Must-read piece

Saturday, March 15, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Orlando Lima: "[Geraldine Ferraro] theorized that a self-made black guy with a Muslim name has a political advantage over a white woman who is the wife of a two-term President." 

I was reading along until I came to this bit. 

"When liberals need black votes they come into our communities and act like they're down." 

Okay, that may be prejudice, not racism, but no matter what it isn't cool.  

I am a liberal, and I feel disempowered too, and I feel that the pols come around and ask for my vote and money and that's the end of that. Even Obama has yet to prove he's any different.  

We desperately need to look for things we have in common, and we all have barriers inside ourselves that we can't see. I'll listen when you say I have a barrier, but you have to do the same.  

If you make being a liberal equivalent with being shallow and silly, you're buying into a Republican frame of reference, and you make it impossible for us to be powerful. And that's not something I'm going to support. 

The lesson of Reverend Wright is that blacks have bad racial attitudes that balance those held by whites. Yes the whites started it, but that isn't going to help anyone (my ancestors were in Eastern Europe while that was hapening). There were reasons we were scared of blacks when I was growing up in NYC, they may not have had anything to do with reality, or maybe there was some reality to it. Remember there were riots then, and the cities were burning. MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, but so were some white people. (To be fair, white people did most of the assassinating.) 

Obama is definitely a leader in league with MLK, I watched him yesterday on TV carefully explaining what was happening, but not using words that would give the press guys any new issues to hang on him. What he's doing is hard, and great. Without Obama we wouldn't have had a reason to listen to Orlando Lima's story, above, and he probably wouldn't have had a reason to tell it.  

If Obama wins, we'll be going through a lot more of it, but going through it is a lot better than living with it. At some point we're going to have to get the racism out in the open and deal with it, all of us, it's just one of many items on our national to-do list that we have been so totally neglecting.