A year or so ago, this was a great place to come to catch up on the news. I came here, to Daily Kos, and a few others like the Poorman, Talking Points Memo and Sadly No, every day.
A year ago, posters were already touting their candidates, but it seemed fairly neighborly. No more. Now, the only reason I really come here is to see how bad things have become.
This place has become a haven for brooding, bitter Clinton supporters who will find something perfectly innocent that Obama, or someone on his campaign did, and twist it until they can find something, anything--however small, however unremarkable--to be outraged about.
Just yesterday, I saw a post in which the writer was outraged! that David Axelrod went on some Sunday morning talk show and didn't badmouth Bill Clinton. Why was that so bad, you might ask? Well, because Axelrod no doubt said harsher things about Clinton, so that made him a hypocrite.
We have reached the stage at which Clinton supporters here are now livid that an Obama staffer went on television and did not excoriate Bill Clinton. How dare he be civil!
Well, that kind of thing, sad as it may be, is not why I'm writing this. As I said, I have been coming here lately just to read that kind of thing. I find it sad and pitiful, and though I feel kind of guilty for doing it, I can't help but gawk at the over the top manufactured rage. It's like watching a really, really bad movie, like Manos the Hands of Fate. As bad as it is, you can't look away. Sometimes you even have to watch it again, it's so bad.
So as I said, these rage diaries are sad, but ultimately harmless, as far as I can see. But there's something else here now, something far worse. Looking back, I can see now there have been hints of it now and again, but it is only in the last few days that I have really seen it for what it is, and that is the rawest, ugliest bigotry.
Yesterday, there was an execrable screed lamenting Obama's rise and blaming it on affirmative action. I'm sure the writer would object that he (or she) is not a racist, that he was only pointing out Obama's obvious flaws and how cynically he has turned his blackness to his advantage to steal the nomination from a much more highly qualified contender who happened to suffer from the awful disadvantage of having grown up with nearly every conceivable advantage.
And, to be sure, if one works hard enough, one could read the diary as the writing of a concientious Democrat, worried about losing in the fall with a flawed candidate who won unfairly. One could read it that way, but it takes a lot of work to overlook the obvious, so the only reasonable way I see to read it is that the writer is a bigot, or at least has an awful lot tof hostility toward black people.
Now to get this out of the way, I am a white guy, fairly well off, I went to a good college, and I even have a master's degree. I'm not some craaaazy-ass militant black dude who's seething with resentment at the way the Man has kept me down, so don't go off and think I'm only seeing this because I have a chip on my shoulder and that slavery has been gone for 143 years and Jim Crow has been gone for 40-odd years, so I should just shut the fuck up and stop whining and pull myself up by my bootstraps.
No, I'm a well off, well schooled white guy who has had every conceivable advantage in this country, and I'm seething with resentment that most black people don't get the chances I've gotten in this country, not because they're dumber than I am, not because they're lazier than I am, but because life in this country is so badly stacked against them. Yes, I know that there is no longer slavery or segregation in this country (see above), but discrimination lingers. And it's harder to fight now, because it's so much harder to see.
It's so hard to see, as it happens, that most white people never see it it all, so when they hear some black person like Jeremiah Wright going on about how unjust this country can be, even today, they just write him off as some angry, bitter radical black America hater. But he isn't. Did you know that the guy volunteered to go fight in Korea? Well, he did. He fought for his country, and then, like so many black soldiers in so many wars, he came back home and the country he fought for treated him like shit. So, yes, I guess he well might be a little bitter.
And he has every right to be bitter. We all should be. This country could have done so much better. And we still can do so much better. Now things are without question better now than they were in 1955 or 1965. I don't think you'd get any argument about that from Wright. I know you wouldn't get any from Obama. But we aren't where we should be. The truth is, we never will be where we ought to be; this is life, and we live on Earth, where things are never perfect, and I don't think anybody ever expects to turn the U.S. into Utopia. But if we can't make the U.S. into Utopia, we can at least keep prodding ourselves in the right direction, and that's what Wright is trying to do. You may not think he's going about it the right way; indeed, he may well not be going about it the right way. I don't know. But he's trying.
And that brings me to Barack Obama, who is also trying to make the country better. I'm not a big fan of his; I think he's better than Clinton, but he was no higher than my third choice, behind Edwards and Dodd. But now he's the presumptive nominee, and he may well end up being a great president.
But to get where he is, he had the gall to beat Hillary Clinton, and that really angered a lot of people who thought she deserved or had earned the nomination. As I said, some people here seem content to bash Obama without bringing up his race. But there are a few who seem to take Obama as an "uppity Negro", or at least that's how it comes across to me. I don't know how else to read it other than that they think that Obama's just a presumtuous and ungrateful black guy who wasn't content to stay in his place, and instead had the effrontery not just to run for president and have a shot at winning.
I mean Jesse jackson and Al Sharpton and Alan Keyes all ran, but we all knew they were going nowhere so that was different, right? It was kind of cute watching those black fellas taking themselves so seriously and acting just like their betters. There was no threat there, right? It was all O.K., it was just a sideshow.
But now we have a guy who doesn't know his place, and he's leading for the nomination, and I think it's brought a lot of latent racism out into the open. I've read some stuff here that if I hadn't known better, I would have thought had come from the KKK website, if there is such a thing. It could have come from Jesse Helms or from Strom Thurmond way back in 1948.
It doesn't belong here. It's not how Democrats should be thinking. I can see it coming from Republicans, but we Democrats can and should be so much better than that. And it sickens me that in 2008, there are still people who call themselves Democrats who think that Barack Obama is just the lucky recipient of affirmative action. After all, he lucky to be a black guy, right? Black people have all the advantages in America today, don't they? I mean, they're, what, 90% of the U.S. Congress. They control all the biggest businesses in the country. Am I right?
Of course not. We have a long and shabby history in this country when it comes to race. We have a long way to go. It says a lot that Barack Obama is likely to be the next U.S. president. But he isn't where he is because he had unfair advantages all his life; he's where he is because he's smart as hell and he worked his ass off. And if he messed up Hillary Clinton's plans, well, then that's just too bad for her, but he ran the good campaign and she ran the lousy one. She has no one to blame but herself. And her backers have no right to say that Obama did anything wrong or took unfair advantage or that he cheated somehow because he didn't. And they sure don't have any right to say he got where he is because he was just "lucky" to be black. Anybody who says otherwise should go to Red State, where they'll fit in just fine.
Here's an update: I would like to thank everyone who has read this, and even more to those who have recommended it. I don't doubt that there are others who could have put it better--more eloquently, more logically and so on--but I didn't see any diaries about it so I wrote this myself. I really do hope against hope that it might end up on the recommended list, not because It's such a well written piece, but because I think it's something we all need to think about here.
Another update: I would like to thank all the people here who have r ead this and have written in about it, even those of you I think are dead wrong. I would also like to thank the 20 or so who have recommended this diary, and would like to ask others to recommend it as well. I don't know how many recommendations it takes to get on the list, but I think this is important. Now without a doubt there are others who could have done this better, and if anybody else would like to do another diary about this, then by all means have at it. But as this is so far the only one (as far as I know) I would ask that we try to get as many eyes to see it as can be. Thank you.
Yet another update: I just saw that this made the recommended list. I had kind of hoped it would, but I didn't really think it would. I want to thank all of you who have read this, written something here or recommended this. I think this is something we liberals and Democrats should be thinking about. Maybe we can make things a little better, bit by bit... And I would especially like to thank whoever added the "holier than thou ranting" tag. I mean that sincerely; it's easy for us to get caught up in thinking that we're always on the side of right and anybody who dares to see things another way is not just wrong but evil as well. Also it was funny...
Last update (so I believe): Anybody who doesn't think there is a nasty undercurrent of racism at this site should take a little stroll through the hidden comments. If you can read some of that stuff and seriously claim it isn't racist, then I don't know what to tell you and I'm not going to try to convince you. But I'll sure think a lot less of you...
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