Obama Calls Me White Folk, page 1
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reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 09:53 AM by Solarskye
reply to post by eric52081



Well if you're white then you are white ( folk ). Now if you're black then you're black ( folk ). What's so racists about that.


reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 09:55 AM by Acidtastic
reply to post by Solarskye



agreeed.

I'd love to live in a world where we don't refer to physical appearence to descibe eachother. As we're all one race,all the same. But alas,we don't. And we're not likely to be anytime soon either.



reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 09:56 AM by eric52081
reply to post by Solarskye



If I would walk up to a black man and tell him, How is the black folk doing? I would be branded a racist on the spot.


reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 10:00 AM by jimmyx
Originally posted by eric52081
"That's just how white folks will do you," Obama writes.

Wow, am I hearing this right. He must be racist if he calls me white folk. This is a great article from 1995. It also talks about how Obama went to the Million Man March.

www.chicagoreader.com...


ummm...white folk?...million man march?...so what? please adjust your medication, you have so many more obama-bashing threads to post, and i don't want you to tire out too early.

[edit on 11-6-2008 by jimmyx]



reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 10:00 AM by jamie83
Originally posted by Solarskye
reply to
post by eric52081



Well if you're white then you are white ( folk ). Now if you're black then you're black ( folk ). What's so racists about that.


It's racist because it's stereotyping a behavior, linking it to an entire race of people, based on the color of their skin.

Seriously, you really can't see that?

That's just how Chinese people are...
That's just how Irish people are...
That's just how Italians are...
etc., etc., etc.

This leads to the slippery slope of statements like...

"That's just how Jews are... we better round them up..."
"That's just how blacks are... we better not let them vote..."

Get the idea?


reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 11:52 AM by argentus
I understand how this is marginally different from some of the other threads about Senator Obama, however I don't see how it matters.

If we are going to perform a linguistic autopsy on virtually everyone's words and THEN decide what they mean..... is this (a) worthy of our time and (b) worthy at all? I don't care if Senator Obama, his supporters or anyone else refers to caucasians as "white folk". I think the term "folk" is kind of homey, kind of quaint.

I don't support Senator Obama for his bid to POTUS, and there have been more than a few things surrounding his campaign that have raised the hairs on the back of my neck, but this surely isn't one of them.

I understand what you mean about the painting ALL of "white folk" with the same brush, but seeing the phrase in context, I don't think that was his intent.

See, a lot of this stuff is political spin control. All sides do it. Somebody comes up with a chink in the armor, drives a wedge in to hold their position, all the while looking for metaphorical hammers to really drive the wedge in, and if a political person is smart, they'll just try to spin it in another direction. It's when they choose to try to cover up some stupid thing that they get into trouble, because the coverup is almost always more foreboding than the original event. I think Senator Obama has been smart in this sense, in that he spins things away from him that are uncomfortable, and leaves other things unaddressed.

Senator McCain has made verbal slips. Senator Clinton, ditto. Senator Obama, yep. It happens. It's not an "AH-HAAA!" moment, it's just human. I wish we could focus on the real and important issues, but it doesn't seem like the politicians themselves wish to do this. We, as humans, just can't seem to keep from rising to the bait, can we?

[edit to correct "sense". Dang, I KNEW that didn't look right]

[edit on 11-6-2008 by argentus]


reply posted on 11-6-2008 @ 12:00 PM by WyrdeOne

When Obama moved back to his grandparents' home in Hawaii, to attend the prestigious Punahou School, he encountered race and class prejudice that would darken his politics even more. At first embarrassed by his race and African name, he soon bonded with the few other African-American students. He quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground. He participated in bitter bull sessions with his buddies on the theme of "how white folks will do you." Obama, who had to reconcile these sentiments with the loving support he had at home from his white mother and grandparents, dismissed much of his buddies' analysis as "the same sloppy thinking" used by racist whites, but he found the racism of whites to be particularly stubborn and obnoxious.

Obama objected when his Punahou basketball coach upbraided the team for losing to "a bunch of 'n-word's." Obama writes that the coach "calmly explained the apparently obvious fact that 'there are black people, and there are 'n-word's. Those guys were 'n-word's.'"

"That's just how white folks will do you," Obama writes. "It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn."


CONTEXT, people...

God, is it so hard to actually read the whole damn thing? Must we pick the one sentence that suits our agenda and discard the rest?

Judging by what I've seen in my (albeit short) life, the citizens of this could-be-great-some-day country are unfit to elect their own leaders.

We're better off with a lottery system than this haphazard mob-rule masquerading as democracy.

A democracy without educated, thinking voters is just dangerous...
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