Erin Aubry Kaplan: President Obama, 'The View' and Race in America
[Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to Opinion.]
President Obama botched it again.
From the beginning, I knew things were going to be tough for him, what with the economy and two wars and all. But I assumed he could at least strike the right tone on matters of race and color. Yes, I know he was the black guy elected to not say anything about color, but I refused to believe Obama would stick to that deal, at least not all the time. But then came the humiliation of watching Obama backtrack on his (correct) opinion about the racial profiling of scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.; more recently, there was the panicky, preemptive firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod for allegedly making anti-white comments.
And late in July, Obama described black folks as a "mongrel people" on the morning talk show "The View." Responding to Barbara Walters' question about why he didn't call himself a biracial president, he explained that blacks are mixed and always have been. That's strictly true. But "mongrel" was a terrible choice of words, the kind of animalistic imagery segregationist whites once used to justify their treatment of blacks (especially men), who they feared would poison a "superior" gene pool. "Mongrelization" was in fact a word used passionately by the Democratic Party in the 1850s, by the Ku Klux Klan and by early eugenicists to describe that awful outcome....
Read entire article at LA Times
President Obama botched it again.
From the beginning, I knew things were going to be tough for him, what with the economy and two wars and all. But I assumed he could at least strike the right tone on matters of race and color. Yes, I know he was the black guy elected to not say anything about color, but I refused to believe Obama would stick to that deal, at least not all the time. But then came the humiliation of watching Obama backtrack on his (correct) opinion about the racial profiling of scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.; more recently, there was the panicky, preemptive firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod for allegedly making anti-white comments.
And late in July, Obama described black folks as a "mongrel people" on the morning talk show "The View." Responding to Barbara Walters' question about why he didn't call himself a biracial president, he explained that blacks are mixed and always have been. That's strictly true. But "mongrel" was a terrible choice of words, the kind of animalistic imagery segregationist whites once used to justify their treatment of blacks (especially men), who they feared would poison a "superior" gene pool. "Mongrelization" was in fact a word used passionately by the Democratic Party in the 1850s, by the Ku Klux Klan and by early eugenicists to describe that awful outcome....