unionist:

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Originally posted by KenS:
I have substantively disagreed with you, and said that Obama was taking the difficult step of addressing the 'nuanced' resentments of white America, which you have dismissed and [apparently] 'answered' with more snide comments.

You are wrong. Obama addressed nothing. What did he say he would do about race issues in the U.S.? He made some pathetic noises about spending more money on schools.

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Really? How about the following. There is more in his speech, but I’m willing to rest my case on this piece alone.

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But it is not only black Americans, he went on, who harbour anger and resentment. “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” he said. “Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything; they've built it from scratch.” When they are forced to bus their kids across town to preserve racially mixed schools, or hear of a black person landing a job or a university placement because of affirmative action, “resentment builds over time.”

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I’m going to excerpt from my comment after you first said there was nothing more in Obama’s speech about race than platitudes.

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Platitudes!?

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Sure, there is nothing new or original in his words. But you have no idea how difficult it is to utter those kind of words in any kind of public space in the US where the audience is not self-selecting... let alone a candidate for the presidency saying it.

If I spoke those kind of words in a US university classroom, I would have to be hyper-aware of how some of the students are going to take those words and what they would do with them.

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You ignored that substantive challenge of your claim.

And you continued to igore it when I pointed out that if these are platitudes then you must be easy for you to find and share with us instances of where someone has braoched these sensitive topics nationally to a non self-selecting audience.

Unless you deign to substantively back up your claim then your comments such as those in the quote at the top- which you have repeated numerous times- deserve to be dismissed as expressions of some combination of ignorance and ideological fetish.

[ 20 March 2008: Message edited by: KenS ]