Carson is an ass running a grift operation more than a campaign (he’s essentially collecting and pocketing contributions while accumulating mailing lists of future marks) and using this as a line of attack on the first black president is just… I can’t even. No argument there.
But I would like to separate that circumstance from the factual veracity of the statement. Considered independently, there is something to it. I believe Obama had to at least sound very white to ever make any headway in national politics.
You’re implying that there’s only one genuine form of African American experiences. You may associate a monolithic “genuine” black experience with “the ghetto,” and if you do, that’s pretty racist. It should be obvious that many black Americans were not born and raised in disenfranchised urban settings.
Was Carson even disputing that? My reading is that he was comparing Obama to himself in order to claim that he’s more “authentically black” than Obama is because of the different sorts of people who raised them and the places in which they were raised.
Remember, this is the same guy who voluntarily fabricated a nonsense story about how he stabbed a guy one time, just to juice up his ‘street-to-surgeon-and-saved’ cred; so it is probably safe to assume that his standards for authentic blackitude are just a tad less regressive than your average Klansman’s; but not necessarily by much.
This. Also, while Carson apparently understands that Republicans like “tough guys,” he doesn’t seem to understand that they don’t like black tough guys (or as many of them would put it, “thugs”).
You don’t have to imply a uniform experience to be able to say that growing up in Indonesia as a son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother was different than what African Americans of the same cohort were meanwhile living through. At the very least the attitude of the surrounding society had to be necessarily unlike the climate of the Civil rights strife happening at the time in the US. And additionally, Obama doesn’t fall into the category of an African American in at least some understandings of the terms, as he is not genealogically descendant from slave ancestors.
So again, as an attack from a political opponent it’s… uncouth. And nobody should base their political decisions on the sufficient or insufficient blackness of any given candidate. But as far as sharing experience and cultural makeup with the African American population goes, Obama really isn’t a typical representative. (Nor is, in fact, Carson.)
Well, some might argue that’s part of the African-American experience, from earlier descriptions like W.E.B Du Bois’ double-consciousness, to more recent framings like code-switching…
Well, technically no because interracial marriage was legal in the state of Hawaii. But it WOULD have been illegal if the couple had attempted to get married in (for example) the state of Virginia.
Bill Maher had a great point about Trump in last week’s show where Trump says things like “The number isn’t reflective,” he said. “I’ve seen numbers of 24 percent – I actually saw a number of 42 percent unemployment. Forty-two percent.” He continued, “5.3 percent unemployment – that is the biggest joke there is in this country. … The unemployment rate is probably 20 percent, but I will tell you, you have some great economists that will tell you it’s a 30, 32. And the highest I’ve heard so far is 42 percent.”
And Maher correctly criticized how is it that people like Trump can get away with just pulling crap out of their ass and people believe it?!? 42%??? We would be in a free fall!!! People would be looting and selling their elderly relatives for crying out loud. It would be near anarchy.
no. thankfully i have stayed away. And yes, I get that the argument still happens from the common folk in social media…but I meant more it ended the debate on the national news media level at least.
I can’t tell just why you keep on picking at this bone.
Sure, Obama’s upbringing was unusual among African Americans. So were those of say, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. And yet, I don’t recall any big general beef being made challenging their claims to authentic blackness.
So what are you actually saying, and why do you think it’s somehow important?
I wonder if it might be about who counts as “the unemployed”. Whether it only counts those receiving state assistance while seeking work (which will undercount those seeking work as long as those giving out said assistance are under pressure to reduce that metric), or if you count all the children, retired people, house-spouses, medically disabled, remittance men and women, and those out-of-work-but-not-seeking-work for whatever reason, and so on.
