways.
Blogger Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) said...
That post is absurd, Professor. I think you should've looked at that grad student closer. Are you sure you weren't a victim of what you wanted to hear?
My observation and experience while being of the dreaded color and living here for much longer than Obama, 76 years to be exact, is that "white" folk have far too many other fish to fry, as unbelievable as that sounds.
In all that lifetime of moving around all over the place, including 45 years in D.C., the police have only stopped me twice, both while driving -- once at a shooting-fish-in-the-barrel speed trap and once at a license check where they were stopping everybody. If I had been looking for racism I might have had more success in finding some, but I never thought that was worth doing.
This retort was one of several that popped into my head after reading As'ad's post, and I only hit the button after I tired of trying to decide among them. I don't think it was necessarily superior or inferior to the others.
As usual, that wasn't the end, and afterward many other ways of framing a reply muscled their way in and out of my head, on into the next day. That's what happens when somebody touches on a subject that you've been mulling over all through your thinking career.
The trouble is that, besides the dozens and even hundreds of ways I could have thought of to respond if I could move myself to it, there are actually millions -- as many as there are Rainbows and Euroes in the U.S. That's because most of the time racism is subjective and a matter purely of perception.
I also believe that a lot of racism adheres tightly to the principle of you get what you give.
B. Obama appears to be much like me, a naturally non-salty person and therefore unlikely to have had much salt thrown on him in return, racist or otherwise. For all this country's problems there is still no state in the Union full of raging skinheads ready to spit on every "undesirable" that they see. There's not that much room for them. They're bad for the American Dream, which is still a tangible entity. So it's entirely possible that B. Obama has had very few personal experiences to relate that would be of interest and that would meet his own truth tests, since the subtle occasions -- which are more likely -- are too susceptible to being mere suspicions. Also they wouldn't have enough bite, while testimonies of more open cases, on the giving or the receiving ends, appeal only to those in the racism industry. For one thing, they're embarrassing.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 8:58 AM
2 Comments:
Very nicely put. I like your explanation better than mine, which is that I have probably been discriminated against, but am just too slow to have noticed. It seems to me that there are those who are incredibly defensive and seem to WANT to find discrimination everywhere they go. I have worked places that were predominantly male (I was in the AF and was the only female in my shop) but I have never felt that sexual discrimination was part and parcel of my life. I know it exists, just as racism does, but maybe those of us who don't experience it are just too busy living our lives to notice. Or maybe we are more comfortable with who we are. Or maybe, we are just non-salty.
Hi! Unfortunately, when I was in, it must've been in the stone age days for women in the AF. (Do they still call them "WAF's?") I only saw them once in any numbers, at Scott, where I went to tech school, and even then I only remember seeing them eating in the chowhalls. They were always a mystery to me, as to what they were doing, at Scott and elsewhere, because I never saw them on the line either, where I worked. Can they be seen all over the lines, now?
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