Letters to the Editor
weeping for brunnhilde
Published Letters: 1150 Editor's Choice: 3
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Get over yourselves!
[Read the article: Moving beyond Obama and race]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oh my God.
I don't know what to say.
Look, I'm a patient person.
Really, I am.
But for Christ's sake, it's extremely frustrating to hear white people get all defensive because Obama referred to his grandmother as "a typical white person" as if this was some kind of insensitivity.
For fuck's sake, it was exactly the opposite!
The problem with our discussions of race and racism is that white people are so defensive they can't bear the idea that they might harbor racist thinking or, more accurately, racist responses that anyone growing up in this country, black people included, have been conditioned to have.
We've all been saturated in negative images of black people so of course we all have negative associations with black people on some level.
The question is, what level, and are we dealing with it.
But Obama was offering his grandmother as a way of relating to white people who have imbibed racism with the culture.
He was saying it's possible to be victimized by racism and still be a good human being.
He's trying to get us beyond the false dichotomy of racist/not racist.
It's precisely this false dichotomy that keeps us stuck.
No one wants to admit they might have racist responses or thoughts because they think that means that then they're a bad person and no one wants to be a bad person.
They take "racism" as an accusation, a damnation rather than as neutral assessment.
Obama was speaking of his grandmother's racism in a neutral, almost sociological way.
It wasn't a fucking accusation, for Christ's sake.
As a black person who lives in an Ivy League world and has lived almost exclusively around white people and has married a European, all I can say is, for the love of Christ, get over yourselves, white people!
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Joan, what's your expertise on race?
[Read the article: Moving beyond Obama and race]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Another thing, Joan.
And I mean this with all due respect and in a genuine spirit of openness: what have you done to "close the racial divide," as you say?
I'm ignorant as to your career and since you're appealing to your own authority as someone with an expertise on the subject of racism, I think it might help your readers (or maybe just me) to know a bit more about this.
What is your expertise?
Because based on what I see here, your analysis seems a bit unsophisticated.
Not that I'm an expert on racism: I'm a rare black person who is working on a Ph.D. that has nothing to do with race or politics.
So I don't have an academic background in racism or theory of race or anything like that, but I have lived a rich and I daresay unique life as a black person in this country (there aren't many Ivy League blacks, so I have a natural affinity with Michelle and Barack inasmuch as that goes).
Anyway, if we're going to talk about race, let's talk about race, not the political fallout of race or the ignorance of white people vis a vis race or how somehow Obama "stepped in it" by trying to actually express something in a way people might relate to by invoking his grandmother.
How about a little generosity, eh?
A little intellectual curiosity, even, wouldn't hurt.
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@llbaltimore
[Read the article: Moving beyond Obama and race]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is the crux and it deserves amplification:
Hillary supporters and posts and articles like this one that continue to insist that Obama do the impossible: have a hard conversation about race, but never say anything that anyone could possibly take the wrong way
Exactly.
So strange Joan should have such a hard time seeing this.
Rather than be an advocate for deeper exploration of the issue which she says she's been an advocate for for all these years, she betrays a really stunning blindness on this.
She should be writing about how the seizure of the "typical white person" remark is the inevitable by-product of an honest discussion.
Instead, she calls it a political liability, showing herself to be just as incapable of serious discussion as the talking heads on the television.
It's sad, really, because she seems genuinely to not get it.
But it's really not that mysterious a concept, is it?
White people are uncomfortable with the idea of racism and are bound to feel uncomfortable with it no matter what.
So why must it be incumbent upon black people to pander, tip-tow and bend over backwards to not offend them?
Isn't that the fucking point of all this?
That's what gets us the segregated churches.
So they don't want Wright screaming from the pulpit to a black audience, but they don't want Obama making the very mild, and in fact conciliatory reference to the "typical white person" either.
What the fuck do they want?
They want to deal with racism (at least liberals do) without dealing with racism?
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"mispoke?"
[Read the article: Moving beyond Obama and race]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think Obama simply misspoke, out of campaign exhaustion, when he called his grandmother "a typical white person" who, he said, harbored no "racial animosity," but "if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know. . .there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."
Ok, Joan, what would you have said?
How would you have made the point Obama was clearly making, which was that his grandmother harbored a sort of stimulus-response fear of black people walking down the street despite the fact that she loved her grandson, who was black?
Don't you think he was saying that inasmuch as his grandmother harbored fears (anxieties, suspicions, whatever) of strange black men, she was the typical white person?
Are you arguing that his grandmother's response was indeed an atypical one?
Are you arguing that there really is no such thing as white flight?
What are you arguing, Joan?
Really, I don't mean that rhetorically.
In the interests of an honest discussion on race, it's sort of critical that your argument be as transparent and cogent as possible.