Gee, spouting stupid racist aphorisms at whites is really useful.

Grow up. Read. Do something with your brain. You're close, obvious you can put sentences together. Now see if you can rise a notch and put some semantics together that aren't obnoxious.

If stupid white people ever forget they bear sole guilt for all this country's deficiencies, your acid contempt will bring them around. Although, within that framework, it's not hard to understand why most of them don't listen: They probably earn a fraction of Mr. Schwarz' income, and, being human, dislike being spat on.

...where are all the white people with good sense these days?

Are they still on vacation?

Have they left the country?

Or are they just so ashamed of these people who look like them, who may be their cousins, or their coworkers, or their in-laws, that they don't want to be mentioned in the same sentence with them?
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Putting the tea-baggers on camera makes for good television. Having a guy rant about "not wanting government to interfere with his Medicare" is entertaining. Having people detail how a private insurance company denied payment for a cancer treatment or rehab is boring.

When news happens in a Black neighborhood, the camera will often skip by the black man or woman in the business suit or work uniform and focus on the black person with a gold-plated mouth, poor diction and wearing low hanging jeans to describe the event. The public believes that the face on film IS the black community. The same thing is occurring in current discussions of health care, etc. The gun-toting whiners asking for "their" country back are not representative of the White community. White Conservatives acquaintances express concern about safety for Obama given the gun-toters and heated rhetoric. These Conservatives also say that they have never seen politicians behave in the rancorous manner that is present today. The cooler heads are being ignored.

The post is pointing out that a skewed view of Whites is constantly being transmitted across our airwaves.

Here's where some of us are: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112622675&ps=rs

Near universal condemnation of NPR playing parrot and providing the Cato Institute and a member of the Texas School Board to trash Obama's address to the nation. I was there before the show finished being broadcast, and even that didn't gain me number one spot.

But how to get anyone's attention? I'm guessing that most kids were in school today and most kids heard the President speak, just as most kids were in school to hear Ronald Reagan tell them to say no to drugs a generation ago. How many? A pretty accurate number could be retreived by one or two reporter interns and a bank of phones in a couple of days. But it won't happen. Normal parents doing normal things with normal students in normal schools aren't news--even if a media that raised this tempest in a teapot should have made them news. Someplace around the house I have a plaque where reads, "On this very spot, 200 years ago, absolutely nothing happened". Af far as the News Media are concerned, those parents of whatever coloar who acted normally are absolutely nothing happening.

I would definitely be less likely to focus on the issue of race if those in the leadership of the GOP and conservative movement would have the courage to stand up and say that there some in their midst who are out and out racists (be they fringe or not) and probably a good number more that have unexamined racist views that bend their feelings Obama and his policies. Instead all we get is some variation of "people don't think that way anymore" and "the real racists are just a fringe."

When Jessie Jackson made his infamous Macaca remark about NYC, there were plenty of those on the Left who wouldn't let him get away with some lame excuse, "gee I didn't know that calling Jews Hymies was a racist comment." (he didn't use this excuse, he did at first try denial, or a rather a non-denial denial) Those on the Left went on to explore as where this racist view came from in the African American community, rather than denying the problem existed.

It just so happens that I did a multi-part series titled "White Americans and the Politics of Race" during last year's presidential campaign season, one that I think has become a classic for the way it attempted to analyze white Americans and the way they think about black people.

Check it out. I thought it was a damn good series. An excerpt from the intro is below:

I am approximately six feet tall – a little taller than the average American male, but not tall enough to really tower over a gathering of other adults. Every once in awhile, though, I find myself in a social situation where I am standing on a riser or a step or an incline that lifts me just two or three inches higher than my normal height. From the vantage point that someone six-two or six-three would have, the world looks entirely different. The people look different, as if I am getting to see another angle of who they are. Just that slight shift in my perspective lets me see, at least for a little while, what tall guys see when they look at the rest of us.

This is what is missing from the debate on race and the affect it is having on the presidential election - a comprehensive look at the perspectives of white people, including those who, despite similar political beliefs or party affiliation, are having a problem voting for Barack Obama. The punditocracy gives the topic lip service, jumping from the question of why this is a problem straight to their favorite labels – Soccer Mom, Walmart Mom, NASCAR Dad, Joe Six Pack, Ma and Pa Kettle, Evangelical voters, Values voters, Rural voters, Bubba voters – before spouting off a pat answer that assumes these voters are either in love with the idea of a black president, or ready to kill the first black president. But if black people, as we have been asserting for some time, aren’t monolithic, why should we believe anything different about white Americans?

So I started doing some research, even before the polls started to record the phenomena of white Democrats who could not fathom voting for a black man last week, just to see what COULD be going on with my white brethren. I ran into a very good sources, including one whose findings anchor this series, The Black Rage In The White Mind, by Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki. Their study categorized white racial thinking in four ways:

Racial comity and understanding

Multi-dimensional conceptual thinking – can hold positive and negative views and acknowledge that having varied interests do not make black and white interests mutually exclusive.

Racial ambivalence

A complicated combination of assumptions, misinformation, emotional needs, experiences and personality traits that all bear on a white person’s thinking about race. Can sometimes allow him to deny the existence of racism.

Racial animosity

Persistent pathological biases that include stereotyping, denial, political rejection, demonization and fearful, angry emotions. Can include the extent to which white people see themselves as having group interests that conflict with those of blacks.

Racist

Believe blacks share such homogeneously negative characteristics that they must be an inferior rank of human against whom discrimination is inevitable and justifiable.

To really have a chance at understanding the origin and motivations of these four different points of view, we’ve got to back up a bit and look at how we process the information we receive. One thing that all of these states of mind have in common are the basic cognitive functions of perception - attention and emotion - which are functions essential to an individual's knowledge of the world and themselves.

Hopefully, this exploration of racial thinking can utilize the traditional building blocks of perception to provide a clearer picture of how white Americans tend to think when they think about race.

And for a look into racism in American and the way it is expressed through other codes, one of the best videos from the election -- AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka on racism and Obama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QIGJTHdH50

Yeah, sorry I have to call BS on this post. If a conservative site was to post a blog about "Where are the Black People with good sense" because most blacks are democrats and disagree with them based on political principles, you'd call them racist. And you'd be right. The inverse is no less offensive. In fact there are plenty of whites (and people of color) standing up against such nonsense.

The unhinged conservatives have always been on the attack. The criticism of Obama's school speech was not because hes black. It's because the Dept of Education was stupid enough to release lesson plans for kids to write an assignment on how they can help the President and suggesting they read Obama's books. Instead of asking them what you can do for your country, the Dept of Education asked what they could do for Barack Obama. Inappropriate. Beyond stupid. And feeding into the paranoia of conservatives about the indoctrination of children. Whoever came up with the suggested lesson plans should have been fired.

So what happened post-speech (and without the lesson plan)? Conservatives by large measure praised the speech because it was based in traditional values.

But the larger question is why must any criticism of Obama be assumed to be racially motivated? A bit of a reality check, but Bill and Hillary were being accused of murder by these folks on the right. That's a touch more unhinged and incendiary than calling him Marxist. Are there some folks who object to Obama based on race? Sure. But there are others who dislike him based on political beliefs and you do a great disservice when you don't even try to see the other person's viewpoint because you put on the it's all racial blinders.

Dij wrote:

A bit of a reality check, but Bill and Hillary were being accused of murder by these folks on the right. That's a touch more unhinged and incendiary than calling him Marxist.

Absolutely and how quickly people forget! I've been trying to make this same point this past weekend to deaf ears.

Look what was circulating on the Internet in 1998!

My concern is that both left and right will start defining everything in terms of race -- which gets into "he said/she said." Note how smoothly Obama never does that (the Gates issue being his one -- human -- error in this regard). I think it's far more effective to use the techniques that the right has used during the past 8 years: call someone unAmerican for not supporting the idea that the POTUS can talk to children. In fact, we used to call that patriotic!

It's a sad fact, but you can't go in an rewire people's brains... so you must let these notions simply burn out of society through death of a generation. For people about 50 years and older, race is an issue. Much less so for those younger. For people 35 years and older sex is an issue, less so for those younger. And for those younger than about 25 years of age, orientation issues are much less of an issue.

We won't ever be in a society that's not prejudiced, but significant strides have been made. Now we must let time take care of the rest.

I was in a group this weekend where someone (who was from the right) brought up this Obama-talks-to-kids-bit. I was probably to the left of most, but I simply said: "C'mon...this is nonsense, is it not?"

Believe it or not, that phrase and the appropriate look (you know the one - you used to see it on kindergarten teachers' faces!), not only nipped it in the bud, but had several people relieved. And then the conversation turned to how these things have gotten out of control and the need to start being rational again. Race was never brought up... but several people left with the idea that they needed a better news source than FNC.

Progress!

Canada.

And parts of Vermont.