...because "Not a single CEO" has complained Funny that Obama is now "African-American" and not "Only half-black" like the GOP has been calling him the past six years. This fuggin' gal!
Ever since I've lived here in Georgia (minutes from the SC border) I've been hearing about their flag drama. Good arguments on all sides, just glad Georgia isn't having to deal with such a situation.
Obama was not by any means the first black Senator. Carol Moseley Braun even held Obama's later seat throughout almost the entire Clinton Administration, and she was preceded by three black Republican senators, the last being elected from Massachusetts in a landslide in '66 and holding his seat on throughout the 1970's. Haley is referring to the first black Senator from South Carolina.
...my mistake, then. The issue of the the GOP's general dismissal of his mixed heritage is a bit of a sore spot with me (i have a brother that get shit on for that) so I may have jumped to conclusions.
Just as an aside, I never got this bullshit. He's always been mixed race to me. I've always found the idea that he's "the first black President" a bit of a bullshit, and I don't see what that has anything to do with politics. It's just fact.
Besides, Bill Clinton was the first black President. Little known fact. The 31st Vice President of the United States was a Native American (Kaw, Osage, and Potawatomi) who grew up on a reservation and only spoke English as his third language. If only Hoover had kicked the bucket...
Yeah it mattered to my black freshmen girl/student who told me to vote for Obama. (I was going to at that point in history.)But I asked her why should I vote for him? "You're racisit, you're a Republican, you're gonna vote for the old white guy." Seriously that was why I should have voted for him in her opinion. Made me wanna vote against him out of spite.
It's grasping at straws to me....but then so was "he was an Islamist born in Kenya". Lots of stupidity all round I think. Having said that, of course the black vote gets someone elected and the latter is just hot air guff. I just wish that some African-Americans at the time weren't so desperate to get friendly face in office that they might have scrutised the candidate a little more. But then I suppose that once the whole "black president" novelty is out of the way it might better lead to a meritorious election, black or white, which can't even be a bad thing.
Yeah, Muad and I would have never seen eye-to-eye on this particular issue. That said he and I had more common ground than most people would suspect. I consider myself a proud southerner and have long resented the smugness of people who knock off about 50 points from someone's IQ if they hear a southern accent. (I don't have one, but that's beside the point). Also there's a certain amount of lingering resentment of "Yankees" who sneered at "Rednecks" for being racist, when I heard worse racial slurs visiting Cleveland than I ever heard growing up in the Deep South. So while I don't fly the Confederate flag and do not call the Civil War, "The War of Northern Aggression (except when I want to piss someone off) I understand where he was coming from.
I see it more as historical accuracy. Racism tends to define itself by anything by deviation from the racists own racial background. So for a country like the US (or indeed most/all Western nations) where people of a white European background were the norm, any deviation from that made you an other. You couldn't make a black woman and have a white child because that child still wouldn't be completely white, a deviation, so thrown into the other black pile. However a white woman could have a black child, because just a drop of black blood was all that was needed to "contaminate" someone. Getting into semantics of whether or not Obama is "really" black is pointless, because realistically there is no such thing as the black race, the same as there is no such thing as the white race. You can have more genetic variation between individuals lumped in as the same race than there are between two individuals of different races. Race is a human construct built upon a handful of aesthetic factors, not a genetic test. By those standards, Obama would have been classified as black by most people in US history.
What Bailey said...that, and mixed children have always had a stuggle in the States fitting in because no one claimed them. My brother that I grew up with (and who would occasionally hack my account here to spam his shitty videos! )has white skin that used to sunburn easily till five years ago and predominately black facial feature and just-too-curly-to-be-Caucasian hair was getting jumped by both black and white kids. Meanwhile, I've got the set of siblings on my dad's side that grew up with the grandmother that hated me for being too white when I was born (even though now I'm the same complexion as those kids! ), and a sister beating the drum on Black Only families and not claiming any half-breed nieces and nephews. Yeah, I'll be sure to cry all the way to the bank with that. It's easier for Brits because y'all had the sense to end slavery after the first set of riots began in Haiti in the 1800s (and as far as I'm aware, you have never had anything similar to Jim Crow in your history either) but even for myself, who doesn't buy into every shooting by cop as RACISM CONSPIRACY HURR, I'm still realize that race and identity is still a big issue in our community.
That's just huge piles of fucked up and, again, purely based in ignorance and stupidity. I'm not so sure most young black male Britons would agree with that unless they came from a wealthy background, nor would a lot of people of otherwise minority backgrounds feel entirely comfortable in the current political climate in the UK.
Perhaps not....but from being on this board and TBBS, many of the foreign posters seem so confused at how and why race is so often discussed/brought in in so many things in American life that I figure--or hoped--people were just more colorblind there.
No it's a problem here. It's just not as big a problem as it is in the US. Minorities can get a lot further in the UK and in Europe at large, but there's still an insidious amount of racism in certain parts of the societal structure, such as, for instance, police forces dominated by white working class recruits, professions like mine affording the best chances to white boys like myself despite recruiting a handful of ethnic minorities and so on. Having said that, I think things are nonetheless progressing faster here than they seem to be in America. But we still have everything from the abuse of the race card to overt racism. That's just the nature of society.
I'd say they're more colorblind because color isn't a useful indicator of who they don't like. For example, the chavs, the gypsies, the Pakis, the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Poles, the Turks, the Serbs, the Russians, the nasty Scandis, and of course the Dutch. That pretty much just leaves the royal family.
Obama got the black vote because he was a Democrat. A fully black as coal black Republican would not get the black vote. It's not a race thing, it's a party thing. Obama might have gotten a few more white Democrat votes because of the novelty of being part of history in "making a difference" via electing a black (1/2 but close enough for government work) the first time, the second time I just can't explain.
Haiti was France not the UK though the UK did end slavery decades before the US and the royal Navy was pretty damn instrumental in stopping the international slave trade. The British basically announced they were ending the slave trade and would seize any ship carrying slaves that they found even in international waters and even ships from other nations. They had the biggest fleet so the others all eventually fell into line.
The second time is because TIIC at the GOP ran Mitt Romney--a guy the party slammed in the mud in '08 using the Mormon card, then put him up as a sacrificial lamb in 2012 because they want to sit it out for '16. Kind of why Bush won in '04 against Lurch impersonator John "I was a soldier--in VIETNAM!!!!1!" Kerry.
It sure does seem the Republicans threw in the towel to sit it out until 2016. But you can't throw in the towel forever. That would be a big gamble.
No, but either is it a good idea to try and tank a still fairly popular incumbent with a newer guy that has a better chance of rolling a lesser known opponent in four years. Whydja think Hitlery didn't campaign in 2004? 'Cuz while the bloom may have come off the ol' Bush, he hadn't become the complete Devil incarnate he'd been made out to be by the time he left; that, and it was all but certain she could decimate any GOP opponent lined up for 2008.
