Comments Posted By Rickielee
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hey, HE HATE ME, or whoever you are....
Gee, thanks for that important correction, and forgive me for impugning anybody connected with the Tuskegee Institue, or the US Office of Public Health. They did not diliberately infect young black men in Tennessee in the 30's and 40's, they went out and found young men who already had it, and then gave them a placebo for the rest of their lives, telling them that they were being treated, and took notes while they spent the next 50 or 60 years dying. For the greater good. Next time you get the clap, light a candle buddy.
I just posted over here (I am, as I'm sure you suspect, a practicing liberal) to see what level of intellectual discourse they had on the right wing blogs. I have yet to discern a level, so I will take my leave. Enjoy each other's company guys.
(and I invite Funny Man Said to come with me and we can find a place were honest talk can happen. It ain't here. You might try The New Republic)
Comment Posted By Rickielee On 20.03.2008 @ 21:18
Something that occured to me as I was watching Pat Buchanan (who seems to be genuinely incensed at the Reverend Wright's YouTube remarks) and some black radio host go at it on Hardball tonight......
Reverend Wright wasn't talking about you and me (well, certainly not me, I don't know about you...), if we are white, when he was doing all his damning and condemning. He wasn't damning and condemning individual white people. He was talking about a white power structure. You and I didn't drop any bombs on Hiroshima, or infect the black population with AIDS (and is that really all that far-fetched to a man who is a contempory of the men who were diliberatly infected with syphillis in the Tuskegee experiment?), or put all those young black men in jail. So he isn't racist in the same sense that the Klan is racist, or David Duke is racist, or all those folks (you might know them...) who post crude and hateful stuff on the various blogs about Barack Obama ("have you seen the way he looks at white women....?)are racist. It just so happens to be a fact that society is predominantly (at some level almost exclusively) white at the top and black and brown at the bottom. He is mostly railing against the realities of class, and the fact that class is intertwined with race (and in his view, not accidently). But for white folks to shiver and go and lock their doors when they hear an angry Reverend Wright says more about their own subliminal racial fantasies and fears (Nat Turner, anyone?) than it does about anything the Reverend Wright has actually said.
He is angry at the ruling class in America, which (again, not accidently if you accept his historical narrative) happens to be white. He doesn't want to round white people up and put them in concentration camps or deport them. He wants to redress the inequalities and injustices of class and end the historical dynamic that results in those inequalties resolving themselves on the basis of race.
Barack Obama understands that critique of society and understands the degree to which it accurate and the degree to which it is not, and disagrees with friend and mentor when he takes this critique to paranoid and unkind extremes, even as he understands that his friend means nothing personal and poses no threat to anybody. He is angry at an impersonal power structure, not at white people as such. And he is disappointed in a country which he sees as not living up it's finest and oft stated ideals. And his patriotism is ambivalent at best. From his point of view, he never asked to come here in the first place. But since America kidnapped him and brought him here, at least it owes him and his a fair shake.
Comment Posted By Rickielee On 19.03.2008 @ 22:36
