I’m more amused than offended by this:
Here’s an excerpt from the Esquire interview.
Here’s hoping Blago has a black cellmate when he goes to jail. I wish I could hear the explanation he’ll be making for this comment.
It’s the hair.
Maybe if it’s an alien brain parasite that’s controlling him - and I could believe that.
He cites (quoted on TV this morning) that he shined shoes, too, as part of his “evidence” for this belief.
Who was it that said this same thing about Bill Clinton? He was America’s “first black president” because he grew up poor, liked McDonald’s, played the saxophone, etc. Someone said the exact same thing about Bill Clinton, more or less - some black woman. Oh yeah - Toni Morrison.
Blagojevich was obviously using a metaphor, the same metaphor Morrison was using. This is a valid thing to talk about and it’s just another manifestation of how the real class divide in this country is not race based but class based. Race is used as a smokescreen to distract people from that. When Morrison called Clinton black, and when Blago called himself black, they were both saying the same thing, and ultimately it was more about their social class than the color of their skin.
Of course, you can never expect anyone to have any reasoned discourse on this stuff when a white man does something as unbelievably stupid as this. The ZOMGRACISMZOMGRACISMZOMGRACISM sirens and flashing lights start spinning, heads start exploding, pitchforks come out, people resign, etc.
Aww, and here I thought Egmond Codfried was back. 
Dissappointing. (Too bad he’s banned too, he’d’ve loved this thread.)
Blago is a true looney.
I love Blago. Every time I come across an article or a television bit that features him, I pay attention. He is guaranteed to say some hilarious shit. Guaran-fucking-teed.
If it was anyone other than my looney ex-governor, I’d give him more credit. As it stands, I’ll just continue to label him an attention whore.
I don’t know why he’s even trying to draw attention to himself at this point. I guess he has nothing to lose, as far as credibility.
He’s going to be on the next Celebrity Apprentice. That should be interesting.
“Rod, you’re fired.”
“No I’m not, fuck you. I’m not going fucking anywhere!”
As Ferrett Herder said, this is really more about attention-whoring than anything else. I’m not particularly offended by it, and I doubt that even the Sharptons of the world take this guy seriously enough to be incensed about it. The fact is the guy has lost so much credibility, he could say he’s a supporter of NAMBLA and most people would just brush it off as him being his usual wacky self.
Money, basically. And just attention, I suspect. He always tried Really Big Projects in the state of Illinois when he was governor (open-road tolling system - with his name plastered at the top of each toll archway, health insurance coverage for all kids, etc.), and some analysts suspected that he was making a move for President until Obama’s popularity exploded and got him into the office, while meanwhile things went off the rails for Blago. (When your own Lt. Governor doesn’t speak to you for over a year, things are ugly. They’re uglier when your father-in-law, a Chicago City Council member, also stops speaking to you over political/nepotism matters.)
He’s on a book tour right now. A cheeky quote or two might draw more crowds in to buy his books and give him attention. His wife was fired from her fundraising job over lack of job performance. The two are used to being the toast of the political community and now, nothing, they’re outcasts. So it looks like it’s anything to spur book sales, reality TV invites (his wife had been on one in his place when he wasn’t allowed out of the country), and whatever else they can dig up, to keep the money coming in.
Morrison was making a comment about Bill Clinton, not a self-aggrandizing statment about herself. That’s one reason her comment was seen as valid. The other, of course, was that she’s not an attention whore and a crook.
Nobody here has said the comment was racist. As for why he is trying to draw attention to himself? He craves it, and he has nothing else. And I think he may be deluded enough to believe people will really accept his side of the story, which is that he is being persecuted for standing up for the little guy.
“And ain’t I a convict?”
Wouldn’t that make nearly all poor white people “black” too? I’m not sure that makes any sense or furthers a discussion in any helpful way. (Though I’m a bit surprised to learn that according to this definition, my practically-Aryan husband is “black.”)
Remember, as we were reminded this week, Obama is “light-skinned.” Depending on the cellmate, Blago could argue “I’m blacker than Barack Obama, but not blacker than you.” 
Another interesting scenario would be if he gets an Aryan cellmate; would the skinhead feel obliged to beat the crap out of him?
“Shining shoes” as an indicator of blackness is dicey, I think.
It’s a seemingly-silly definition, which upon further scrutiny reflects a larger class-divide related issue in our society. It’s not a definition that any scholarly people would use; Morrison’s use of the term was in a metaphorical way, as I already said before. The stereotypical “black experience” in America is, indeed, not really a part of Obama’s upbringing at all, and Bill Clinton does, indeed, have more in common in his upbringing with the “black experience” in America than Barack Obama does. But don’t expect anybody to be able to reasonably discuss this stuff, because people are so sensitive about racial issues that they explode in a hellstorm of criticism and accusation you say the “wrong thing”.
Yes. I actually hear this fairly often out of people of all races when juxtaposing a poor white person to a black person who is well off. “X non-black person is blacker than X black person; He grew up in a poor neighborhood, and his mother worked two jobs,” and the like. I frequently hear the terms “black” and “poor/working class” used interchangeably.
It just means hard, blue-collar work. It’s not a “Yes, massah, shine yo shoes” thing.
But Blago used that as evidence of his “blackness”.