Monday, November 24, 2014

Just SAY IT, Charles Blow

In many ways, Charles Blow nailed it it his column titled: Bigger Than Immigration.
Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Don’t allow yourself to believe that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors.

This hostility and animosity toward this president is, in fact, larger than this president. This is about systems of power and the power of symbols. Particularly, it is about preserving traditional power and destroying emerging symbols that threaten that power. This president is simply the embodiment of the threat, as far as his detractors are concerned, whether they are willing or able to articulate it as such.
But does anyone else get the feeling like he's trying to say something while walking on egg shells? His message is basically the same one I talked about in: Understanding the Threat of a Confederate Insurgency. But he hides behind words like "systems of power" and "power of symbols" and never gets around to saying anything about what those systems and symbols represent: racism.

Perhaps there's a method to his madness because everyone knows what kind of reaction the use of the "r" word gets these days. But lets be real...we all know exactly what he's talking about.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you, Nancy, because yes, we HAVE to say it out loud. I think there is a major requirement that it especially come from those of us who are white who, as people of white privilege, are heard differently and, sometimes, with more shocking impact in calling it out. Thank you for always being someone who does.

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  2. To confine what is going on to racism is to miss a significant part of what he is writing about: Power. Yes, white power, I get that, but it's more about wealthy powerful people who have a set of traditional beliefs who want to keep that power at all costs. In countries where the people who are in power aren't white, for instance Iran or Mexico, the same dynamic exists. People-centric power is always going to be a threat, no matter what it looks like or who the leaders are.

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    Replies
    1. What you are saying is probably true for the wealthy powerful people who oppose President Obama.

      But an awful lot of the hostility and animosity being directed at the President doesn't come from wealthy powerful people.

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    2. Iranian are what? Asian? They sure look "white" to me. Pablo

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