Thursday, July 22, 2010
Sherrod to President Obama: It’s a Black Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.
I learn this morning that our president is a person of pallor.
“I can’t say that the president is fully behind me, I would hope that he is…I would love to talk to him,” Sherrod said on “GMA.”
“He is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life, being a person of color. He might need to hear some of what I could say to him,” she told me. “I don’t know if that would guide him in a way that he deals with others like me, but I at least would like to have the opportunity to talk to him about it.”
Rev. Wright is going to be cranky when he finds out.
An aside: I really take issue with her hyper-racialized view of the world. The tone really bugs me.
Comments & Trackbacks
In her defense, I think she meant that she’s had experiences that Obama hasn’t, that make her feelings about being black different than his. (And she has! Her father was murdered and the white killer was never indicted.) Her wording is awkward, but her point seems to be more nuanced than, “He’s not really black because he hasn’t had black experiences.”
More succinctly: She probably feels that Obama doesn’t understand how she had to struggle to not hate whites because he never hated them begin with. (Hate may be too strong a word, but it gets the gist of it.)
I don’t think that hate is too strong a word in this case--and even understandable.That said, her awkward wording invited a little mockery. I am disgusted by this immense focus on race and racial issues in this era of our supposedly post-racial president. Poking fun at that seems to be a better alternative to saying, bluntly, what I really want to say right now.
To coin a phrase… indeed. ( ... http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/103501/ ... )
You’re so quotable. I have to say: the more she talks, the less sympathy I feel for her.
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