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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Re: Obama Said to Choose Arne Duncan
aburke5054@aol.com wrote: Mr Obama hasn't been sworn in yet and you're claiming that he has sold out his principles, to the KKK yet.Well, I never claimed I hated, Obama, you dolt...resent? Yes! suspect? for sure! as for the connections to the KKK...I alluded to the undercurrent of racism in this country that is so ubiquitous that even black aspirants to high office who sell out to *The Corporate Citizen*, unwittlingly sell out to the more base motives within these Olympian circles of power. That, after all, is the rationale that many, including Nader, have seen in using another epithet (*House Nigger*) to describe those members of the dispossessed classes who sell out principal for privilege at the expense of the roots which sustained them in their rise to preeminence. BTW: my familiarity of the epithet, *House Nigger* came to me when, working as an educational director with a Settlement House in Schenectady, NY, I became active working on community development projects and within a team of community and neighborhood leaders. There had been a minority city council member who was moving up the career ladder had had been stiff-arming and coopting almost every progressive initiative we had come up with from our forum, of which he had been a member. When I somewhat apprehensively suggested to the group that he had been perhaps acting as an *Uncle Tom*, I was admonished and cajoled by a few women in the group, one of whom, a dear friend, who said, "C'mon, Rick...call him what WE do...he's nothin' but a *House Nigger*!" (I almost choked!) She then went on to explain that we *Whities* never actually lived under an *Uncle Tom* and don't realize the treachery that is implied in the more abrasive label. BTW: I wonder just what editorial line Obama developed while editor of the Harvard Law Review? anybody out there done the research? Here I offer a start on that research wrt Obama cutting his eye teeth on *toeing the line*... REFS: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12705.html Obama's tenure at the Review has been chronicled at length in the Politico <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11257.html>, the New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/us/politics/28obama.html>, and elsewhere. But Obama has never mentioned his law review piece, a demurral that's part of his campaign's broader pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents about the candidate, even when relatively innocuous. When Politico reporters working on a story about Obama's law review presidency earlier this year asked if he had written for the review, a spokesman responded accurately - but narrowly - that "as the president of the Law Review, Obama didn't write articles, he edited and reviewed them." AND from Politico: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11257.html *Obama kept Law Review balanced *<...SNIP...>* *Obama might have had it right while he was running the journal, when he reportedly ended minor disputes with the words, "Just remember, folks: Nobody reads it." <...SNIP...> . June 1990 --- This issue included five responses to "Racial Critiques of Legal Academia," a highly controversial article published in the Review before Obama became its president. The article --- written by Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law --- argued against the idea that legal scholars of color have a unique and at times uniquely valuable voice on issues related to race. The first entry in the colloquy is prefaced by a quote from performer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson's 1934 article "The Culture of the Negro" --- "The white man has made a fetish of intellect and worships the god of thought; the negro feels rather than thinks" --- and several quotes from the now largely forgotten but once highly controversial racial provocateur Frantz Fanon, among them: "If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not the 'sho' good eatin'' that he persists in imagining." . November 1990 --- This issue included perhaps the most conservative piece of Obama's tenure, in which Ronald Reagan's former Solicitor General Charles Fried attacked race-based affirmative action, calling it "racial balkanization" that would "impoverish the human race." The implications of group rights, he wrote, are "sinister." . February 1991 --- Obama's last issue contains one of its most sharply liberal pieces, a study of race and gender in car sales, which, the editors say in an equally liberal introduction, provides "evidence that seriously challenge faith in the ability of competitive market forces to eliminate racial and gender discrimination in other markets" and calls for more government action. In the end, though, Obama's time on the Review mirrored other aspects of his life. Even in the staunchly liberal milieus in which he has spent his entire adult life, Obama has managed to lead without leaving a clear ideological stamp, and to respect --- and even, at times, to embrace --- opposing views. To his critics, that's a sign of a lack of core beliefs. To his admirers, it's the root of his appeal. Pragmatism and moderation in the face of an abject declivity in the liberty, opportunity, and prospects for the working poor and middle class is a prescription for diasaster, be it a measured and considerate prescription... ;-} rap. More on the historical roots and etymology of the epithet: *House Nigger* (from the NLC list): I think many North Americans have observed that "Uncle Tom" is often used in a derogatory and or negative way. I believe that Nader would agree with this. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons that he didn't simply call President-Elect Obama an Uncle Tom to the corporations. The term can be interpreted as offensive when it is used by whites (i.e., in contemporary contexts non-Latin, non-Asian persons who are recognized as being of primarily European descent whether Protestant or Catholic) as well as when it is used by blacks. The context in which usage occurs as well as the history of the term shape its meaning. A little about the novel: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) about the time the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. The novel galvanized the country's opposition to the enslavement of African Americans. Many consider it the most successful commercial novel of the 1800s. Some of Stowe's critics suggested that the work exaggerated the plight and suffering of the enslaved in the plantation economy. In an 1852 letter to Stowe, Charles Dickens comments on the character Tom and the merits of the novel. He writes: "I doubt there being any warrant for making out the African race to be a great race, or for supposing the future destinies of the world to lie in that direction: and I think this extreme championship likely to repel some useful sympathy and support." In 1853 Stowe published, under pressure from some who supported slavery in the South, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It features "Original Facts and Documents, upon which the story is founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work." In his introduction to the annotated (and illustrated) 2007 edition of the novel, Henry Louis Gates comments on the phrase "Uncle Tom." He states that in the period of the Black Power Movement the term "Uncle Tom" became synonymous with self-loathing. Gates writes that it was a time when African Americans could be read out of the race publicly for not being "black" enough. He elaborates: "For years after, everything connected with Uncle Tom's Cabin recalled this nightmare, our very own version of the Inquisition, the time when blacks turned on other blacks as the enemy economy, as the principal targets of our revolutionary fervor" (xii). Henry Louis Gates has pointed out that the novel was required reading for many North American public school children in the 1960s. He states that the most obvious reason for the novel's disappearance in colleges and universities was the "utter disdain of the Tom character by the black community" (xxvi). The novel was assigned reading for me in a public high school in the US South in 1987. The day we read our teacher passed around postcards that featured the words UNCLE TOM inscribed under various images. Some photos featured racial caricatures (Sambo, minstrel, and Tom-like images), others photos of twentieth-century lynchings that had occurred in the town where we lived. Such images are included in the annotated edition mentioned above. Don Walicek University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras -- "Dein Wachstum sei feste und lache vor Lust! Deines Herzens Trefflichkeit Hat dir selbst das Feld bereit', Auf dem du bluehen musst." JS Bach: Bauern Kantata Richard A. Parkany Prometheus Educational Services http://www.borg.com/~rparkany/ Upper Hudson & Mohawk Valleys; New York State, USA aburke5054@aol.com wrote: Mr Obama hasn't been sworn in yet and you're claiming that he has sold out his principles, to the KKK yet.
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