I said yes because the OP asks about people, not politicians or political parties. MY experience is that a lot of ordinary people ARE against Obama because of race. Nothing he does makes them happy, they are all on or soon will be on medicare, and some of them have paritally disabled grandchildren who NEED a healthcare system to provide thier medical needs. These kids are not likely to ever get jobs.
They already HAVE a system in place for them, but don't seem to be worried about others, even their own offspring....
How does any of that equate to being because of his race?
I said yes because the OP asks about people, not politicians or political parties. MY experience is that a lot of ordinary people ARE against Obama because of race. Nothing he does makes them happy, they are all on or soon will be on medicare, and some of them have paritally disabled grandchildren who NEED a healthcare system to provide thier medical needs. These kids are not likely to ever get jobs.
They already HAVE a system in place for them, but don't seem to be worried about others, even their own offspring....
It sounds like you are assuming because they don't like him or his policy's it must be about race?
I don't like him and it has nothing to do with his race.
Maybe personal responsibility will take hold.
I don't have to assume much,,,they don't use the N word much anymore, but the inflection they use when using the word "blacks" tells a lot....and the derogatory things said about blacks in conversation tells even more.
Granted, this may not be a large percentage of whites, but there are plenty still who would just as soon provide one way tickets to Africa....
Not sure what you mean about personal responsibility...are you suggesting that there are no cases where government shouldn't assist?
There are a lot of kids out there with disabililties that they were born with, and no insurance company is going to provide for them the rest of their lives.
Good luck with that notion. The government starting taking over that responsibility during the great depression when private charities were overwhelmed. There is no going back....and no amount of wishful thinking about it will change that.That is what private charity's are for. The Federal Government is not in place to take care of the medical or retirement needs of the nation.
Good luck with that notion. The government starting taking over that responsibility during the great depression when private charities were overwhelmed. There is no going back....and no amount of wishful thinking about it will change that.
My feelings about that particular issue are irrelevant to the thread anyway.
This still does not explain why you think most of the opposition to Obama is racist based on anecdotal evidence that does not apply or represent the majority of the opposition.
These are people that I know personally, and they still subscribe to the belief that the catholics started a long time ago, that the black man was marked by God for the sins of Cain, and destined to be subservient to the rest of the world. I have heard that tripe from baptists and mormons, even tho both churches have changed their views on the topic.
Racism is still here, believe it or don't....
Who can tell what people really think? Not me, nor you...just telling what I see in my neck of the woods, and you would think the western states would be better about the races than the deep south where I grew up.
I think the majority of us are past racism, but I also think that a substantial number of us are not...
I have not met anyone who is against Obama because of race. Perhaps some other posters here, need to hang out with a different crowd. :shrug:
and how about the people who send the derogatory emails out? do you think they do that because they LIKE Obama? I get at least 4 or 5 a week, from people who think they are christians. People like that know how to keep a low profile with their racism....it is a learned talent.All this poll shows is that we have at least 17 people who are capable of pointing and clicking, but can't comprehend the world around them. I have met three people who are opposed to Obama based on his race. I have met thousands of people who are opposed to Obama's policies, but not because of his race. I also live in the deep south, so I live and work around a lot of racists.
I don't know if I should feel sorrow, pity or disgust for those who voted 'Yes' in this poll. Opposition to Obama is clearly not based on race and the fact that it is the liberal loons who are bringing race up is the ultimate irony in all of this. We've seen Devil divert, divert and divert some more. He has no facts to support his belief, but we are to take it that he is right? I don't think so. I like to look at the facts before I reach a credible conclusion. Since there are no facts or statistics to support his claim (just his feelings), how can anyone believe for a nanosecond that he is actually right?
I am adamantly opposed to nearly every one of Obama's policies. It has absolutely nothing to do with his race. It has everything to do with how horrible his policies are. Many are starting to wake up to this which is why you see his poll numbers dipping and what once was a majority support for Obamacare is now the minority. I don't look at Obama as a black President, I look at him as the President. The color of his skin bears no weight when I judge his character or his policies, and I know that I am not alone. Anyone who believes that the main point of opposition to Obama is his skin color is clearly not in touch with the world around them.
So why then, do they keep saying it? It is this question that I've been pondering for the past few days. What could possibly be the purpose of making an argument that has so little intellectual validity; so little indeed that it can be easily shot down by the average 12th grade European history student (who, it should be noted, would have as much education as either Limbaugh or Hannity)? What would be the value, symbolically speaking, of putting forth on protest signs this Obama=Hitler meme, and visually representing that meme, straight down to the little mustache, side-swept hairdo and swastika adornment?
And then it struck me. This analogy, as absurd as it is factually, and as offensive as it is historically, makes almost perfect sense politically, to a movement that is trying desperately to create a groundswell of support behind the notion that white people are the new victims of massive discrimination, the new victims of the Obama era: the ones who don't get picked first for the Supreme Court, and who can no longer take for granted their hegemonic power. And that is precisely the kind of movement they are trying to build, what with their equally facile rantings that white men, according to Limbaugh, are being sent to the "back of the bus" under Obama, because he literally hates white people, and that white men are now experiencing, to hear Pat Buchanan tell it, "exactly what black folks" experienced during the days of Jim Crow. Within a politics of white resentment and white victimology, the Hitler meme works. After all, Hitler was not just a fascist, but is understood to have been a racial fascist: one whose dictatorial and murderous schemes were directed at a distinctly racialized "other." So to make the black man atop the U.S. political system into Hitler, is to plant the idea in white minds that he too will be a racial fascist. And if that is the case, the question is quite obviously begged, which race will he be coming for? Ah yes, white man, see? Now are you scared?
By playing upon white fears--fears of a black President with a funny name, fears of a country that within about 30 years will no longer be majority white, fears of the inability to take for granted that our Leave-it-to-Beaver, Norman Rockwell, Boy Scout-approved national narrative will continue to predominate--the right hopes to prove resurgent, and the GOP hopes to remain a living entity. They have all but abandoned any hopes of attracting large numbers of people of color. The writing in that regard is on the wall and they seem to very much know it. So they have retreated into the laager--South African imagery very much intended here--and decided to go all in as the party of nostalgia, a white nationalist party, in effect, whose only hope is to claim that the nation has lost its greatness, and that everything that made America, well, America (ya know, back in the days of segregation) has been lost. And that such a transformation, from a formal white supremacist state, to a multicultural society, is of course a bad thing.
In addition to rallying the troops of white backlash, the Obama/Hitler analogies also serve another function, one that would be immediately recognizable to most any psychologist. That function is called projection: when someone recognizes a trait within themselves, and then, ashamed of that trait seeks it out in others and locates it there, displacing the shame and self-hatred that might otherwise manifest onto someone else.
For these right-wing louts to accuse President Obama of being a racist, let alone a potentially genocidal one at that, is the ultimate in projection. After all, it is the right whose authors regularly publish books with hateful and prejudicial comments about racialized others, not Obama, whose own writing reveals a deep and abiding love for his family--all of it, including the white half.
It is the right that channels Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebells, every time they spew lies about the health care bill's euthanasia provisions, or about how Obama is going to confiscate all the guns, or casting doubt on Obama's citizenship, or about how Mexicans are looking to "reconquer" the American southwest, or about how illegal immigrants are a major source of leprosy and disease. All of these things have been debunked, time and again, and yet they are repeated daily, as if facts don't matter. Because to anti-intellectual brownshirts, they don't.
It is the right channeling the thuggishness of the Nazi bullies by sending folks to public forums to shout and disrupt, and to intimidate people by carrying weapons.
It is the right that would like to smash the trade unions.
It is the right that stood by while the last president circumvented the Constitution on such matters as wiretaps, torture, the primacy of international treaties to which the U.S. is a party, and the suspension of habeas corpus for suspected "terrorists."
It is folks like Michael Savage--perhaps the most truly psychotic of the right-wing radio set--who has staked out positions of overt racism and even murderous intent. To wit, his comments of May 11 and 12, 2004, to the effect that Arab Muslims are "non humans," who should be either forcibly converted to Christianity or slaughtered. Or his statement of April 17, 2006, to the effect that the United States should kill 100 million Muslims. Or his more recent comment to the effect that he hopes "far extreme, violent motorcycle gangs" show up at the health care town hall meetings around the country. Or his statement about liberal advocacy groups, suggesting "they have no place in America," and that he would like to "round up every member of the ACLU and of the National Lawyers Guild and...put them in a prison in Guantanamo and...throw the key away" Or his pithy paraphrasing of a statement previously made by Nazi leader Hermann Goering, to the effect that when he "hears that someone is in the civil rights business," he "oils up (his) AR-15," and presumably not so as to have an intelligent conversation.
And speaking of Nazis, it was Pat Buchanan who said, in a 1977 column that the early Adolf Hitler--the one who suspended civil liberties, murdered his political opponents inside Germany, and set about to invade surrounding countries so as to broaden the boundaries of the Reich--was for all intent and purposes, a model leader. Prior to initiating the Holocaust of European Jewry, Hitler seems to have done little with which Buchanan could find fault, thus his claim: "If Hitler had died in 1937 on the fourth anniversary of his coming to power, he would undoubtedly have gone down as one of the greatest figures of German history." Hitler was, to hear Pat tell it, "an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank" whose "genius" was in having such an "intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."
Yet Pat Buchanan, who also called for the U.S. to annex parts of Canada back in a 1989 column, so as to expand the size of our nation's "white tribe"--an idea that Herr Hitler would have no doubt found exhilarating--remains a commentator in good standing on major networks. And so the right, which regularly espouses ideas resonant of the very fascism they would ascribe to Obama, gets a free pass, as they project their own darkest authoritarian desires onto others, with whom they cannot intellectually compete. And so they must bully. They must shout. They must drown out reason with volume.
And beneath it all, they hope that just enough people will listen. Just enough to build a movement rooted in white anger, white fear, white victimology, and the reassertion of white nationhood that they feel has been taken from them.
Although not ALL who oppose Obama are racist, the underlying theme of the rightwing hate machine and it's fearmongering is about race. It's the only thing the Republicans have in their dirty bags of tricks. They no longer rule, so they whip up the base that's left into a frenzied mob of racist nutjobs with the same old sleezy tactics. "Take back our country!" screams are accompanied by the other words said under their breath. They have learned not to scream some things out loud.
But, we all know what the subtext is. We also know what they mean when they scream out and cry for the "good old days".
Racism has for a long time been "coded", now it's coming out pretty blatantly for any who really care to look. The comparisons of Obama to Hitler are the most striking, since Hitler waged a deadly war to exterminate a whole race of people. Now, who could Obama be after? Yeah, now you get the analogy.
Poor downtrodden white people are the new underclass (in their minds) now.
Tim Wise, one of my favorite activists said this on CNN last night:
http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.elemen...ideo/politics/2009/08/16/nr.race.a.factor.cnn
This was on one of his columns a few days ago:
Sick Heil: Racial Paranoia, White Victimology and the Hitlerizing of Obama | Red Room
Makes sense to me! All of those older white folks "protesting" the new "Hitler", waxing nostalgic about the "good ole days" where segregation was law and black folks knew their place.......
My bottom line (to those who say they know no one who hates Obama due to his race) is that they are either kidding themslves are trying to kid us.
In this day & age, how many people will come right out & admit they are racists? ..Very few!..They'll describe 10,000 legitimate reasons why they oppose Obama, but their REAL Basis, in many cases is his race.
I'll tell you how I spot an...anit-Obama suspected racist:
Look for someone who vehemently opposes Obama on every issue. No matter what Obama says or does, he's a Commie, Socialist, Pals around with terrorosts, wnts to kill the elderly, etc.
I think someone like that (& there are plenty on this forum) is "telegraphing" the real reason they oppose Obama.....No matter what the issue!
Again, the topic title qujestion starts with 3 words......Do You Believe"....Personally I believe anyone who opposes everything Obama does, is simply trying to hide their true reasons behing issue-based crap. (It's possible...though unlikely..that they my not even realize it themselves)
No it shouldn't. It's a POLL about beliefs & disagreeing with another member's belief is not a good reason to try to hide it in obscure forums.You found me out. I oppose President Obama because he is black! :roll:
Hey....I never accused YOU inparticulr but if the shoe fits.....
This really should be in conspiracy theories.
Not worth a response, but I will say this:... So I suppose everyone who went against Bush on everything were also racist? :lol:
Screwed up an edit. The emboldened line (below) line should not be in your quote box, but below it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blackdog View Post
You found me out. I oppose President Obama because he is black!
Hey....I never accused YOU inparticulr but if the shoe fits.....
This really should be in conspiracy theories.
I don't think opposition to Obama is mostly based on race. I think it is emotionally-based on the fact that he is a democrat and had an emotionally-based following amongst liberals running up to the election that was directly proportional to the emotionally-based opposition that was felt amongst said liberals to the Bush administration.
And while we're talking about not insulting the intelligence of the posters here, let's stop calling Obama a socialist. Sound fair?
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