The larger point of Jesse L. Jackson's criticism of Barack Obama -- if not the crude way he expressed it -- touched a nerve among some African American political activists who have been unhappy about the senator 's pointed critiques of absentee fathers and other problems in the black community.
Jackson, an Obama supporter, spent much of yesterday apologizing for a remark that was caught by a Fox News microphone and aired Wednesday on the network. Jackson was overheard saying Obama's pitch to expand President Bush's federal assistance for faith-based social service programs was "talking down to black people." He then used a base phrase to say what he wanted to do to the senator from Illinois.
But he also told CNN that while he agrees with Obama's arguments that blacks must do more to improve their lot, "the moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care."
Michael Eric Dyson, a vocal Obama backer and a sociology professor at Georgetown University, said he worries that the candidate's speeches criticizing the behavior of African Americans will distract attention from larger societal issues. "I'm quibbling with the use of his speeches," he said yesterday.
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Writing in Time magazine last month, Dyson likened Obama's critiques of the black community to that of comedian Chris Rock, but noted: "Rock's humor is so effective because he is just as hard on whites as on blacks. That's a part of the routine Obama has not yet adopted."
Ronald Walters, who teaches at the University of Maryland, worked on Jackson's presidential campaigns in the 1980s. He criticized a speech Obama gave last month chastising black fathers who were "acting like boys instead of men," and adding that "we need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one."
Walters said that "we're not electing him to be preacher in chief," and that Obama needs to give more speeches about how he would help black communities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002812.htmlHELP YOURSELF, dammit! You're free, civil rights is won, have some PRIDE and quit asking for handouts! HELP YOUR GODDAMNED SELF!
Why can't any politician have the courage to point out that while it has nothing to do with race, that the celebrated "black culture" of inner cities is completely self-destructive, a cycle of violence and unwed mothers and multiple fathers and poverty and more violence? The fact that there is zero respect for life, zero pride in neighborhoods, zero sense of personal responsibility is a universal constant in every single one of the "problem" black communities. You have people killing each other over a damn HAT, and then glaring with stone cold badass attitude at the jury as if wondering what's wrong with doing that. That is a broken culture!
Other blacks just GOT ON WITH IT and live like any other American, I have black lawyers and doctors as neighbors. They're no different than anyone else. Skin color is irrelevant. I don't even see it. I see people, and I see, in problem areas, people of different and completely dysfunctional tribal cultures of their own choosing.
Why can't anyone just say that? It's not the guns, it's not the drugs, it's the CULTURE. And the only people who can reject it are...the people themselves.
