Election 2008

What I am seeing is that Americans are too blinded by race to look at his actual policies and those of his vice president. It is a bit easier to retain clarity as an immigrant.

What does the color of his skin matter in the middle of a war? What does the ethnicity of his father and grandmother matter while he must decide on policies?

Not much.

His ideas and associations are with the fanatical fringe of the Democratic Party and the Left.  Joseph Biden's bitter legacy for Eastern Europe is troubling and his lack of vision in the current terror crisis is worrying for Western Europe. People disregard his actual ties and people around him for the lofty (and vague) rhetoric of change.

These will be a bitter four years.

The ideological motives are primary but his ability to offer a triumph over supposed racism is another major draw. The effect is the most powerful when they are combined.

You would never have voted for Alan Keyes because you disagree with him and because he never implied that voting for him would absolve people of past racial guilt.

Originally posted by Lipovan87 The ideological motives are primary but his ability to offer a triumph over supposed racism is another major draw. The effect is the most powerful when they are combined. You would never have voted for Alan Keyes because you disagree with him and because he never implied that voting for him would absolve people of past racial guilt.

Isn't that the same for Obama? People who think voting for an African-American is necessary to absolve the country of past racial guilt (who I don't think are very numerous anyway) are probably voting Democratic anyway. Just as people who won't vote for African-Americans because of their race wil never vote Democratic anyway.

A first movie by Oliver_Stone

Originally posted by Lipovan87 What I am seeing is that Americans are too blinded by race to look at his actual policies and those of his vice president. It is a bit easier to retain clarity as an immigrant. What does the color of his skin matter in the middle of a war? What does the ethnicity of his father and grandmother matter while he must decide on policies?Not much.His ideas and associations are with the fanatical fringe of the Democratic Party and the Left.  Joseph Biden's bitter legacy for Eastern Europe is troubling and his lack of vision in the current terror crisis is worrying for Western Europe. People disregard his actual ties and people around him for the lofty (and vague) rhetoric of change.These will be a bitter four years.

Eh, the bitter years are about to be over. And those were the bitter years that a small group of right wing extremists who took over the GOP brought to this nation.

Speaking as an immigrant from the Balkans, I see nothing so dramatic.

The founders certainly saw the disparity but the ethnic upheavals were too much to risk for Southern states to risk abolishing slavery. You may ask why some people did not free their slaves? The state laws made emancipation contingent on providing them property. The owners did not want to lose their physical property while freeing people.

The larger problem was the effect of large numbers of people who did not identify with the society being granted freedom and rights. The vast differences in identity and perspective made the hegemony needed for government impossible to achieve without some form of repression. Northerners who were not in the danger zone would urge emancipation and Southerners who feared another Haiti resisted it.

Eventually, the legal question of jurisdiction was the question that cut the frayed ties between the two regions and war emerged. Slavery was one issue among many (albeit important to some). The brutality of ethnic strife in the aftermath of the Civil War left American Blacks (thought the group can hardly be considered a race but an ethnic group given that Nigerians, Cameroonians, and others try to resist assimilation into it ) dependent  on the federal government who abandoned them after Reconstruction ended.

The massive changed after the 1900's with industrialization and a rising Black entrepreneurial spirit saw waves of migration to the North. These migrants formed a separate Black culture of striving and assimilation into Northern society. The difference between them and Southern Blacks was stark and set the two at odds.

Eventually, the more vehement and less intellectual of Southern Black culture used the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement to resist previous cultural pressure to assimilate to larger norms of life and created a pride in the new "ghetto" life. Those bad attitudes and habits became hardened by the refusal to look upon criticism as anything other than racism.

The result was that a few privileged Black families became the elite of Black society while millions of others were left without a higher standard to motivate them. The older generations who had achieved so much of the "first Black to... " were ignored due to their supposed "selling out" to a racist wider society.

The result was the collapse of civilized life in a large number of neighborhoods and the assumption by many middle-class Black youth that crime, savagery, and mysterious victimhood were the hallmarks of the Black identity.

The problem is that the guilt used to destroy institutionalized segregation has been used to defend the indefensible breakdown in civilized values and standards. It should be a point of shame that I feel safer walking down the street in contested parts of the Balkans than when I walked home in the Black part of Washington DC. That guild has been wrongly nurtured to the point why remission from that guilt has become the reason why no one confronted the likes of Marion Barry or the intellectual failures of Afro-centric education.

This is not the Berlin wall. This is hope that ethnic strife will end by proving your own lack of racism. That may help sooth emotions but it will not help run a country.

Originally posted by Lipovan87 Speaking as an immigrant from the Balkans, I see nothing so dramatic.

He's black-and-white. That's how he got the law-and-order vote.

He has a mixed pigment but he chose a "Black" identity.

Americans seem to think that their ethnic disputes are "racial" due to some misplaced sense of universalism. The hatreds and fears were not of "Blacks" or "Whites" but of their neighbors. Few Whites feared Nigerian Ibos and few Blacks feared Armenians.