It was a bright sunny Tuesday morning, I had taken the week off from work because we were bringing the newborn SugarPlum home for the first time. My wife had gone into the office in downtown Atlanta to grab a few things and then were going to get our daughter at noon.
plezWorld saw something on the television about about a plane flying into the World Trade Center in NYC and decided to turn to CNN and see what was going on. I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane slam into the tower... in disbelief! The imagery of the moment, no, that entire day will forever be etched in my memory.
The most joyous day of my life - bringing home my baby girl - merged with the most horrific day in US history. I remember holding her in my arms that afternoon and into the night wondering what had become of the world, when someone would plot and plan such a diabolical attack. And I remember fighting back the tears while thinking of what a hateful world we had brought my daughter into... I could only pray she would be capable of growing up devoid of the cynicism and hate this day brought us.
It is now a decade later, two wars have run their course, we have a Black President, bin Laden is dead... and my innocent little girl is a pre-teen. She is pretty as a button, lovable, and kind. But we have raised her in a changed world, where every motive is suspect, our freedoms have been abridged, our economy has tanked, and political vitriol has damn near crippled President Obama. This post-9/11 world is vastly different than the one I grew up in. I can only hope we can use this tenth anniversary of 9/11 to put this behind us and move on to a kinder, more understanding America.
Unemployed African-Americans Need to Redefine the Game, Says 'Apprentice'-Winner Pinkett By AMACOM
With the latest Department of Labor statistics indicating 16.1 percent of the black population versus 8.7 percent of the white population face unemployment, "The Apprentice"-winner Randal Pinkett offers clear advice for business success -- stop playing the game and start redefining it.
"African-Americans who cling to strategies that worked in the past, without taking into account how the world is shifting, will likely feel frustrated as they progress at a snail's pace or, worse, lose ground in the future," Pinkett explains. "We must redefine the game now because while we have made tremendous progress, we still face tremendous challenges, and tremendous work remains to be done. Our communities and our country cannot afford to wait."
(1) Establish a strong identity. Leverage your culture and ethnicity as assets, not as liabilities. These characteristics give you a unique competitive advantage, so don't white-wash your resume.
(2) Network and build diverse relationships. Use your membership in professional black organizations to meet people and discover new opportunities.
(3) Seek the wisdom of others. We all know the power of a great mentor and now is the time to take advantage of everything they have to offer.
(4) Become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship creates wealth, transforms communities, and boosts the wealth of African-Americans as a whole.
(5) Give back generously. As the recession attempts to tear us apart, now is the time for us to give back to one another. Whether with time, talent, or money, we can all make a difference.
As Pinkett asserts, "Black Americans should not focus on winning the game in any arena -- business, professional, social, or political. The ultimate goal is to redefine the game sufficiently to end the game itself."
Author Bios AMACOM is the book publishing division of the American Management Association, a world leader in professional development, advancing the skills of individuals, teams, organizations and government agencies.
Randal Pinkett, Ph.D., coauthor of Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness, was the winner of season four of The Apprentice and the show's first minority winner. He is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of BCT Partners, an information technology and management consulting firm. Dr. Pinkett is based in Somerset, New Jersey. For more information please visit www.randalpinkett.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.
Jeffrey Robinson, Ph.D., coauthor of Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness, is a leading business scholar at Rutgers Business School and lives in Piscataway, New Jersey.
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plez sez: full disclosure - plezWorld received a review copy of the book, "Black Faces in White Places" in exchange for publishing the feature above.
i did receive a complimentary review copy, but i plan to buy at 10 copies for people in my network who i mentor. it is chock full of suggestions and strategies for advancement as a person of color in the corporate arena. this book should be required reading for every black college graduate!
i really connected on a personal level with Randal Pinkett: grew up in a small, predominantly white town in upstate New York, attended a predominantly white university to study engineering, and go to work on a daily basis as one of the few Black faces in the office. his story and game-changing strategies definitely resonated with plezWorld.
I tried, but plezWorld is unable to authenticate the origin (date or publication) of this editorial. I received it as an e-mail message that claimed it was written in the Macon Telegraph, but my research did not bear this out. I've also seen this article included in a blog written in December 2008, before Obama was inaugurated.
What follows is an open letter to white people from a white person about our Black president. I welcome your comments.
Dr. Andrew Manis: “When are we going to get over it?”
For much of the last forty years, ever since America “fixed” its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, “When are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask: “When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that “Election Spurs Hundreds’ of Race Threats, Crimes” should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in “Bombingham,” Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than “talk the talk.”
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes. Call for their impeachment, perhaps.
But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we’re back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we’ve proven what conservatives are always saying -that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president. But instead we now hear that schoolchildren from Maine to California are talking about wanting to “assassinate Obama.”
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, “How long?” How long before we white people realize we can’t make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us? How long until we white people can -once and for all- get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color? How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior? How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin? How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
How long before we starting “living out the true meaning” of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that “red and yellow, black and white” all are precious in God’s sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn’t believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don’t believe I’ll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem. But here’s my three-point plan:
First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built I’m going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people.
Second, I’m going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama.
Third, I’m going to pray to live long enough to see America surprise the world once again, when white people can “in spirit and in truth” sing of our damnable color prejudice, “We HAVE overcome.”
It takes a Village to protect our President!!!
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About the author:
Dr. Andrew M. Manis Assistant Professor of History, Macon State College Author, historian, researcher, lecturer
Andrew Manis is author of Macon Black and White and serves on the steering committee of Macon’s Center for Racial understanding.
The author of five books, Dr. Manis is a frequent lecturer and has become one of Central Georgia’s leading authorities on the history of race relations, especially in the South. His most recent book, Macon Black and White: An Unutterable Separation of the American Century, published in 2004 by Mercer University Press and the Tubman African American Museum, earned him the 2005 Georgia Author of the Year (History Division) award, and he was a semifinalist for the 2005 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Manis’ previous book, a biography of Birmingham civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, won a number of prizes, including the 2000 Lillian Smith Book Award. In addition, he has written many magazine articles about religion and religions in the South.
He’s conducted more than 40 lectures, sermons or interviews on race relations in Macon, made presentations at colleges and universities throughout the South and has appeared on national radio broadcasts.
He is a member of the steering committee for the Center for Racial Understanding in Macon and Bibb County, is involved in the South Atlantic Humanities Center’s Thanksgiving Project to document people’s experiences of Thanksgiving Day, assists the Georgia Humanities Council in charitable giving programs and was named one of the 2006 recipients of the council’s Governor’s Awards in the Humanities. He also serves as the faculty advisor for the Macon State branch of Habitat for Humanity.
An ordained minister, Manis received his bachelor’s degree from Samford University, and his Master’s of Divinity and Ph.D. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has been at Macon State College since 2000 and previously served as editor for religion and Southern Studies with Mercer University Press; was associate professor of religion at Averett College in Virginia; was a fellow in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania; and an assistant professor of theology at Xavier University of Louisiana.
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plez sez: excellent commentary. i'm sure there will be those white folk who will take exception to dr. manis's decision to paint all white people with the same brush. but he makes his point when he implies that everyone is complicit in the "crime" when they remain silent or do not call out their peers for their racist jibes.
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as you can see, plezWorld is still alive and kicking... and going strong! i must admit that business is good and i simply have not had the bandwidth to post on a daily basis like last year. i can promise that it will be a few months before i'll be able to consider going back to a daily posting on plezWorld.
The Burger King Texican Whopper "inspired by the land where a man ain't afraid to sink his teeth into something hot and spicy."
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Mexico is protesting what it says is a whopper of an insult.
An advertisement for Burger King's Texican Whopper burger shows a small wrestler dressed in a cape resembling a Mexican flag. The wrestler teams up with a lanky American cowboy almost twice his height to illustrate the cross-border blend of flavors.
"The taste of Texas with a little spicy Mexican," a narrator's voice says.
The taller cowboy boosts the wrestler up to reach high shelves and helps clean tall windows, while the Mexican helps the cowboy open a jar. The lazy Mexican swims by while the Texan cleans the pool.
Mexico's ambassador to Spain said Monday he has written a letter to Burger King's offices in that nation objecting to the ad and asking that it be removed. Jorge Zermeno told Radio Formula that the ads "improperly use the stereotyped image of a Mexican."
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The company pledged Tuesday to pull the ads for its chili-flavored "Texican" hamburger, saying they were "not intended to offend anyone."
"Burger King Corp. has made the decision to revise the Texican Whopper advertising creative out of respect for the Mexican culture and its people," the company said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. Burger King, which is known for its signature Whopper hamburger, said it would air redesigned ads "as soon as commercially possible."
"The revised campaign will focus solely on the Texican Whopper sandwich and will not feature any characters or the use of the Mexican flag," the company said.
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plez sez: what are these ad execs thinking when they approve these obviously offensive projects? demeaning fried chicken ads with black people (kfc). now this over-the-top portrayal of a stereotypical mexican in a burger commercial. the only way to make this commercial more offensive would've been to have the "lil wrestler" illegally cross the border to answer the personal ad in the newspaper!
this is what happens when the people sitting around a table making decisions is not a representative sample of the people who will consume the products. after yuckin' it up at an ad that looks like it was created by a roomful of sixth grade boys, no one in the room considered that having a little person traipse around draped in a mexican flag would inflame some passion from people of mexican descent!
it's been about two years since plezWorld has graced kfc with his presence... i guess i can replace that personal boycott with one of burger king and their texican whopper!
This book display is confirmed by snopes.com and the resulting apology by Mary Ellen Keating, Barnes & Noble spokesperson. She claims the book display was more than likely the result of a customer prank.
From snopes.com, here is the apology:
Barnes & Noble would like to publicly apologize for an incident in our Coral Gables, Florida store. We believe that a customer played a cruel joke and placed an inappropriate title ("Monkeys") in the front window of our store, where we were featuring books written by or about President Obama. We want to assure our customers that the book placed by someone other than any of our booksellers was never intended to be included in our display and was removed as soon as we became aware of the situation. We are looking into it and taking the steps necessary so that it does not happen again. From time to time customers will move titles from one area of the store to another. In this particular case, we don not condone whatever message may have been intended with the placement of this title in our Presidential display. It certainly was not part of our merchandising and we regret that we didn't see the placement of this title immediately.
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plezWorld received an e-mail with the above photo and a plea to boycott Barnes & Noble.
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plez sez: there are some sick people out there and even as a prank, this sinks to a level of depravity that is simply appalling.
boycott the store?!? hmmm, that may be a bit extreme. they did correct the display and they did issue an apology. i'm not aware of a pattern of this behavior and it appears that this was an isolated incident. it is my hope that barnes & noble puts the proper controls in place to reduce the likelihood of this type of "merchandising" making its way into the public eye in the future.
After Rev. Al Sharpton-led protests clogged the street in front of the NY Post headquarters, the Post released the following apology - to some:
THAT CARTOON
Wednesday's Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp's body: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
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plez sez: so... the apology was only for people who tend to agree with everything the post publishes? by following that logic, it would seem that the people who tend to agree with everything the post publishes probably weren't offended by the cartoon.
which leads me to the "go to hell" statement for those would seize upon the "opportunity for payback." who would more than likely include MOST of the people who were offended by the cartoon.
which begs the question, why apologize? those who weren't offended haven't sought an apology and they said "eff you" to the ones who were offended. i'm perplexed.
plezWorld is no fan of the ny post... it is too sensational and "over the top." i wasn't particularly offended by the cartoon because it wasn't funny and it completely missed the mark for whatever it was trying to satirize: the wayward chimp with a couple of bullet holes in its chest? barack obama? the simians in congress? nancy pelosi? you can't really tell what the artist was trying to say, which left the entire thing up to speculation... and allegations of racism.
if the caption had read: "they'll have to find someone else to SIGN the next stimulus bill," then the knee-jerk, attention-grubbing crowd (oh yeah, and al sharpton) would've had something to go after. as it reads, it doesn't really point to obama, because he didn't WRITE the stimulus bill!
just speculating here, maybe it had read "sign" and the editor thought that would be too inflammatory, so the artist changed one word... yeah! that's the ticket.
to my way of thinking... "big whup"! who would've guessed that an instrument of rupert murdoch would harbor some racist views?!? come on, ya'll... grow a thicker skin, because i'm guaranteeing a next time!
i don't oppose the cartoon as much as i despise that inept non-apology!
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Read the mealy mouthed NY Post apology about chimp cartoon.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and integration in the southern states of the United States began to take hold via federal fiat, the Republican hatched a plan gain control of the White House (and keep it). Generally attributed to Richard Nixon's run in 1968, the Southern Strategy was a Republican ploy to push newly enfranchised Blacks to the Democratic party while enticing conservative Democratic whites to join the Republican Party, thus creating a solid cultural bloc that would elect four presidents (Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43) over the next 40 years. During that stretch, only 2 Democratic presidents - both Southerners (Carter from Georgia and Clinton from Arkansas) - would gain the White House.
In a 1970 New York Times article, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips said:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Even as the approach was applied nationally, until the early 1960's, the Southern US was home to a majority of Black Americans. "States' rights" and cultural issues such as gay marriage (bans were on ballot of 3 states in 2008), abortion, gun ownership, and religion were hot button wedge issues that were adopted into the platform of the Republicans. By playing on ignorance and fears of Black power exacerbated white flight from urban centers to growing suburbs and exurbs, and also fueled white flight from the Democratic Party, which was the predominant party in the South until the mid-1960's.
The candidacy of Barack Obama hinged on his running not as a Black candidate, but as just a candidate for President. If you notice, his campaign went to great lengths to keep the Civil Rights icons (Jackson, Young, Lewis, etc.) at arm's length, while securing votes in states that had near negligible Black populations (Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire, etc.). Obama ran a strong southern campaign during the primaries, mopping up Hillary Clinton in every southern state except Arkansas... but then again, the Democratic Party is heavily Black in the south. He didn't do quite as well against Clinton in areas with similar southern demographics in the north (Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, etc.).
Along the road to winning the Democratic primary, the Obama campaign registered hundreds of thousands of new voters, new progressive voters: young, educated, upwardly mobile. These new voters would become a new base as he pushed the line of battleground states into the south! The new voters in Virginia and North Carolina tilted those states blue (Virginia had not gone for a Democrat since LBJ in 1964). Newly registered voters almost turned red state Georgia blue (Obama lost the state by only 4 percentage points) and the US Senate seat was thrown into a runoff, something that was unheard of only four years ago.
Two weeks before the election, the American Prospect uses Obama in North Carolina as an example that the southern strategy is dead:
In less than two weeks, we may well see the election in which the Southern Strategy -- the strategic doctrine that has underpinned the rise of the Republican Party over the past four decades -- dies an inglorious death. Since 1968, Republicans have exploited the racial and cultural resentments of Southern whites brilliantly. Their control of the White House for 24 of the last 40 years, and of Congress from 1994 through 2006, was rooted in the overwhelming support they won from Southern whites.
The strategy was premised on the South's distinct identity -- that it was home to a more rural, less educated, more militaristic, more churchgoing, less tolerant, more racist white population than the nation's other regions. It has worked like a charm in areas where Southern backwardness has been immutable. The problem for the GOP is that modernity, in the form of internal development, greater racial diversity, and migration from -- oh, the horror -- the North, has finally begun to alter the political identity of key Southern states.
Clearly, that's what has happened to Virginia, in which the southward creep of an increasingly cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. into the Virginia burbs (both sub- and ex-) has altered the state's racial and cultural make-up. Since 2000, Republicans have fared well in what Sarah Palin termed the "real Virginia," only to see their numbers dwarfed by the successively bigger margins racked up by such Democrats as Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, and Jim Webb in the northern part of the state.
The thought of Virginia, which has not gone Democratic in a presidential election since 1964, casting its electoral votes for Barack Obama is mind-boggling enough. But North Carolina? Could a black presidential candidate carry a southern state that hasn't had a northern metropolis disrupt its demographics? Could a relatively unknown Democratic senate candidate unseat a nationally known Republican incumbent?
By looking at the Electoral Shift Map (as it appears in the New York Times), one can see that the entire country, save a swath of counties that stretches down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains into Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, has shifted (and voted) to the left (blue). The red portions of the map tells the story of the part of the country that was left behind during the boom of the 1990's, is less racially diverse, less sophisticated, and far less educated than the blue regions to the north and east (the red parts of Georgia are in the largely white North Georgia mountains and the southern plain).
The New York Times appears to agree that the area of the south that is still a part of the Southern Strategy appears to be shrinking before it dies on the vine. Some parts of the south were more fervently red for John McCain than they were for Bush back in 2004, but one would have to travel into the deepest hollows of the traditional south to find them... that would be Palin Country! The story goes down to Vernon, Alabama which sits on the Alabama-Mississippi border where they don't cotton to uppity-Negroes with funny sounding names and Muslim sounding middle names. These people don't think too highly of Ivy League graduates and have very clear ideas about why certain folk should stay in their place!
Most of these people don't like Abraham Lincoln, think they got a relative who died fighting for the Lost Cause back in '65 (1865, that is), and still think that Martin Luther King, Jr. was nothing more than a rabble rouser who got what was coming to him.
The state of affairs in the Deep South and how Virginia and North Carolina turned blue, as reported by the New York Times:
VERNON, Ala. — Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday’s vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.
What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.
The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”
One reason for that is that the South is no longer a solid voting bloc. Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.
The increased turnout in the South’s so-called Black Belt, or old plantation-country counties, was visible in the results, but it generally could not make up for the solid white support for Mr. McCain. Alabama, for example, experienced a heavy black turnout and voted slightly more Democratic than in 2004, but the state over all gave 60 percent of its vote to Mr. McCain. (Arkansas, however, doubled the margin of victory it gave to the Republican over 2004.)
Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.
That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.
“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.
Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.
“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”
Even the Democrats made use of the Southern strategy, as the party’s two presidents in the last 40 years, Jimmy Carter and Mr. Clinton, were Southerners whose presence on the ticket served to assuage regional anxieties. Mr. Obama has now proved it is no longer necessary to include a Southerner on the national ticket — to quiet racial fears, for example — in order to win, in the view of analysts.
Several Southern states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, have voted for the winner in presidential elections for decades. No more. And Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.
Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states. Alabama analysts pointed to the persistence of traditional white Southern attitudes on race as the deciding factor in Mr. McCain’s strong margin. Mr. Obama won in Jefferson County, which includes the city of Birmingham, and in the Black Belt, but he made few inroads elsewhere.
“Race continues to play a major role in the state,” said Glenn Feldman, a historian at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “Alabama, unfortunately, continues to remain shackled to the bonds of yesterday.”
David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.
“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.
In Arkansas, which had among the nation’s largest concentration of counties increasing their support for the Republican candidate over the 2004 vote, “there’s a clear indication that racial conservatism was a component of that shift away from the Democrat,” said Jay Barth, a political scientist in the state.
Race was a strong subtext in post-election conversations across the socioeconomic spectrum here in Vernon, the small, struggling seat of Lamar County on the Mississippi border.
One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.
Mr. McCain won 76 percent of the county’s vote, about five percentage points more than Mr. Bush did, because “a lot more people came out, hoping to keep Obama out,” Joey Franks, a construction worker, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save.
Mr. Franks, who voted for Mr. McCain, said he believed that “over 50 percent voted against Obama for racial reasons,” adding that in his own case race mattered “a little bit. That’s in my mind.”
Many people made it clear that they were deeply apprehensive about Mr. Obama, though some said they were hoping for the best.
“I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.
Don Dollar, the administrative assistant at City Hall, said bitterly that anyone not upset with Mr. Obama’s victory should seek religious forgiveness.
“This is a community that’s supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks,” he said. “If they’re not disappointed, they need to be at the altar.”
Customers of Bill Pennington, a barber whose downtown shop is decorated with hunting and fishing trophies, were “scared because they heard he had a Muslim background,” Mr. Pennington said over the country music on the radio. “Over and over again I heard that.”
Mr. Obama remains an unknown quantity in this corner of the South, and there are deep worries about the changes he will bring.
“I am concerned,” Gail McDaniel, who owns a cosmetics business, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. “The abortion thing bothers me. Same-sex marriage.”
“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks,” she added. “From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”
As the United States moves to the center and away from divisive politics, the two major parties will have to deal with a demographic shift that changed the complexion of the 2008 presidential election. Even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had an article concerning the viability of the Southern Strategy in light of the eventual Obama win. The AJC article had an interesting twist on how Gov. Sarah Palin would affect voting in the South based on the fact that she is a candidate tailor-made for the Southern Strategy (abortion, religion, guns, and states' rights)!
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One of the unintended consequences, as predicted by plezWorld, was that there would be an almost immediate knee jerk reaction to an Obama win to begin the rapid destruction of affirmative action in the United States. Exactly one week after President-Elect Obama obliterated the Southern Strategy, right-wing opinion is doing exactly as I predicted. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece that calls for re-examination of the Voting Rights Act (and its 2006 update) since Barack Obama proved that race-based Congressional districts are no longer necessary, since it was proved last week that white people will vote for a Black person.
Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled, "Racial Gerrymandering is Unnecessary":
The conventional wisdom among voting-rights advocates and political scientists has been that whites will not vote for black candidates in significant numbers. Hence the need for federal protection in the form of race-based districts that create safe black constituencies where black candidates are sure to win.
But the myth of racist white voters was destroyed by this year's presidential election.
Although six out of 10 votes cast for Barack Obama came from whites, he did not win an overall majority of white votes -- he lost among this group 43%-55%. But no Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 has won the majority of whites. The reason is simple: Just as African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately Democrats, whites are now disproportionately Republicans.
Remember Mr. Obama's weak performance with working-class white voters during the primaries? Many speculated at the time, and right up to Nov. 4, that those voters who pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton would defect to John McCain.
Not so. Mr. Obama's 43% share of the white vote in the general election was actually a tad larger than that of John Kerry in 2004 (41%) or Al Gore in 2000 (42%).
So what happened to all those "racists" or "rednecks" that John Murtha spoke of so recently? If there had been that many of them, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia and Florida would have gone the other way, and we would have a President-elect McCain today. Racism is the Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark in the night.
Consider Iowa, with only a miniscule African-American population. The 5% of voters who said race was the most important factor in their choice of whom to vote for backed Mr. Obama 54% to 45%. Or consider Minnesota and Wisconsin, also overwhelmingly white, where Mr. Obama's lead was 18% and 21% respectively among the 5% to 7% of voters who made race their highest priority.
These results do not mean we now live in a color-blind society. But we can say that the doors of electoral opportunity in America are open to all.
The aggressive federal interference in state and local districting decisions enshrined in the Voting Rights Act should therefore be reconsidered. That statute, adopted in 1965 and strengthened by Congress in the summer of 2006, demands race-driven districting maps to protect black candidates from white competition. That translates into an effort to create black representation proportional to the black population in the jurisdiction.
That law gave federal courts and the Justice Department what are, in effect, extraordinary war powers to combat the evil of ongoing Southern black disfranchisement. But blacks are no longer disfranchised -- by any definition.
In fact, racially gerrymandered districts are an impediment to political integration at all levels of government. Herding African-Americans into "max-black" districts forces black candidates to run in heavily gerrymandered districts. The candidates who emerge from those districts are, unsurprisingly, typically not the most well-positioned to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.
Black candidates can win in multi-ethnic and even majority-white districts with color-blind voting. Mr. Obama should make it a priority to give more aspiring black politicians the opportunity to stand before white (and Latino and Asian and other ethnic) voters. He won, so can they.
American voters have turned a racial corner. The law should follow in their footsteps.
BARACK OBAMA ran a flawless campaign that left the remnants of the southern strategy in tatters. by concentrating on creating and energizing a "new electorate," the Obama campaign broke the generational and cultural hold that the Republican party had on the "backwards" south. by shrinking its geography, states that for the past 40 years would only go with a republican or a southern democrat now saw their electorate leaning blue.
if Obama can marshall the congress to do his bidding on just a few of his initiatives, these remaining pockets of the southern strategy will surely fall by the next election. should he fail, 2012 will yield an optimum opportunity for a resurgent sarah palin and her brand of right-wing fanatism to take hold and we could witness the rebirth of the southern strategy for the republicans. Obama's hold on the region is that tenuous.
the election of BARACK OBAMA was the death knell for the southern strategy... for the time being!
The following is a reproduction of an e-mail that I received on my fraternity's private e-mail distribution listserver a few days ago. The author joined our fraternity in the mid-1950's on the campus of Virginia State College in the small city of Petersburg, Virginia. The following post (with permission from Dr. Michael V. W. Gordon, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University) recounts his journey to take advantage of early voting in Raleigh, North Carolina... and his struggle to get the right to vote in 1960.
Aretha Franklin "A Change Is Gonna Come"
This song was written and recorded by Sam Cooke during the height of the Civil Rights Movement after he was moved at hearing Bob Dylan's ode to the movement, "Blowin' in the Wind." It is reported that after speaking with sit-in demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina following a concert in May 1963, Cooke returned to his tour bus and wrote the first draft of what would become "A Change Is Gonna Come."
I selected this version of the song to accompany Dr. Gordon's story because I love the old gospel feel of Aretha Franklin's soulful singing and the music (the organ wailing in the background holding up Aretha's heartfelt turn at the piano) in contrast to the equally lush and mythical orchestration (with strings and horns) of Sam Cooke's version. AND this is the version of the song that plezWorld grew up listening to on my parents' stereo.
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The First Day Of Early Voting In Raleigh, NC Dr. MICHAEL V W GORDON Posted: October 22, 2008
We arrived early last Thursday, October 16th and already about 300 people were in line at the polling place. My brother-in-law, who just recently had hip replacement surgery, my sister, and me - who will be having ankle replacement surgery - went to the assisted voting area for the handicapped. Can you imagine?
We were assisted by very able poll workers, like this one.
Guess who I voted for? Should I vote the straight ticket? All right, lefty.
WE HAVE COME A LONG WAY, BABY!
The reason I say, "We have come a long way, baby" is that sitting there waiting for my ballot to be brought to me, I reflected on the first time I voted back in 1960 in Petersburg, Virginia. After studying ROTC at Virginia State College (now University) and graduating in 1957, I served for two years as an officer in the Army, mainly in the 101st Airborne Division.
When I returned to Petersburg in 1959, I had an unusual administrative experience for a small town African American guy. I was appointed as part-time Assistant Principal at the newly built, Westview Elementary School.
The president of the PTA there that year was the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker. Rev. Walker, along with some other young ministers in Petersburg started a civil rights organization to make Petersburg better. It was called the Petersburg Improvement Association. The Petersburg Improvement Association led many sit-ins and other protest activities against racial segregation laws there. Many were arrested. Many lost their jobs.
This movement gained the attention of the young, Reverend MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., who visited our city many times and assisted us. He was so impressed with Wyatt Tee Walker, that eventually he took him back to Atlanta as his Chief of Staff.
But as we were studying to register African Americans to vote, Martin Luther King would come with his staff to teach us techniques for getting that job done. MLK would drive in late at night and leave during the night because it was dangerous for him to be seen in that area. We had heard that an assistant principal in an area not far from us had been taken out of his home and lynched.
You see, this was before the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that removed the artificial and deliberate obstacles the segregationists devised to keep blacks from exercising voting power.We had the poll tax, which required paying a fee for the privilege of voting and we had the "literacy" test.
That was administered in Petersburg by asking the prospective voter something about government that they expected an educated voter to know. Also, you need to know that all whites did not support this apartheid system of government. We had someone in the voter registration office, who was white, who told us the question in advance which we would be asked.
That question was changed periodically to keep blacks from knowing too much in advance. We had study sessions at night at the church and some of us were trained to "pass" and some were trained to "fail". The reason for this was that if we all passed it would look suspicious.
Since I was the part-time Assistant Principal of the elementary school and an officer in the United States Army Reserve, they believed that I was among those who would not cause so much suspicion if I "passed".
So we set about the task of memorizing the answer to the question which we had been presented in "secret". I'll never forget that day when I was to report to the Petersburg Court House for my "examination".
After waiting a good while, I was ushered into an office and confronted by a surly, burly white man, "What do you want, boy?"
"I want to register to vote," I replied.
"I will ask you a question. Can you recite from memory the Third Article of The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Fa-jin-ja (his pronunciation of Virginia)?
So, I recited what I had carefully memorized over the previous two weeks:
ARTICLE III The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia
Division of Powers
Section 1. Departments to be distinct.The legislative, executive, and judicial departments shall be separate and distinct, so that none exercise the powers properly belonging to the others, nor any person exercise the power of more than one of them at the same time; provided, however, administrative agencies may be created by the General Assembly with such authority and duties as the General Assembly may prescribe.
Provisions may be made for judicial review of any finding, order, or judgment of such administrative agencies.
And that is the way it was then.
I got my registration card in 1960.
I voted for John F. Kennedy for President of the United States of America!
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plez sez: i thank Dr. Gordon for trusting plezWorld with his story.
both of my parents were born and raised in segregated north carolina: denied an adequate education, fair wages, health care, and an opportunity to vote. my parents did not get to vote until they moved our family to new york in the mid-1950's. i have an aunt (my mother's 95-year old sister) who will be taking advantage of early voting in ahoskie, north carolia... like dr. gordon, my aunt will be voting from the handicapped area for BARACK OBAMA!
another commonality with dr. gordon is my second oldest brother, he also graduated from virginia state college in petersburg in 1979 - a full 20 years after dr. gordon returned there to teach. i spoke with my brother earlier this week, he lives in southern california. like dr. gordon, my aunt, and me, my brother will be voting for BARACK OBAMA!
Civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis is accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of inciting hate, by invoking the name of George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, when referring to the atmosphere at their Republican campaign events.
If you recall, John Lewis was on the front lines on the hard fought battles for the civil rights of Black Americans during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Many don't realize that he was one of the speakers on the dais when Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. But more importantly, Lewis was a recipient of seeds of hate the were sown by Gov. George Wallace when he was beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery, Alabama as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. He still carries the scar on his head from that beating. He has the moral authority to speak of the hatred that was so pervasive in the country and how one could get that feeling from listening to the rhetoric that has been evident at McCain-Palin rallies of late.
Rep. John Lewis' statement (in part):
"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on [a] Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
“As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.”
Of course, Sen. John McCain was "saddened that John Lewis" would make such a "brazen and baseless" attack on his character. Not to be outdone, McCain had to draw Sen. Obama into the discussion:
"I call on Senator Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America.”
The Obama campaign had a response:
“Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies. But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for President of the United States ‘pals around with terrorists.’
"As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together. That is the kind of campaign Senator Obama will continue to run in the weeks ahead.”
On Saturday night, John Lewis released another statement, further clarifying his initial statement:
"A careful review of my earlier statement would reveal that I did not compare Sen. John McCain or Gov. Sarah Palin to George Wallace. It was not my intention or desire to do so.
"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior. I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation."
Read Pandagon's sarcasm-laced take on the John Lewis comment.
Read the New York Times op-ed piece about the racist-tinged rhetoric that comes from the McCain campaign here
Read the CNN.com article about McCain's reaction to Lewis's comment here and here.
plez sez: hmmmm, for the better part of the last two weeks, mccain and palin have been flying around the country saying that Obama is dangerous and that he supports domestic terrorism, and that isn’t character assassination; but calling mccain and palin out for running a campaign that very obviously incites hate (including threatening comments) is character assassination? {scratching my head}
Rep. John Lewis has a big scar on his head as a daily reminder of the "toxic language" of gov. george wallace. and i'm sure the chill that ran up his spine at listening to a mccain-palin rally is similar to that which he used to feel when listening to george wallace.
as they say down in this part of the country: "a hit dog will holler, and a stuck pig will squeal!"
palin's brand of populist rhetoric ("them vs. us", "liberal elites vs. true americans", "bad people like them vs. good people like us", "Obama is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America", etc.) is cut from the same cloth that was draped over the very words that dripped from gov. george wallace's racist lips! i guess palin forgets that she's pallin' around with an adulterer and an infidel! i guess she forgets the moral failings of her running mate while decrying the character flaws of her opponent.
as evidenced by mccain's reaction at rallies over the past couple of days, he sees that his words are getting out of hand; his campaign is already a lost cause, his entire career would be loss if the end product of this campaign is Obama's blood on his hands and race riots in the streets.
blog post artwork: Barry Blitt - New York Times - 10-12-2008
The following videos are actual, real, live people who attended a McCain-Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio on Wednesday, October 8th (one day after the second McCain-Obama Debate). If you don't think that the McCain camp is fomenting a gutter level campaign of hate and mistrust, I have a Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska to sell you.
The utter ignorance and total disdain for even a scintilla of rational thought from any of these people sent a cold chill up my spine.
While watching this video, remember that Sen. Barack Obama has been "running" for President for the better part of the last 2 years, Gov. Sarah Palin has been in the public eye of the Lower 48 for the better part of 2 months!
Now, if you are against the policies and politics of Sen. Barack Obama, by all means, don't vote for him. But every last person in this YouTube video has "another reason" why they won't vote for Obama... and it doesn't have a thing to do with his politics!
Before the McCain-Palin Rally in Strongsville, Ohio October 8, 2008
Read the New York Times op-ed piece on John McCain's fall from political grace during the last debate with Sen. Barack Obama here.
Read the CNN.com article about Obama's quest for the battleground state of Ohio here
CNN.com has a few articles about the negative campaigning and division in a Ohio town here and here.
plez sez: truly a scary scene. that was one brave cameraman. i bet he wouldn't dare try to interview those people on their way out of the rally after being whipped into a lather by john mccain and sarah palin!
i know that politics are dirty, but the turn in this campaign in particular has taken an ugly and evil bent. mccain is purposely appealing to the worse instincts of his supporters. rather than giving his supporters something to vote for, mccain is feeding them the red meat necessary to vote against Obama in the most vicious and racist way!
mccain is showing himself to be desperate and dangerous person willing to go outside the bounds of proper comportment to achieve his goal. to my way of thinking, he has reached the point of no return, his reputation and his honor will forever be stained by the ugly tenor of this campaign. and the real tragedy here is that mccain was "done in" by a negative campaign by george w. bush during the republican primaries back in 2000... in 2008, he just upped the ante!
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there were two scenes in the videos that really made me sit up in my seat in "shock and awe":
the Black guy wearing the mccain-palin sticker on his jacket... i wonder why he couldn't speak up for himself and explain why he was supporting mccain?
the child who shouted, "you need gloves to touch him!" while his mother walked along with the Obama doll (heaven knows what she planned to do with that doll during the rally)!
i'm not going to say MOST of mccain's supporters are like the few people who were interviewed, but...
This picture was forwarded to plezWorld on Wednesday evening by the brother of the woman who took this pic on her camera phone this past weekend. You read the caption correctly, it reads "Nigger Please! It's a White House".
If you look alittle closer at the fender, he's a McCain/Palin supporter! The McCain campaign has made racism and racist comments toward Obama by his supporters acceptable... read this and this and this.
Nothing would please plezWorld more than to have this dude (and thousands like him) wake up on November 5th with Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.
After the second debate in Nashville, McCain took his road show to visit the good people of Strongsville, Ohio. read more...
Over the past six months, race relations and attitudes towards race in the US has been front and center with the candidacy of the presumptive Democratic Party nominee Sen. Barack H. Obama, the first Black American to head a major party's ticket in the country's 232 year history. From comfortable wins in states like Iowa, North Dakota, and Montana that have few Black voters; to close losses in states like Indiana, Pennsylvania, and California that have sizable Black numbers; to big wins in states that have large numbers of Blacks; to apparent race-based losses in states like Kentucky and West Virginia, this country has run the gamut in support (and lack in support) of Sen. Obama.
The Washington Post released the results of a new Washington Post-ABC News poll (published June 18, 2008) that shows the attitudes towards on race in the United States. The poll shows that 3 in 10 of all Americans admit to at least some racial bias. Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations "excellent" or "good." More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: 30 percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.
At the same time, there is an overwhelming public openness to the idea of electing an African American to the presidency. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be "entirely comfortable" with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.
Read the entire Washington Post article about race here.
plez sez: in this past, i recently wrote about what i saw as the unintended consequences of an Obama presidency in terms of its affect on affirmative action in america. another unintended consequence may be the eventual post-racialism in this country. John McWhorter writes eloquently of how little racism affects america on a day-to-day basis, could it be that a President Obama will finally throw that last shovels full of dirt on the casket of racism?
there will always be those who see black and brown skin as inferior - hell, there are those in the Black community who view darker skin as inferior - but this election may give america its first opportunity to see past race. the poll results show that 30 percent of all americans have some racial bias, but more than 50 percent are comfortable with a Black president. when this country doesn't slide into a moral abyss after Obama's inauguration and when he begins to actually accomplish something during his presidency, we may see these numbers improve dramatically. racism is a sickness of ignorance (demographically, Obama does better with better educated white folk). maybe even a sizable portion of whites who only know Black people from what they see on the evening news will come to see the folly of their racial bias.
on the flip side, i'm in Michelle Obama's camp on this one: this election cycle has for the first time in my adult life given me reason to be truly proud of this country! Barack Obama's candidacy has completely re-written my thoughts on race relations in this country. plezWorld has an Obama '08 bumper sticker on the SUV, i received it from two white Obama campaigners who were eating in a restaurant in my neighborhood; they were returning to Atlanta from the South Carolina primaries that weekend. when i went canvassing on Super Tuesday, my riding partner was an older white lady, Dreaming Bear, from the north georgia mountains who had made the two hour drive to South DeKalb to canvass for Obama!
John McWhorter, left, of the Manhattan Institute and Glenn Loury of Brown University discuss the issue of race for Barack Obama:
John H. McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues for the Institute's Center for Race and Ethnicity. He also writes a regular column in the New York Sun. McWhorter's new book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books) was released in early 2006 and has already generated widespread acclaim. He was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Non-Fiction and has appeared numerous national TV and radio shows, such as Meet the Press, John McLaughlin's One on One, the O'Reilly Factor and NPR's Fresh Air. McWhorter is also a well-known and widely published linguistics scholar.
Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He has taught previously at Boston, Harvard and Northwestern Universities, and the University of Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern University) and a Ph.D. in Economics (MIT). In addition to this scholarly work, Professor Loury is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual. His over 200 essays and reviews on racial inequality and social policy have appeared in dozens of influential journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. He is a frequent commentator on national radio and television, a much soughtafter public speaker, and an advisor on social issues to business and political leaders throughout the country. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic, and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of The American Interest.
plez sez: i find it a delight to listen to two academics debate and intelligently discuss issues that affect us today. i can't think of two better Bloggingheads than John McWhorter and Glenn Loury to discuss the issue of race and racism in politics.
i deplore calling anyone a racist (don't get me wrong, there are racist people), because we all see race... and we've all formed our own prejudices and preferences for the types of people we choose to deal with. i'm no more a racist for choosing to live in a very nice predominantly Black neighborhood, anymore than the white person who chooses to live in a neighborhood populated by mainly white folk.
plezWorld agrees with McWhorter about the good folk in west virginia and indiana who came out in droves for hillary clinton, they weren't racists, but they were voting race... just like the droves of Black folk who supported Barack Obama down here in georgia and south carolina!
i just found this to be a particularly enlightening Bloggingheads episode. i invite you to check out other episodes with McWhorter and Loury.
A Roswell, Georgia newspaper is defending a controversial cover illustration that placed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in a rifle's cross hairs. The Roswell Beacon is a free weekly rag that has a distribution of about 65,000 in the city of Roswell, which is just north of Atlanta, Georgia. The controversial front cover was published on May 15, 2008.
The associated article states that north Georgia is the home to some serious racists, and whether we like it or not, Obama's candidacy has brought out the worst in a lot of people. Some have questioned whether there is a need for a newspaper to suggest assassination with such an incendiary cover such as this.
The paper's publisher, John Fredericks is quoted as saying, "Good, bad, or ugly, we tell the truth." The cover was approved with little debate about it being appropriate, though they were aware that it would likely cause a buzz in the community.
The cover's article was pitched and reported by veteran freelance journalist Alan Sverdlik, who said he was curious how law enforcement agencies were handling the increased number of threats lodged against Sen. Obama by white supremacist groups, some of whom are based around north Fulton. Sverdlik said Tuesday he had not seen the cover and had no input in its development.
A number of bloggers have written articles calling the Roswell Beacon to task for publishing such an incendiary cover.
Read the entire AJC article about the Obama cover picture here.
WARNING! The Roswell Beacon article is a chilling and quite disturbing expose' that takes place just north of Atlanta; one of the subjects openly discusses the assassination of Obama and the beginning of a race war if he is elected President.
Read the actual article from the Roswell Beacon here and it is also re-posted on the Reporter-Cub blog.
plez sez: roswell, georgia is home to the whites who fled the city of atlanta to the south. north atlanta (and north fulton county) is probably the reddest part of red state georgia. the right leaning roswell beacon features syndicated columns from ultra-conservative michelle malkin, it is a free rag that panders to its constituency: a large community of right wing borderline racists! they see nothing wrong with giving comfort to those who would kill a Black man who would be so bold as to aspire to the presidency of the united states.
it is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in this country when a presidential candidate (more than likely, the presumptive nominee and quite likely the next president) is given the cover of even a fish wrapping rag in the crosshairs of a rifle! if the man who is singularly responsible for the wrongful death of over 4,000 americans in iraq isn't worthy of this publisher's ire (for those who are kind of slow, i'm talking about george w. bush), i can only wonder what Barack Obama has done (other than being born with brown skin) to endear such an honor? and my gut instinct tells me that the color of his skin has everything to do with it and concerns about his safety have very little to do with it.
the cover art is no longer accessible on the beacon's website. but i intend to let my feelings known by sending them more e-mail. a local holiday inn has already pulled support from the rag based on the backlash over the cover.
~ husband ~ father ~ son ~ brother ~ mentor ~ subdivision dweller ~ northern by birth ~ southern by choice ~ raised a black baptist, now guided by the spiritual ~ raised a kennedy democrat, now politically dead center (moderate) ~ raised in a Cadillac Coupe Deville, now hooked on an SUV ~ college educated and still a student of life ~ wild college frat boy and now a settled alumnus ~ intellectual yet fun-loving geek ~ technical and leading edge ~ corporate cog ~ consultant ~ college football saturday devotee ~ and a ramblin' gamblin' helluva engineer (GO JACKETS!) ~
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