[quote]vroom wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
No, it’s in his book. I’ve actually read it. Have you?
Apparently, according to the snopes link, your reading comprehension is pretty abysmal.
According to some folks in another thread, they don’t think you should even have the right to vote…[/quote]
The snopes article largely agrees with the comments above, the writers have just given it a more generous understanding than it deserves. What are we to make of this:
[quote]“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No ? it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am …”
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people …
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.
[/quote]
He is distancing himself from his multi-racial background, (the one he shared with other multi-racial friends in Hawaii), in an effort to cast himself as a black man. This is largely the story in “Dreams…” - he is one thing but tries to make himself another, which has led to a certain bitterness and radicalism that he need not have embraced. It also led to him attending Trinity, where racial antagonisms were cultivated.
Snopes’ reading of the statement about Marty Kaufman is more generous than it should be. Obama was stating that he distrusted Kaufman partially because he IS white, and at the same time justifying his prejudice because Kaufman admitted it was a problem.
In fact, Obama broke up with his white girlfriend in 1985 precisely because she didn’t have the racial heritage Obama had attached himself to.