Is this where Obama is coming from?

Barack's wife, Michelle, recently gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine, and she declared that the U.S. is "just downright mean":

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

“The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

1) If we're a nation that is "just downright mean," why in the hell do so many people clamor to come here to live and work?

2) Sloths? Complacents? Meaning what, exactly? (I wonder if George Bush was "complacent" by actually dealing with Saddam Hussein and with radical Islamic terrorists head-on, rather than sort of nit-pick at the problem -- like the administration that preceded him?)

3) The whole nation is "struggling" and "barely making it everyday"?? This statement is just downright ignorant. And stupid.

4) The nation has gotten worse as Michelle Obama has gotten older? In terms of ... ? (That's right -- just don't ask for specifics, especially regarding the Obama's personal lot in life which would make this statement, among others, look downright pathetic.)

Does Barack share this sentiment? Does he really believe that things have deteriorated in America since he was a little boy? If you listen to his speeches, it's easy to get that impression.

Will America go for a man who thinks that ... America sucks? And that only he can save it? Hmm. Many have compared a potential Obama presidency to that of Jimmy Carter. Anyone remember Carter's [in]famous "malaise" speech? Sounds a lot like Barack and Michelle Obama, doesn't it?

If you're wondering about the mindset of Michelle Obama (recall her college thesis), it might be interesting to note her brother's college thesis, “The Nature of Informal Social Structures Within a Prison”:

Trenton State Prison houses inmates mostly from the Trenton and Newark areas. This partially accounts for the racial make-up of the population. Racism, as I will show later, is accounted for as a result of the number of inmates who make up the majority of prisoners.

When one begins to examine the highly unequal numbers of blacks in prison, one cannot begin with the prison itself. In order to understand the significant effect of racism one must examine the whole criminal justice system from arrest to ajudication to incarceration. It is no secret that Black males have and still do account for the majority of men incarcerated in the United States…

In order to understand the disproportion one must realize that, “…if the percentage of Black males in prison had been as low as the proportion of white men, the number of Black men in jail would have been 25,000!” These numbers should be inflated to attain an accurate picture of 1983. These figures only reinforce the notion of institutional racism throughout the criminal justice system.

It was clear after completing the interviews that racism within the prison community is as one ex-guard put it, “…just as the whites, in normal societal situations, they have ‘control’ because they make up the majority.” As a result of being the majority instead of the minority Blacks do to whites on the inside what has been done to them on the outside.

Obviously, Craig Robinson adheres to the "proportionate representation" theory of society, in that if there's any significant deviation from general population figures (in this case, the very high number of black males in prison compared to their overall number in the population), there is something inherently wrong -- usually, and in this case, racism.

If this is an accurate assessment, then the Robinsons (Craig and Michelle) may well be right in that "things have gotten worse" and America "is just mean," etc. But Craig Robinson's theory is more than a highly debatable point. I think most rational people would feel that racism still does play a role in the criminal justice system (and elsewhere), but is it the major factor behind the disproportionate numbers we see in prisons?

If this is the mind-set the Obamas are bringing to the table, they may find it's going to be a very long campaign indeed if they attempt to sell people on it. That is, if they actually bring such issues to the fore.

Posted by Felix at March 5, 2008 04:34 PM | TrackBack