Police Swipe at Obama Over Tensions

Cardinal said:

The fact of a black man being president divided the country racially. When he was sworn in racists lost their ****ing minds. He has spoken out on race a handful of times in his two terms, perfectly aware that anything he says is basically lighting a gas tanker. Meanwhile, anyone else can make his presidency about his race every single day. It's absolutely hilarious -- the first thing he does in response to the Dallas shooting is stand behind the police, and still the racists in this country make it about his race. They just can't help themselves.

Click to expand...

ludin said:

All he did when running for president was play the race card. so how did he not divide the country?

Click to expand...

jmotivator said:

He spoke highly of him and what he gained from him regardless of how many times they met.

Click to expand...

Quazimodo said:

Problem:he's not black, he just looks black. He is bi-racial. His mother was white, his father black. When he self-identifies as black, he's lying.

If he was an honest man(and he has proved over and over again that he is not)he could just as easily support his white brothers and sisters. Instead, he perpetuates his false narrative and continues to stir up discontent, division, and unrest. Sounds like an anarchist and a Marxist communist to me.

Frank and Saul would sure be proud.

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

I'm not watching a 60 minute video hunting for some snippet where Obama speaks highly of 1 of the 100s of people he's come across - all of which validates some super secret communist conspiracy.

Click to expand...

jmotivator said:

Good job avoiding information.

Click to expand...

Cardinal said:

The fact of a black man being president divided the country racially. When he was sworn in racists lost their ****ing minds. He has spoken out on race a handful of times in his two terms, perfectly aware that anything he says is basically lighting a gas tanker. Meanwhile, anyone else can make his presidency about his race every single day. It's absolutely hilarious -- the first thing he does in response to the Dallas shooting is stand behind the police, and still the racists in this country make it about his race. They just can't help themselves.

Click to expand...

Chainsaw said:

Racial tensions, mass shootings, targeted executions of police officers, urban violence, all up significantly under Obama. But that won't even be mentioned in Obama's affirmative action filtered legacy.

Click to expand...

Tanngrisnir said:

They have nothing else to desperately cling to. They latched on the concept the Obama somehow, magically, divided the country by race, since they were spoon-fed it as a false narrative, and now to keep that illusion from being shattered, they have to dig that much more deeply into it.

Sad, really.

Click to expand...

sanman said:

You use the word "racists" - by this, do you mean the majority of the country? Your words seem purposefully chosen to be deliberately ambiguous. Is opposing Obama an automatic certificate of racism? I find Obama to be a less-than-average president. I am a dark-skinned person of Asian origin - my skin color is as dark as Obama's if not darker.

When he made his comments in public following the Baton Rouge and Minnesota incidents, did he not have the presence of mind to understand that tensions were high and there could be reprisal attacks against innocent police? After the Dallas shooting, Obama seemed to downplay its significance by merely issuing a clarification of his previous remarks in saying that most law enforcement were doing a good job. Not his finest hour.

If you want to call everybody racist for not feeling inspired by the guy, then you go ahead and sit in the corner declaring the rest of the room out-of-bounds.

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

Be specific instead of trying bury your opponent under irrelevant information. It's a better debating tactic. Please point at the specific minute to minute where Obama speaks of FMD.

Click to expand...

jmotivator said:

Maybe this will help. [video=youtube;ub1LiRU2tGo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub1LiRU2tGo[video]

Click to expand...

Didn't realize you were so opposed to Obama speeches. I guess we agree on something.

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

30 seconds out of 56 minutes where Obama said he had a conversation with a guy over 12 years before and the guy told him to get used to the status quo around conversations on race. So?

Reading comprehension is important. I never said anything like you think I said.

Click to expand...

Quazimodo said:

Problem:he's not black, he just looks black. He is bi-racial. His mother was white, his father black. When he self-identifies as black, he's lying.

If he was an honest man(and he has proved over and over again that he is not)he could just as easily support his white brothers and sisters. Instead, he perpetuates his false narrative and continues to stir up discontent, division, and unrest. Sounds like an anarchist and a Marxist communist to me.

Frank and Saul would sure be proud.

Click to expand...

Cardinal said:

Oh, feel free to catalogue "every single time." And feel free to pad those examples with as much rhetoric and detail as possible in an attempt to not make them sound so weak and few in number.

Click to expand...

jimbo said:

Goes back farther back than Martin. Early on Obama weighed in from the national bully pulpit on a simple police property check in Boston. A decidedly local issue. The reason? Skippy be black. Sent the full force to Ferguson in another local matter. Same reason. The list is long, and most often the speech ends in guns be bad.

Click to expand...

Quazimodo said:

Wouldn't it be funny if Obama gave a speech and nobody listened? Kinda like yodeling into a canyon?

Click to expand...

Chomsky said:

The phones are really only the messengers though - it's the actions that cause the problems.

Click to expand...

jmotivator said:

Have you read Obama's memoir?

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

30 seconds out of 56 minutes where Obama said he had a conversation with a guy over 12 years before and the guy told him to get used to the status quo around conversations on race. So?.

Click to expand...

There was one exception, a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section
of Waikiki. He had enjoyed some modest notoriety once, was a contemporary of Richard Wright and
Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago-Gramps once showed me some of his work anthologized in a
book of black poetry. But by the time I met Frank he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped
face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his
poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the
night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the
conversation would turn to laments about women.
“They’ll drive you to drink, boy,” Frank would tell me soberly. “And if you let ’em, they’ll drive you into
your grave.”
I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge
behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if
I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t
fully understand.

Click to expand...

It took me a while to recognize the house, with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof. Inside, the light was on, and I
could see Frank sitting in his overstuffed chair, a book of poetry in his lap, his reading glasses slipping down
his nose. I sat in the car, watching him for a time, then finally got out and tapped on the door. The old man
barely looked up as he rose to undo the latch. It had been three years since I’d seen him.
“Want a drink?” he asked me. I nodded and watched him pull down a bottle of whiskey and two plastic
cups from the kitchen cupboard. He looked the same, his mustache a little whiter, dangling like dead ivy
over his heavy upper lip, his cut-off leans with a few more holes and tied at the waist with a length of rope.
“How’s your grandpa?”
“He’s all right.”
“So what are you doing here?”
I wasn’t sure. I told Frank some of what had happened. He nodded and poured us each a shot. “Funny
cat, your grandfather,” he said. “You know we grew up maybe fifty miles apart?”
I shook my head.
“We sure did. Both of us lived near Wichita. We didn’t know each other, of course. I was long gone by
the time he was old enough to remember anything. I might have seen some of his people, though. Might’ve
passed ’em on the street. If I did, I would’ve had to step off the sidewalk to give ’em room. Your grandpa
ever tell you about things like that?”
I threw the whiskey down my throat, shaking my head again.
“Naw,” Frank said, “I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas
much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A
preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he
remembers it, you understand-this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming
to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”

I reached for the bottle, this time pouring my own. Frank wasn’t watching me; his eyes were closed
now, his head leaning against the back of his chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving of stone. “You can’t
blame Stan for what he is,” Frank said quietly. “He’s basically a good man. But he doesn’t know me. Any
more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can’t know me, not the way I know him.
Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers
humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like. That’s why
he can come over here and drink my whiskey and fall asleep in that chair you’re sitting in right now. Sleep
like a baby. See, that’s something I can never do in his house. Never. Doesn’t matter how tired I get, I still
have to watch myself. I have to be vigilant, for my own survival.”
Frank opened his eyes. “What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least
as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For
your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”
Frank closed his eyes again. His breathing slowed until he seemed to be asleep. I thought about
waking him, then decided against it and walked back to the car. The earth shook under my feet, ready to
crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly
alone.

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

So?

Click to expand...

We could joke about it by then, for her worst fears hadn’t come to pass. I had graduated without
mishap, was accepted into several respectable schools, and settled on Occidental College in Los Angeles
mainly because I’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawaii with her family. But I was
still just going through the motions, as indifferent toward college as toward most everything else. Even
Frank thought I had a bad attitude, although he was less than clear about how I should change it.
What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I
had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained
about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet
into European shoes. Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I
didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head.
“Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of these young
cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do. And the people who are
old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college-they’re just so happy to
see you in there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.”
“And what’s that?”
“Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of
his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going
there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so
they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train
you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all
that ****. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your
race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know
that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”
“So what is it you’re telling me-that I shouldn’t be going to college?”
Frank’s shoulders slumped, and he fell back in his chair with a sigh. “No. I didn’t say that. You’ve got to
go. I’m just telling you to keep your eyes open. Stay awake.”
It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was
as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had
created. Keep your eyes open, he had warned. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Not in sunny L.A. Not as
you strolled through Occidental’s campus, a few miles from Pasadena, tree-lined and Spanish-tiled. The
students were friendly, the teachers encouraging. In the fall of 1979, Carter, gas lines, and breast-beating
were all on their way out. Reagan was on his way in, morning in America. When you left campus, you drove
on the freeway to Venice Beach or over to Westwood, passing East L.A. or South Central without even
knowing it, just more palm trees peeking out like dandelions over the high concrete walls. L.A. wasn’t all that
different from Hawaii, not the part you saw. Just bigger, and easier to find a barber who knew how to cut
your hair.

Click to expand...

Hatuey said:

Here we go, what about it? I've asked you to elaborate on this conspiracy theory. Flesh it out. Come on. Enough mystery - get to the point.

Click to expand...

jmotivator said:

I am speaking to your willful ignorance of the relationship between Frank Marshall Davis and Obama, a relationship you want to diminish through the fearsome power of your complete ignorance on the subject.

Click to expand...