Those are just haters and losers who know He’s the Greatest Person Ever but refuse to admit it because they’re jealous of Him.
Apparently he was unaware that they would be fact-checking him during the interview. Probably part of the reason for his whining.
He’s clueless and the event didn’t directly concern or benefit him, so it doesn’t enter his awareness.
Not my culture or family history so I won’t go into details I’d likely get wrong but some people draw a distinction between those Americans who are descendants of slaves in this country and those who are descendants of people who were not US slaves. This is not, from my observation, anything close to a universal opinion among Black people, whether or not they fall into the category of “descended from slaves”. This came up with Barack Obama as well, being a descendant of a recent African immigrant rather than slaves. People outside of the ethnic and cultural group for whom this is important frequently don’t see it and don’t get it. I don’t have a personal opinion on this except that I acknowledge that the viewpoint exists.
I’m not sure a White boy should be attempting to make those sorts of distinctions to a Black audience.
There are still times and places when race matters in this country whether or not it should.
Actually, Obama is half Black and half White. It’s a legacy of the US-style of slavery and the one-drop rule that there is this notion that one MUST be JUST ONE racial category. Mixed race people people have long been pressured to identify solely with one side of their heritage in this country, and never with the White part of it. The reasons why this is so are probably not on topic here.
You could see this with Trump who in that interview keep on and on about how Kamala said she was Indian until “suddenly” she said she was Black. It’s like he can’t understand that she is both. She has always been both. Other countries who do not share the same racial hang-ups as the US usually wrap their heads around this much better than the US does.
First of all, Jamaica had chattel slavery every bit as brutal and dehumanizing as that in the United States. Maybe splitting those hairs matters to some, but if we’re talking about “descent from chattel slaves” then Kamala qualifies. Now, the social structure of Jamaica post-slavery was and is different than that of the US and maybe there’s a context where that makes a difference, I wouldn’t know, but anyone asserting that there weren’t chattel slaves in Harris’ ancestry is ignorant of even superficial knowledge of Jamaican history.
With Mr. Obama there is a distinction that I think is sometimes lost on us White folk who, when asked about our ancestry, can provide some detail. I don’t refer to myself as “European-American”, I can say my paternal grandparents were Russian Jews, Jewish subtype Ashkenazi, and my maternal grandfather came from Germany, and my maternal grandmother was a descendant of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Hunger/Potato Famine in the mid 1800’s. Meanwhile, when growing up if I asked some of my Black classmates where in the world their ancestors came from the answer was a very non-specific “Africa”. Where in Africa? What nations or languages? No one knew, that information was deliberately destroyed. Some were lighter-skinned and might have known they has Irish or English ancestry… but usually unspoken, but known (certainly known to adults), was that that heritage was the result of a master raping one of their female ancestors. Now, I don’t know what to tell you if you can’t see the distinction there, but it makes a mystery of a family’s past with a dollop of sexual violence on top. Mr. Obama, however, does not share that cultural amputation - he can say he is “Kenyan-American”, he knows exactly where his father came from, he knows the particular ethnic group his father is from, he has been back to visit his African family, and his family wound up in America not via kidnapping but by his father choosing to pursue education here. In that, Obama is closer to a White American of European descent than the millions of people who history was ripped from their ancestors. Sure, Obama has faced the racist disadvantages a dark skin gets you in the US but his family’s experience isn’t necessarily typical of that of most people viewed as Black in the US.
Is that a distinction worth making? Apparently to some people. Almost certainly in some contexts.
^ This.
For 500 years White people in power in North America have been making the decisions on who is and isn’t this or that racial group.
Yes, but the presence and role of free Black people in Jamaican society even while there was chattel slavery, when and how slavery ended in Jamaica, and the society that grew out of those changes were significantly different than what happened in the US.
I can say the same - I know different White people than you do. While far from universal there are some very racist White folks who still very much subscribe to the one drop rule. We have even had a discussion about White men who wouldn’t date or associate with a White woman who had ever dated, much less had a more involved relationship, with a Black man in the past here on the Dope.. The person who made post #160 in that thread was pretty clear on his views. That was a mere 10 years ago. Apparently the “one drop” he objected to wasn’t blood but other bodily fluid(s).
Well, the US is a country of 330 million people spread over most of a continent, I would expect there to be different sorts and different experiences.
Trump’s handlers pulled him off the stage thirty minutes (or so) early. They wouldn’t have done that if he was doing what they planned for him to do.
The suggestion that this is part of a plan is just ridiculous – it’s exactly what it looks like; a racist old man flailing.
Granted, it may have been a bad plan. Counterprogramming isn’t some kind of arcane art, it’s just doing a big event to take some press from your opponent. But if your appearance gets you so much bad press that it offsets the benefit of stealing attention, then it’s a pretty dumb plan.
Trump provided at least 10 clippable moments that I could count of him saying the dumbest, most hamfisted lines, just handing enough free oppo research to the Harris campaign to last at least 4 weeks.
So yeah, maybe he had a strategy in mind, but we don’t have to hand it to him for being a strategic thinker. He’s doing the same dumb stuff he always has, and it’s not working anymore.
So how does any of this rise to the level of impact of Hallary’s “deplorables” comment?
I’ve gotta figure, “She became black” (or whatever exactly he said) oughta have legs!
There are, believe it or not, people alive today who make a big deal about who one’s ancestors were. They would happily play up having a king or queen in their distant past, or even just an earl. They would feel shame if an ancestor was a thief or murderer and try to hide that from the world.
Absolutely they would hold a slave in someone’s past against them. Regrettably, I do have regular contact with bigots and I recall one of them saying they found Obama acceptable because he did not have slaves in his family tree but “respectable” people. I didn’t ask for further elaboration on that statement.
Absolutely anyone dark skinned in the US is vulnerable to racism, but it’s not just about that. Chattel slavery had extensive cultural effects on African-Americans who are the descendants of slaves.
Lincoln might have signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves but by today’s standards he was quite racist even if in his own time he might have been seen as a enlightened. I’m not sure that comparing himself to Lincoln is a winning strategy in 2024.
^ This.
Trump doesn’t have to win the majority of the Black vote, he just has to peel away votes from Kamala Harris.
Well, some of us are hoping that but until November we won’t know for sure, will we?
The irony is that it’s Republicans who are accusing Harris of being a DEI hire. If anyone should be forced to define the term, it’s the people who originally used it, not the journalists asking Trump if he agrees with them. In that sense, Trump’s misdirection worked; he shifted the conversation away from what he believes to something else.
It is, probably, a good thing that the journalists on stage were asked to define “DEI”, rather than the people who use “DEI hire” as a perjorative.
No doubt to a round of "atta-boy"s and high-fives. They probably told him he nailed it early and there was no reason to continue on. Now he can say “the blacks are now totally behind me!” thanks to this appearence. He’ll never admit he was wrong, about anything, and just claim total victory. Such is the delusion.
It pleases the ear to hear audience members laughing at him a jeering while he is maundering on stuff he is stupidly ignorant about.
I wouldn’t expect Kamala to do it, but someone could recount her upbringing, comparing it to Klan Dad teaching his son about discriminating against persons of color. He was a racist asshole right out of the gate!
Or that wouldn’t dare be openly hostile to him to his face. That is the thing that he has trouble with, a room where people don’t care if they “lose access” by pushing back or calling him out.
“What disrespect, never seen so much disrespect” is going to be his takeaway. He feels the world is required to be all “oh, Mr. President” at him and just let him ramble on, note how he is even with friendly media figures who are trying to redirect to stop him from looking worse, he just barges right ahead. Remember his demeanor in the NY court room where he was forced to just sit there, shut up and take it.
On reddit, someone mentioned how he got off to a good start with the Birther nonsense, and so he’s playing the same cards again. I opined that it was like a guy who won big the first time he played poker by drawing to an inside straight. Now, he keeps trying to draw to that same inside straight, and can’t figure out why he keeps losing.
Yikes–I missed your note to them. Sorry!
ISTR Charlize Theron, who is presumably not insane, having difficulty with that particular question on the US Census.
Then I’m going to question the “presumably not insane” bit.
As a teenager, in Pakistan in the 1980s, I bet if you asked my classmates to interpret that question, very few would be confused. And these are kids who had very little exposure to western media beyond BBC World Service on short wave radio, and almost none of whom had ever been to the United States even on vacation.
I don’t know if she was trying to be cute or disingenuous, but presumably she’s not that dumb.
Hoo boy. I’m amazed at how I can still be surprised how awful trump can be. And trump’s handlers letting him try to deliver the idea that Harris is not ‘Black enough’, if that’s what was happening, is a stupid miscalculation on their part. Not that tactics like that can’t work-- Karl Rove was the evil genius behind George W. Bush and other Repubs, who was successful at attacking opponents on their strengths (Swift Boat Veterans Against Kerry).
But Rove created ‘whisper campaigns’ behind the scenes to do his dirty work-- he’d never let W, who never met a sentence he couldn’t mangle, attempt that sort of thing. Those kinds of calculated wedge issue tactics require a certain rhetorical skill and subtlety. Using trump to try to deliver that kind of message is like using a meat cleaver to try to perform an appendectomy.
And trump’s overt, gratuitous hostility was astounding. I didn’t see those panelists being hostile to trump, as he claimed, at all-- they were simply asking pointed, relevant questions of a Presidential candidate…like, the way journalists are supposed to do.
Interesting analysis on cnn.com this morning contemplating how the media should cover his rhetoric. The conclusion was that it shouldn’t be covered, to deprive him of media ‘oxygen’, and that having trump at the NABJ conference was a mistake. But I don’t know if I agree with that. I think trumpster fires like this should be highlighted. People need to be reminded, over and over, just how horrible he really is. The voters who love the bombastic nature of these tantrums were already going to vote for him anyway.
I bit the bullet and read his X posts since then. He’s proudly claiming that he “crushed it.”
Well, over on Breitbart they’re saying he schooled them.
Remember, we live in a world where people can and do find someplace online that validates their views.
I’m guessing as a white South African, she doesn’t want people to think she’s trying to be “clever” by calling herself African-American.
Maybe that’s true, but does it matter? The Breitbart audience was always going for Trump, and that voter pool isn’t getting any larger.
It’s very much possible trump was thinking that he’ll counterprogram Harris by giving the base some red meat to chew on. But what a dumb strategy. He’s not reaching new voters, and providing mountains of ammo to be used against him with swing voters.