Racism and sexism are perverse, regardless of whose ox is being gored. They are not likely to disappear soon.
There are doubtless some people who will vote for or against Senator Obama because he is Black. Some will doubtless vote for or against Senator McCain because he is not. According to a recent AP-Yahoo News survey, there are many Whites who harbor misgivings about Blacks. This survey focused on the attitudes of Whites concerning such characteristics of Blacks as violence, trustworthiness, responsibility and boastfulness. A similar survey of Black attitudes toward Whites would have been useful. The best I have been able to find is a survey conducted in 2002 and reported in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (free registration required; PDF format) which focused on attitudes of Blacks toward Whites and vice versa. The respondents were male and female, Black and White, students at six universities selected to provide regional diversity. It is an interesting academic study, rather tightly written, and full of complex statistical methodology. Still, those who find such things comprehensible (I had many problems, but think I got the basic thrust) might also find it interesting. The similarities between the results of the 2002 (Black and White) and 2008 (White only) surveys seem, to me, quite remarkable.…
Article comments
126 - Lisa Solod Warren
Well, now this story is lovely.....
students at a predominantly white Christian college in Oregan hung an effigy of Obama from a tree, the third such racial incident at a college in the state in the past year. You can read the whole story at the link.
127 - David Black
Well, Lisa, protesters around the world burn effigies of our President all the time.
But I know that doesn't bother you, right?
By the way, Barry O. is actually a white man.
One is racially defined through their mother's side.
It's the way it is in the Jewish world.
Barry O. calling himself black was a ploy to ascend up the Democrat Party ladder, which falls over itself annointing articulate and relatively non-threatening minorities.
All that "one drop" stuff is nonsense.
Lisa, nothing is more pathetic than a guilt-ridden Jew..
128 - David Black
"Your need to feel important has robed you of a broader richer and more beautiful life. You are in your senior years and you've missed it all."
I've witnessed Islamo-fascist thugs kill innocent Israeli women and children at close range. The kids were students of mine. I had been teaching them how to speak English.
I grew up among Holocaust survivors.
I've seen and heard quite enough about your precious "humanity," thank you.
129 - David Black
"I live in Texas and there are plenty of dumb, poor, lazy, Whites with really bad grammar. Most of my neighbors couldn't conduct a meaningful conversation on current events (they are White), as middle class as they are."
Compare that to the overwhelming number of black kids (or adults) who can't pronounce the word ASK and who drop the consonants from the ends of words.
In fact, I've heard many black professionals who STILL sound a little ghetto when they speak. They haven't worked enough to remove any remnants of that subculture from their speech.
130 - Zedd
Clavos,
Who said anything about being guilt ridden. I think you are telling more than you mean to.
I said this nation needs to atone for its misdeeds. We cant move on unless we wrap this thing up. You see the issue has nothing to do with YOU personally. It has to do with the cancer that is at the bowels of this nation. You know it's there and everyone knows its there. We have to deal with it. The reasons that we haven't is because we are isolated, our abuses have been a secret AND Whites are in the majority and they simply don't have to do anything. No one is looking. We can lie and say were have been a democracy since 1776 an no one really knows what we are really like. We begin to believe our own lie and later on feel offended that anyone would suggest that we are anything but what we believe ourselves to be. Much like spoiled children who are challenged. Were we in Europe where our neighbors would have a clear view of us us, we would have atoned and moved on a long time ago.
Another problem is simply White supremacy. Its like crack. Look at David. Dumb as a door knob but feels good about himself and his abysmally stupid notions, because he is White. He has no idea that he is an imbecile. No better than some dumb near drooling thug in the hood or some backwoods share cropper who's never seen the inside of a school. But society has told him that his Whiteness makes him innately superior. Talk about affirmative action! Atoning makes everyone really equal. If you were a David, would you want that? If everyone is equal than everyone has to be treated equally and thought of as equal. That means more competition and the cream really rise to the top. How many Miguels and LaKeshas are suppressed geniuses? You know they exist.
131 - Lisa Solod Warren
Jews don't run the world, David. We define our own heritage through our mothers, not the rest of the world's. Get real. Obama is defined as a black man in this white-run United States (even though,very soon, the majority will NOT be white, and perhaps the power elite will no longer be white men)...
If Jews did run the world, however, I think they would be quite ashamed to include you among them. I certainly am.
I feel not a drop of guilt about Obama and am not voting for him because of that; I am voting for him because his is far more intelligent, educated, even-tempered, rational and kind than McCain; he made a superior choice in his running mate; he will be a peacmaker not a warmonger; he cares about all people, not just the rich; he is not trading on his father's name nor his forty year old record as a P.O.W. as his sole credentials; he is dedicated and committed to bringing back our reputation as a country of integrity.
You can disagree with that all you like. But accusing me of liking him because he is black is a foolish lie and makes you looks ignorant and absurd.
132 - Silas Kain
Oh come on now, Lisa. Any student of history knows that the Democrat reaction to solving an economic crisis is going into war. In time I think Barack Obama will make a great President. Now is not his time. Give me four years of a McCain Administration which only serves one term and isn't running for reelection from Inauguration Day. For too many Presidential election cycles we've been forced to accept the "lesser" of two evils. The only election in my memory where that was not the case is the Dole-Clinton race. Bob Dole would have made a superb President but we would have lost a man as equally superb. The man who loses this election isn't the only loser. The American people lose as well. Both men are fine patriots in their own right.
133 - Ruvy
I followed this thread - not because I cared about the original article or most of the comments - but because I was curious to see how David Black, an angry bitter man, was being speared here.
A few points worth noting. Racially speaking, Obama is not an "African American" at all. His father was a Luo from Kenya. Zedd, who has been one of the people dangling David like a spider dangles a fly, is a Zulu from South Africa herself. In other words, she is far more like Obama than the she is the average black person one sees walking around in the States whose ancestors were seized by hostile African tribes and sold as slaves to slavers a few centuries ago. While Zulus have the reputation for being warriors, the most important Zulu running around these days, the head of the ANC in South Africa, Jacob Zuma, is nothing but a thug who rapes women.
I guess they can't all be winners, eh Zedd?
But returning to Obama, the appropriate term to describe fear of him is xenophobia, rather than racism. Culturally, he was not raised as a "black", and absorbed values from all over the world - Moslem values from Indonesia as well as the version of American Christianity one generally picks up in Hawaii. In addition, of course, he has had a loyalty to his and his father's native tribe, the Luo of Kenya. It all goes into the mix that makes Obhama more a citizen of the world than a black man, and were he better educated (not in terms of schools, but in the values of decency and honesty one seeks in a leader) and someone with higher moral values, he would be truly someone to be admired and voted for. In other words, if he were more of a real man instead of the good Chicago machine politician who closes his eyes to this and gently overlooks that while stringing together inspiration speeches for the rubes and useful idiots who think he is the messiah.... You get the idea.
But let's examine Mr. Black, a man who has views that in some ways are similar to mine - but who is different in several fundamental ways.
Mr. Black proudly describes himself as descended from Austrian Jews. He is another one of those Central European Jews foisted on the world who escaped Hitler, either directly or indirectly. He comes in famous company - people like Freud, Viktor Borge, Einstein, Neils Bohr and Henry Kissinger. The last of the bunch mentioned has been nothing but a traitor to the Jewish people and nothing but a damned court Jew for the Rockefeller Foundation,and if I was going to be ashamed of having anyone in the Tribe, it would be Kissinger. But I digress.
Mr. Black has no trouble with Hitler and his theories - except that he targetted Jews of course - probably because he hasn't a clue as to their origins. A lot of his arguments stem from that general point of view and the understandable pride he takes in the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe and their accomplishments.
So let's provide a badly needed history lesson for the good David Black (and the rest of you as well). Older men usually do not change their minds, no matter what evidence is laid in front of their eyes, but Einstein, to his credit, was able to admit in his old age major mistakes he had made as a physicist.
Hope springs eternal and let's hope that Mr. Black has more in him of Einstein than of stubborn schneiders who argue over the cut of the cloth for a penny a bolt....
Miracles do happen.
What we know as Nazism arose in Austria and is rooted in the unintended results of the Seven Weeks War (1866) between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Empire of Austria. The issue of the war was the vision of German nationalism that was to become reality in Europe. Was it to be the greater German nationalism that included Austria and its German speaking provinces throughout Europe, or would it be a narrower kind that excluded Austria and focused on the northwest German states in Europe, a nation centered on Prussia and its militarized aristocracy?
The issue was decided on a battlefield in Bohemia, and a Prussian army advanced on Wien when the Austrians gave up the ghost.
The immediate result was the creation of the North German Confederation, dominated by Prussia, and this creation evolved into the "German Empire" in 1871 when the Prussian army defeated the French at Sédan. This Geman Empire did not include Austria.
The Austrian régime had to figure out a way to survive after this defeat, and its German leaders sat down (unwillingly) with the Hungarians and cut a deal that resurrected the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian Empire, giving it virtual autonomy and a huge swath of territory between Styria and the Transylvanian mountains.
So much for the boring history lesson.
Now comes the interesting part.
The Germans in this new Austria-Hungary were a minority - not only in the Empire as a whole, but in the "crown lands" that comprised Austria itself, particularly Galicia, Croatia and Bohemia. Many Germans felt very insecure in this new arrangement, because as Polish, Croatian and Bohemian power grew, German power declined.
One of the things that resulted was the development of a "racial superiority" theory. Intellectuals would write about this, cooking up all sorts of theories to back up their ideas. They seized upon Darwin's "Origin of Species" to argue that races within humankind, as well as species in the animal world, evolved as superior or inferior and that some races within humankind, just as some species in the animal world, deserved extinction.
But the basic motive, the driving force that pushed these people, was fear of being forced out of a superior cultural position. With each introduction of Bohemian language schools, with every Jew who travelled to Wien and put up a sign saying "tailor", "butcher" or "candlestick maker" in Yiddish, the hated tongue of those who had murdered Jesus (in a good Catholic country like Austria, that was what was taught) the discomfort of the Austrian Germans grew.
It is no accident that it was in Wien that the juden-hass, the Jew-hatred that these people felt, developed into the Anti-Semite Party. It is no accident that Slavs (Poles, Bohemians, Croatians, Slovenians) were regarded as a slave people with an inferior mentality. It is no accident that Gypsies were looked upon as little more than a criminal class to be exterminated, as one wipes out crime permanently in the pure Aryan state.
All this was to make the minority Germans feel more comfortable in their own land. The idea that the German "superiority" that had created Austria in the first place as a wall facing east to block the Mongols and the Moslems morphed into a racial theory that took the Kabbala and stood it on its head, and made the Jews the evil race that had to be destroyed, and the Aryans the race that would redeem mankind.
Nazism and the völkish theories it is based on has little or nothing to do with Fascism, which is just socialism dressed up as an ambitious Italian's nightmare.
But how did this sick world-view gain power? It gained power because the standard bearer of German nationalism, the German Empire, was defeated in a war of its own making, its royal houses (all twenty five of them) fled like rats and an unstable and weak German state followed in Wilhelm II's stead. As the German money lost value and the German economy became dependent on infusions of capital from the United States, the Germans' view of themselves sunk lower and lower until the racial theories of the proto-Nazis of Austria started to look very attractive to them. When the stock market collapsed about 79 years ago, that was the nail in the coffin for the weak German successor to the German Empire. Either the Communists or Nazis would take control; it turned out to be the Nazis.
Noe let's address you directly, David.
Behind all the spiritual theories of "cleansing the earth" was a brutal murderousness that would kill your and my relatives in Europe, Mr. Black, a murderousness that would eventually translate into policy for the Wahhabi-influenced scum who rushed to Hitler's side from Mandate Palestine during Hitler's great war to cleanse the earth.
Don't believe me. Look up the Thule Society. The Nazis had a satanic religion of murder and human sacrifice that makes the symbolic cannibalism of Christianity look humane by comparison.
Go ahead, David. Sing another verse from the "Horst Wessel Lied" if it will make you happy. Or, if you are the truly wise man that I think your are, have a good hard look at your ideas.
That's what I did in my late forties. I had a good hard look at what was basically the agnosticism that had guided me for decades and came out thinking very differently.
You're a proud Jew - that's good. But now is the time to read parshát nitzavím and poarshát ha'azínu in the Torah [d'varím/Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20, 32:1-52] and realize that our history was revealed to us 3,500 years ago by a prophecy of Moses. It is time to humble yourself before G-d (as did King Josiah) and realize Who really runs the Show.
If you are able to do that, than you will truly surpass the stupid criticisms that appear here in Blogcritics on this comment thread.
I apologize if I seem to have insulted you, David, for that has not been my intent here at all.
Shaná Tová v'Shavúa Tov,
Reuven