This is interesting for those of us who are really curious about just how this man thinks.. My impression: he is a phony.
When asked if "he was very conscious of his own race", he reportedly said "You just don't think about it, you really don't. You've got too many other things to worry about." A perfect politician's non-answer: if he disclaimed race consciousness, he opened himself up to be accused of being an Uncle Tom, but he didn't want to alarm his white audience either.. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/03/02/obama-says-race-a-key-component-in-tea-party-protests?PageNr=1 -----------------------------------snip Obama addressed this pessimism among blacks in an address at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington on January 17, 2010, to mark the holiday devoted to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Calling for patience and pragmatism, the president said, "Sometimes I get a little frustrated when folks just don't want to see that even if we don't get everything, we're getting something. King understood that the desegregation of the armed forces didn't end the civil rights movement, because black and white soldiers still couldn't sit together at the same lunch counter when they came home. But he still insisted on the rightness of desegregating the armed forces. . . . 'Let's take a victory,' he said, 'and then keep on marching.'" [...] Obama was in a reflective mood. He began the interview by saying he had been "fully briefed" on my topic and was ready for me to "dive in." He proceeded to methodically defend his effort to build a race-neutral administration. "Americans, since the victories of the civil rights movement, I think, have broadly come to accept the notion that everybody has to be treated equally; everybody has to be treated fairly," the president told me. "And I think that the whole debate about how do you make up for past history creates a complicated wrinkle in that principle of equality." Calmly, candidly, and with typical intellectual precision, Obama gave one of his most extensive analyses of the country's racial situation and his goals for improving it. He made clear that he was president of all Americans, not just of African-Americans, and didn't want to be thought of only as a black president, even though he acknowledged that the country had been extremely proud in November 2008 when a majority of voters made history by electing him. He said he wasn't sure how many Americans still saw him "through the lens of race," although he acknowledged that, within the black community, "there is a great pride that's undeniable," and many African-American children "may feel a special affinity to me as a role model." He compared all this with Irish-Catholic Americans who felt enormous pride in John F. Kennedy's election as the first Irish-Catholic president in 1960. I asked him if he was very conscious of his own race as he conducted the business of the presidency, and his answer was insightful. "You just don't think about it, you really don't," he replied. "You've got too many other things to worry about." I asked him how much he felt an obligation or responsibility as the first African-American president to advance racial justice and make up for some of the past disparities between blacks and whites. He replied, "Well, I think that every president should feel an obligation to deal with not only issues of discrimination, but also the legacy of slavery and segregation that has been such a profound part of our history. You know, obviously it's hard for me to engage in a mind experiment and say, well, if I weren't African-American, would I feel less strongly about it or more strongly about it—and I know I feel strongly about it. I do come to this issue with personal experiences that are unlike any previous presidents'. "But I also think that anybody in this office who cares deeply about the future of the country would be looking and saying to themselves, the population is changing; the future workforce is going to have a lot more African-American and Latino and Asian workers. And if those populations don't feel fully assimilated into the culture, aren't performing at high levels educationally, are caught in cycles of poverty—that that's not good for America's future. And that's certainly how I feel—and I would like to think that any president would feel that way." [...] But Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent "Tea Party" movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn't helping them nearly enough, he said. A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to "take back" their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn't dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a "subterranean agenda" in the anti-Obama movement—a racially biased one—that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it. His goal, he said, was to be as effective and empathetic a president as possible for all Americans. If he could accomplish that, it would advance racial progress for blacks more than anything else he could do. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
