>>> Should President Obama's staff have thought through the first version of his curriculum that went along with his speech and realized that including items like "ask children to write a letter to the president saying what they can do to help him" was probably ill advised?

According to Arne Duncan on Face the Nation, the "horrific" statement they took back was about writing a letter to the president saying what they can do to help him REACH HIS GOAL OF HAVING OVER HALF OF HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS ACCEPTED INTO COLLEGE BY 2020" (not sure of the year).

If that is true, then we progressives have to share part of the blame: we still haven't learned how to counter the ridiculous but effective attacks from the right. First off, I think we should get the hard facts and get them out to the public immediately. Yes, they won't be as 'sexy' and simple-minded as the slogans of the right, but the American people do have a fair amount of common sense and if we are consistent about getting the accurate facts out, a lot of them will learn to check before reacting.

Was Arne Duncan lying? If not, why am I only now hearing about the full statement that started all this furor?

amike -- Obama is an unsentimental pragmatist who always, always chooses his battles. I'm not at all surprised he would accept, or even ask for, the resignation. Do I like that quality about him? Not really. Am I glad he has it? I have to say I am - it makes him a more effective fighter. It's sort of like someone complaining to Lincoln that Grant was a drunk -- and Lincoln suggesting that a case of his favorite liquor be sent to the other generals.

Sadly, I thought this too:

But, I thought that the very act of electing a black man for president meant we had turned a corner on the sordid racial past of our country, but now I'm not so sure.

And unfortunately this is also true:

The forces out there that will try and hold black people down are strong and loud and dangerous. They will swear up and down to you that their actions have nothing to do with race. And it's difficult to fight because, while we can have suspicions that these fights are, at least in part, about race, we can't really prove it.

MCB, do you see yourself here? Right. It has nothing to do with race.

There is no longer any national debate. It's a national screaming match. Personally, I'm waiting for the headline:

President Obama personally puts toxins into our nation's water

the next time he uses a toilet.

Your comments about who gets blamed in an incident rang home to me. We watched our friends' native american and to a slightly lesser degree, be punished (not discplined, so much) at a different level than the anglo kids, so we were even more careful of teaching our son to avoid fights. We suspected he might get suspended or expelled, while the other kids wouldn't. There was a group of teachers' kids who had extra status in the schools, sometimes excelling athleres and coaches sons, too. A lot of those kids harassed our son, and we taught him lots of strategies to neutralize them, but they didn't work. Our son says to this day he blames us about it; he would rather have had even one fight, and won it. I suppose I can understand.
When you are anglo with a child of color, t's like you straddle two worlds. We would notice at sports and school potlucks that the people of color tended to end up sitting toether; we were are a family of color. (our daughter is Ute Indian.) It wasn't planned; we just hooked to each other like some law of physics; like particles attracting or something.
You and I didn't have to live through the pain or anger of being black, but we lived through our babies' pain.Your screen name: I had to look up virago, and found it was pronounce Verr-AH-go, and it means crone or shrew. You are funny in your self-mockery!
Thanks for the great post. All I can say in comfort is that the old generations will be dying off, and there will be less gay-haters and color-haters. Now all we have to do is fund education the way it should be funded, find great administrators and counselors who aren't bigots, and we'll be cookin' in the future (she said hopefully.)

I've never been one to look for racism around every corner, but I have to admit I'm flummoxed by this business with the president and his speech to students. I can't for the life of me come up with any other reason for telling students that, not only are they not required to listen to the words of the President of the United States, their parents have the right to haul them out of school on that day.

This is our President, this is the 21st Century, this is our government-funded educational system, and this is utter nonsense. The speech is even being vetted, as if our President is going to throw something subversive in there that might adversely influence innocent children.

It's very nearly insane, this attack on a speech by the president. So someone please tell me--if it isn't because our President is black, what is it then?

And, by the way, I never did see anything wrong with the wording in that original letter. Apparently it's just me, but what a lot of fuss about nothing. Unless it's because the man is black. Then it's something else again.

I'm really moved by this blog, TwoVirago,s as well as by the comments it has evoked.
Random thoughts:
1) I had considered the probability that the vitriol in response to Obama's projected speech was another instance of push back that is racially-based; whatever he does (which some of us think, thus far, is shaping up to be alarmingly tentative) is met with such furious censure and contempt by the right that it is hard to see it as anything else....although it is also true that the right attacks any Democratic president or candidate with vicious abandon -- witness the whole impeachment saga with Clinton and the swiftboating debacle with Kerry. Still, the unapologetic, not even thinly-veiled lack of respect Obama is being shown by the right has to racially-motivated, admitted or not.
2) I had not considered how this lack of respect would affect children. That this open disrespect of our president teaches white children, in yet another generation, that they may break boundaries of fairness and civility with impunity. And that it teaches children of color, in yet another generation, to be apprehensive or to be more circumspect in their own lives. These are sorrows from yesterday and I am shocked by them, perhaps naively. I did not expect Obama's election to be one of past as prologue.
3) I love the fact that TPM is like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone, "a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average."
Thank you all.

Excellent Post.

Of course racism is alive and well, and it is being played to to stimulate "white" fear that the "colored" people are taking over. Racism was part of the "Obama's a terrorist" malarkey. And the cries of 'I want my country back' have everything to do with Obama's race. (Might tell folks that he is also white.)

The attacks on Sotomayor were blatantly racist (and sexist).

I don't have a problem with Jones' actions or affiliations. Nor do I think that they are reason for him to resign, and I agree that it provides momentum for attack after attack on Obama appointments. I too have signed those petitions for a full investigation of September 11, 2001. I imagine some of the folks here at TPM have as well. What we learned from the Commission was that the government (under Bush) was at the very least negligent. Given what happened, one might say criminally negligent. Regardless, there are lots of unanswered questions and further investigation is warranted. I don't see it a bizarre that Jones would sign such a petition. I find it beyond bizarre that it could be thrown in to get him removed.

Regardless, racism is being used overtly and covertly as part of a political ploy. People don't want to talk about, much less address racism. Whites are much more comfortable talking about social class. Which is very convenient because we define class as individual and self-chosen. Therefore, by swapping race to class not only is the topic changed, but the very conceptual framework of the topic has changed.

I remember very well a time when the president was respected as a person and as the leader of our country because to do otherwise was viewed, and sensibly I think, as unpatriotic.

Since then we have endured a number of presidents who haven't lived up to the public perceptions of the office. More than that though we have become an openly hostile society which seems to have totally lost its way.

Needless to say it has been painful to watch this. The number of monumental screwups has overcome our ability to cope. I'm guessing it isn't realistic for individual citizens to live through the political, social and economic upheavals and remain unaffected. The mistakes are by no means minor and in retrospect we are amazed at each and are thoroughly puzzled by how we repeatedly make such huge blunders.

Yet, we continue to make these monumental blunders in spite of abundant evidence informing us of the appropriate path. I really wish I knew what it is about us that makes people, possessed of the same set of facts, arrive at opposite conclusions about something. Everyone of us does this in a common and repetitive way. In every instance hindsight reveals to us the obvious path that wasn't taken, leaving us high and dry with frustration at our foolish choices. Quite apparently our foolish choices reflect our flawed and inexplicable state of being. And even when we try, ever so hopefully to avoid this, we arrive in a collectve way at the same poor choices. All I can say for sure is we are not the rational beings we suppose. Of that we have abundant, irrefutable proof. Maybe if we were to accept that fact we might be able to do better.

Look all, the guy signed onto a petition that blames 9/11 on a deliberate acts or omissions of George Bush or the ever nefarious "government" and then he wants to go into public service, that's just silly.

As far as whether we want her gov't back, she's a birther, which means a bigot. She praised her parents for fighting/sacrificing for WWII (blacks didn't live through WWII?), that's code for she likes white people. She likes old movies filled with white people, war movies celebrating the triumphs of white people, that's all it is. When you meet a birther, I believe you should get in their face and ask them about their bigotry and all about them taking responsibility creating bigotry-based climate of hatred that endangers the President's security. Tell that you hope to heaven that aren't *DREAMING* that they will any way be forgiven if, perish the thought, happens to him as they are fully complicit, knowing partners in the bad acts that only serve to bring this about. And when they say they don't agree, have none of it, and tell them to own it. Own their directly complicity.

Yes. A wonderful post.

Gotta say that were Blount white the punishment would have been the same. However, the racist reaction to him on YouTube shows America's racism in high style. Amazing that many moderators at newspaper blogs don't immediately censor the n word, or do so automatically through software. I guess there are no moderators.