How would people respond if John McCain (or any person of a different race, nationality or ethnicity) threw out stereotypes like these? What would we say if a white person had stood in the pulpit of a black church, or anywhere else for that matter, and referred to black men as “boys,” in any context?
But since it’s Obama, sounding like Bill Clinton before his fall from black grace, or Bill Cosby speaking out of his own personal pain, the change candidate’s remarks were met with hosannas mostly by a vapid, racist, white-dominated corporate media, the black people who say what their white bosses want to hear, and blacks and whites alike who shout amen even when Obama’s saying something plainly contradicted by their own life experiences.
It was no big surprise that after the speech those critical of Obama were dismissed “as out touch” with the new “post-racial” illusion. Bob Herbert of The New York Times appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball went so far as to say that anyone who disagreed with Obama’s Father’s Day admonition to black men was living in a racial “fog” of the past. Newspapers across the county affirmed the smear with headlines like “Obama tells black men to shape up” or “Obama speaks ‘inconvenient truth’ to black men” or “Obama calls black men irresponsible” or “He's saying things people don’t want to hear” - with the inference that truth was flowing from his tongue.
I saw no headline lead with the word "some" black men.
Playin’ folk on any day is bad enough. But, as a father, grandfather and a black person, I see playin’ black men on Father's Day as even more repulsive. The day is for honoring fathers. We don’t honor the vets on Veteran’s Day by pointing out those who choose not to fight, or the cowards, or even the enemy.
http://counterpunch.org/gray07112008.html
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