Re: Ishmael Reed: "What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama" Keeping Cool & Caring" NYT

[alice wellintown]

Reed argument is as solid:

1. The President cares about Progressive issues.
2. The President's strategy, to keep cool but care, makes sense.
3. White progressives who expect the President to get loud on issues
should understand that were the President to take their advice, and
abandon is "keep cool but care" stance, he would suffer counter
punches that would damage his fragile coalition.
4. Reed supports this argument with an analogy: the President would
annoy a good many whites and they would either not vote for the
President in the next election or vote against him; "most teachers
[saw] me as an annoyance, and gave me the grades to prove it."
5. While one can argue, and with a Black man in the white house one
may support this argument with the obvious,   that the days of poor
grades and racist assessments generally are behind us, they are not
behind us.
6. Even in academic debate, racist argumentum ad hominem persists.
7. The same racist argumentum ad hominem persists in debates amongst
progressives.
8. White progressives, where these racist ad hominem are more latent
than overt, are kidding themselves and need to understand that the
President is a Black man; he can not act like a white man in the white
house.
9. The President, and his Black and Latino supporters understand that
the President can not lose his cool and the they know his cool is the
best strategy.
10. This understanding of cool comes with the territory so the
President should take the advice of those of us who been there and
done that.
11. This strategy is not about excluding or white progressives; it is
about keeping cool.
12. Peace

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 5:32 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Reed's argument isn't an argument.  He is saying that blacks and feel
> lucky to have a minority in the Presidency (which is probably largely
> true), and that non-minority should respect that by shutting up.  Fuck
> him!  Remember that woman who at the CNN townhall meeting said she was
> exhausted making excuses for him, his lack of leading?  She was black.
>
> This defending a politician lack of performance because he is black,
> by calling the opposition racist, or at the very least insensitive
> reminds me of former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial calling together a
> group of black ministers for a prayer-meeting to ask God to stop the
> violence as a way to racially deflect a much larger group
> simultaneously marching on City Hall at that very moment to protest
> the outrageous execution-style murder of restaurant employees in the
> walk-in fridge.  Inaction and prayer with an overt dose of
> racial-politics were pitted against those that demanded
> accountability.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 3:53 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Reed's argument: he met a self-identified white progressive who called the Tea Party a people's movement, therefore ALL white progressives believe this to be the case, is a noxious contortion of logic.  We jeer at ignorant Tea Baggers who use this idiotic method of pointing to the particular as proof of the general:  I met a black person who was X, therefore ALL black people are X.  It's as ignorant a construction coming from Reed.  Oh, he thinks Clarence Thomas was mistreated by Anita Hill, does he?  How progressive of him.
>