What. Did he say something recalling Dave Chapelle’s
I KNOW BLACK PEOPLE!! gameshow, except not funny?

He is not asking to be given credit, he is trying to boost his own credibility. He claims to understand the black community because he “loves” Rosa Parks, has black musical influences and sees pregnant black teenagers at high school games. In his twisted little mind, that makes him qualified to conclude that black people have nobody to blame for their problems but themselves. Nugent’s message is this: white America, you are doing nothing wrong, keep up the good work; black America, you are doing a lot of things wrong, get your act together. Fortunately he is mostly irrelevant considering that he is lecturing to an audience that is just like him (white ultra-conservatives), pretending to tell them something they don’t already “know”. If and when this fringe element is ready to listen to something like http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2008/08/13/index.html then it will be time to engage them, until then it might be best to focus effort on people who are open to facts and reason.

Nice that he “admires” Rosa Parks and all that, but like most whites who “admire” black culture, they’re pretty quick to tell us what’s wrong. Very few of them can ever cite what black folks are doing RIGHT. Everything’s about single moms, black-on-black crime and Jesse Jackson. Ask The Nuge and other white folks like Billo the Clown to name ten famous black people, he’ll probably spout off the names of rappers and athletes.

He’s a total loon, but I still dig ‘Cat Scratch Fever’. Ah, classic rock when it was cool to run around in a loincloth!

The tone of it seems like a white guy. Basically, he’s saying “I love Rosa Parks and I all my musical influences are black, so that entitles me to dig into black culture and tell y’all what is wrong with it.” Sounds white to me. (No offense white people — I’m white myself — but it’s a familiar approach.)

If you assume he’s a black man, you’re wondering why he’s going on so much about admiring Rosa Parks, which is sort of the default setting. (Not that Ms. Parks has not gotten roundly trashed by racialist conservatives.) And then he goes in and talks trash about a number of issues that he seems to think are (1) black issues and (2) issues you can talk people out of. It sounds wrong, in ways that I don’t have time to analyze.

If he’s a black man passing as a white man, then you have to wonder why. Really, WHY? Is it some kind of coded communication? Does everyone know he’s black but me? Why doesn’t he just come out? That does not compute.

So, Alex, like ABW, I am wondering what is going on there. The essay I linked to is a perplexing one. Frankly, it sounds inauthentic to me, it sounds phony and manipulative. I don’t trust it, and I can’t figure out who the actual writer is.

Thanks to those who have offered some clue as to whether he’s white or black. Can anyone explain why he’d seek to be given credit as (basically) what they used (in the ’50s) to call a white Negro, and then trash the black community?

Sounds like a right-wing ploy to me.

In other words – the “White people aren’t willing to hear an actual PoC discussion on racism without them complaining about “What about us” and all that garbage.”

Know why you’re not hearing anything refreshing on race, Alex? It’s because YOU are doing the same thing now that many white people have done before whenever the topic of race is brought up. Hope for the best and meanwhile ignore the present. You’re getting the education here – you just have no desire to hear it because it’s not feel-good.

Slash has never hidden his heritage, neither has Jennifer. I remember hearing about Slash behind the Axl Rose racist song.

The Nuge has a soul, I’m glad he’s white and just ig’nant. I would really cry if he was Black.

Cheney, now he has no soul.

I loved the link about racist Disney, because I was never allowed to watch Disney growing up, BECAUSE of the blatant (and not so) racism in many Disney films. It’s sad, but my niece can watch the Disney channel and those films, now, and she’s only 5.

I have a different take on the near complete absence of a discussion about race over the course of his campaign. I do not see it as a gift, but rather a calculated decision to avoid discussing race at all costs (he only brought it up when forced to – ie: his speech after the Jeremiah Wright nonsense – http://tinyurl.com/5c93g6).

He and his strategists recognized that talking of race would alienate his core supporters – middle-class, college-educated/college student, liberal, white folks. They knew that talk of the institutionalized racism, that I believe Obama does acknowledge to some extent, would scare people off. He didn’t want people thinking he was one of those scary, angry black men who would remind them of uncomfortable history like slavery and lynchings and uncomfortable current realities like racialised poverty, employment inequity, and the like. Or worse yet, that he would require that they actually do something about all of this!

I like Obama as much as the next white girl, but I also try to see him clearly. His refusal to talk about race is anything but a gift.

I’m ready for a final conversation, one that may go on for MANY YEARS BUT at the end of it, we will finally be able to say something new, see something new among us.

Kim, What’s “common sense” in one place is not necessarily the same thing in a different quarter. A world view different from your own doesn’t have to be “baiting.” Apparently you were able to intuit why ABW posed the question; I was not able to intuit her intention and so I posed a question of my own and expressed an opinion.

“Final” conversation is a reference to what I consider a monotonous perspective on race in America. It is rare to hear anything fresh or useful or educative or redeeming or otherwise progressive or positive in the “conversation(s) on race” in America. I’m ready for a final conversation, one that may go on for a conversation but at the end of it, we will finally be able to say something new, see something new among us.

One of the most radical gifts Obama brought us was a campaign devoid of the same old talk about race in America. My hopes are high that we are in fact entering the era of the Final Conversation.