This conversation over at Good Men Project has me a little jazzed up. My main contention about the absurdity of the accusations that Romney is dog-whistling by calling Obama “angry” is that each of these candidates will pull out the stops to get elected. They’ll say anything to get elected. Calling one or the other racist is a racist statement in and of itself. Calling the other angry is an aggressive statement in and of itself. These are all just circular arguments that can only occur within the realm of politics. My entire anti-liberal stance is mostly my belief that it is liberals who believe (currently) in their candidates more than conservatives believe in their candidates. And it is this lack of cynicism among liberals that I find idiotic.
Weigh in over there or over here. It’s whatever.
But to answer the OP – no, Toure Neblett shouldn’t have to apologize for saying that Mitt Romney is engaging in the “niggerization” of Barack Obama. But if he wants respectable people to buy his argument it is in his best interest to further elucidate his point rather than just throw out such a highly debatable charge. Is Romney niggerizing (btw, all of the media outlets who throw asterisks in place of the letters that Toure clearly uttered on air must also be afraid of their own shadow)? Ta-Nehisi Coates has a column up today at the New York Time reminding us that in 2008 the knock on Obama from conservatives was that he was too weak to lead. Coates cites a Dick Morris column titled “Obama’s Weakness is Weakness.” Even though conservatives were all supposedly racist then, calling him “angry” four years later is also evidence that conservatives are racist. How does this specific argument work? I guess Coates answers when he writes, of Obama and the reaction he’s fostered among conservatives: “Now he has earned their fear.”
So, if Coates is right, Romney and conservatives aren’t particularly racist in speaking in terms of combatitiveness, aggresion, and anger. Obama’s strategy is to invoke fear in his political opponents.
Back to Toure, claiming that niggerization occurs when one person calls another person angry ignores the fact that many, many white people have made that claim about other white people. And what Toure et al are essentially doing is claiming that only blacks can be perceived as angry. Whites can be angry too, and plenty of liberals have leveled that claim against white Tea Partiers. Anger is not owned by any one race.
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There are two reasons to debate politics: to convince your opponent of your case, or to convince third-party audiences of your case. Which is your reason for engaging feminists or black advocates in debates?
Most of my family is liberal. The younger males are open to other opinions. The older females are not. I don’t even bother with them.
Obama doesn’t seem angry. McCain has anger issues. Remember when he threatened Putin. We don’t need a hothead in the White House.
Chuck – as you can see from the commenters’ responses to you on that thread, they will never admit there is a double standard. In their eyes, Obama gets to throw around any accusations he wants since he is a member of “an oppressed class,” while Romney isn’t allowed to do or say anything in response because he is of the “oppressor class.”
Funny how Obama is a multi millionaire and orders people killed by drones at will, yet oh so oppressed. There can never be an honest discussion with these people. I don’t know if they are actually brainwashed to see racism in every shadow, or if they are cynically leveraging the race card for all it’s worth just to silence their political opponents.
The comment about Romney as the straight white alpha male is telling. Some people truly won’t be satisfied till Harrison Bergeron is a reality.
I was under the impression that Obama has niggerized himself. He is, after all, the son of a White woman, raised by White grandparents, etc., etc. and yet you’d think those people never existed.
He clearly identifies (If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon)as a… let’s just say that Toure had it right, he just named the wrong Presidential candidate doing the niggerizing.
Lara, please stop posting.
Light-skinned blacks play the race card more enthusiastically than do their darker-skinned cousins. It’s almost as if they’re projecting the tensions within their own families onto the country as a whole.
I’m not saying that white people are never cruel to black people because of how they look. That actually happens quite a lot. What I am saying is that the race discussion we have in this country is run by people who are half-black and half-white. Obama and Toure both fit the bill. They’re the ones stamping their feet about “niggerization” because doing so cements their leadership inside the black community, and it also scares whites away from questioning them or wondering out loud about their obvious biracial heritages.
Lara, please keep posting.
These are all just circular arguments that can only occur within the realm of politics. My entire anti-liberal stance is mostly my belief that it is liberals who believe (currently) in their candidates more than conservatives believe in their candidates. And it is this lack of cynicism among liberals that I find idiotic.
This is the truest, most pragmatic thought articulated about politics today that I’ve heard in a long time. Liberals look down on the religious zealotry of the right without acknowledging the zeal that they have for their own beliefs. The liberal ideology is an air tight bubble that deflects all criticism by calling it racists, sexist or greedy. People inside this bubble can’t see what they are doing because the belief system is self-perpetuating. I wonder if it’s possible for liberals to keep up this charade because they know deep down inside that the whole thing is fake. The money is all fake, the system is fake and the politics are fake. One day, the whole thing will collapse in a glorious heap and on that miraculous day everyone will stare at it and shrug knowing that it wasn’t really anything real to begin with. Then, the lucky bastards in power get to reshuffle the deck and make everyone “equal”.
The right has its own issues, but its zealotry may be tempered by a wise mistrust of government. Liberals are all behind the big G to try and put everything the way it aught to be.