As long as he keeps talking like this, he's got my vote. In the primary.
www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/01/02/deans_blunt_talk_about_race?mode=PF "Dealing with race is about educating white folks," Dean said in an interview Tuesday on a campaign swing through the first primary state where African-American voters will have a major impact. "Not because white people are worse than black people about race but because whites are in the majority, and therefore the behavior of whites has a much bigger influence on hiring practices and so forth and so on than the behavior of African-Americans."
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Uh-huh. Note the careful use of the word "folks" to signal that he is a regular, no-nonsense, down-to-earth guy.
Dean said his own education about unconscious racism began at Yale, where he graduated in 1971. He was trying to get a child from the inner city of New Haven that he was tutoring to talk "proper" English. One of his African-American roommates told him, "Why don't you leave him alone?" He said he had the "traditional white liberal idea that if black people were like us then we'd all be fine. Sort of like the Republican idea. If we all played golf at the same country club, then there wouldn't be any racial problems."
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Here Dean carefully trots out an involved metaphor for the politically suicidal statement "I am a fatuous moron more concerned with observing false social values than with improving anyone's life." Presumably, he didn't keep after the kid to learn standard English. Therefore we can safely assume that the kid is now a successful doctor, attorney, or businessman despite the fact that he talks like Snoop Dogg with a snootful of ganja, or that he is dead or unemployed, but "keepin' it real." You guess which.
Now Dean wants to get white Americans to ask those same questions without raising the hair on their necks. If he succeeds, that would really turn the tables on America's most difficult subject.
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God forbid that if [again, God forbid] he is elected, Dean mind the national store rather than trying to re-educate the population into enlightened ways of feeling. Can you believe that some of your fellow-citizens are actually enthusiastic about the prospect of this watery fleck of curdled yak milk holding high office?