Letters to the Editor
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Obama and race...
So Obama made an historic speech or racism and scored big.
He was right and it's high time we realized it and moved to correct such problems that exist in this country.
Now, let's get back to the issues....the illegal and denigrating war that has all but destroyed our America and most of the world, the economic issues that are threatening us all, the lies we are being force fed every day, the thugs who are advocating and have participated in torture, the almost 4000 American men and women who have died in this Iraq fiasco, the fact that bin Laden is still doing his thing,the 120 recorded suicides of returning servicemen...the veterans affairs groups who are not meeting this problem, a vice president who when notified that over 2/3 of the citizenry oppose this war, replied with the flip remark "so what?"
Deal with it Joan. Your racism topic is old hat. Get a job on Fox and just shut up.
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Joan doesn't need to resign...
She needs a vacation. A full month touring Europe, right now, before the tourist season really starts. She needs to step back, refresh, and renew her objectivity.
I think she does favor Clinton, and I infer from her past posts that it's not so much Senator Clinton herself as Joan's need to make up for past wrongs. That makes sense. It also strikes me that the vast majority of the posters here - me included - jumping up and down on her head for her partisanship is only putting her back up. The fact that she won't walk away from Obama's grandmother seems almost defiant.
Joan, I don't think that Senator Obama's grandmother is the most important thing that happened this week - perhaps it was the speech, or the security breaches, or the anniversary of the war (which you did cover), or Senator Clinton's first lady schedules, or Senator McCain's repeated "gaffes" (does anyone else see the pattern as a new Saddam-bin-Laden link?). With only three posts a week, none of them involving actual reporting and all of them opinion, I honestly feel that only one of them dealt with a topic with any kind of perspective - the forest, not the trees.
Honestly, Joan - you need to step back to renew that perspective. Get out of here for awhile. Hard as it may be, stop paying attention. Come back fresh. Because at the moment you're not actually helping either the debate, or Salon's credibility.
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@Realitycounts
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!
A serious question for you with all due respect. If I said that your statement was that of a typical black person, would you be offended?
A) I suppose it would depend on the context.
B) Part of my point is that, if we're going to deal with race, it's incumbent upon us all to cultivate patience and not take easy offense. It's important to be charitable and to cultivate empathy. That being the case, provided we're having an earnest discussion about something that matters, no, my first reaction would not be offense, but rather, "Tell me what you mean and what point you're trying to make."
So I ask you to elaborate on your statement; let's say my "statement" (and I'm not sure precisely what you're referring to) was "typical." What's the point you're trying to make by observing that?
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and you know he doesn't "generalize about a typical white person" because......
the good reverend wright told you or because every time someone criticizes him he cries racism?
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All Of Our Grandmothers
I think Joan needs to move beyond Obama and race. She is an obvious Clinton backer, which is fine, but that bias prevents her from being objective on the topic that has given him so much positive attention. I am a 50 year old woman who cringes to this day over remarks that my elderly parents, my daughters grandparents, make in describing Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and Asians. I am a highly educated woman who has become a better person than my parents and grandparents, and as much as I would love to disavow them, I have a duty to model positive behavior and teach them as often as I can. Obama is not making up the stories regarding his grandmother, I hear these stories everyday from bi-racial people, or people like myself who are the product of mixed immigrant cultures. And let's not forget, Barack was born in 1961 and he was 10 years old in 1971. His grandmother was certainly more likely to be aware of the progress being made in the civil rights movement. Think of the Norman Lear "All in the Family" lessons. The "typical" white person response back then and still is to be fearful or cautious when one encounters people of color whether in an urban setting or while working in Tucson..............it's still very much alive. Wasn't that the whole point of his speech?
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Obama's speech
The sound & furor over Obama's speech, and his reference to his grandmother, strikes a resonant chord. Both my wife's mother and my mother, at various times, expressed racial remarks. My wife likes to say her mother would make statements about people of other races, but when she got to know them her heart was full of love and respect. And I remember my mother, in the 1930's, making a condescending remark about people of Mexican descent. Somehow I think we need to paraphrase President Roosevelt's speech about "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and recognize we are all part of the human race.
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Joan Walsh is a Clintonoid stooge.
Earlier this week, in reference to Hillary Clinton's complicity in the Iraq war, Joan Walsh made this comment.
"It boiled down to wanting to avoid the Kerry flip-flop label, as well as believing that the first serious female candidate for commander in chief needed to look resolute, and couldn't afford to admit a mistake. Whoever sold her on that idea must have been ... a man."
Sadly, as well as admitting that the first possible female commander in chief is powerless against the persuasion of a man, Joan Walsh also revealed her own stunning capacity for unintelligent stereotyping. It must have been a man, because this is how men think, and the reason they think this way is because they are men.
That's fine. Everyone has their biases and prejudices. But now, she professes to be troubled that Obama would dare suggest there is such a thing as a "typical white person". This is blatant hypocrisy. Who cares really? Everyone has clay feet and I'm not condemning her to hell or anything.
What's important to understand though is that Joan Walsh's objectivity in this matter is a sham. She is a partisan hack who wants Clinton in office. It's really disturbing though rather than letting a really minor thing pass ("Typical white person"? Joan, really, how many people go to the site "Stuff white people like" everyday?) she is trying to hold someone's feet to the fire FOR THE VERY SAME KIND OF ERROR SHE MAKES IN HER COLUMNS.
Joan Walsh would have us believe she is objective and moral, but in reality she is attempting to perpetuate the baseless slur that Obama is a racist. And she is doing so because she wants her woman in power. Talk about sleazy.