Rudy Giuliani: Electing Obama has 'taken us back 40 or 50 years on race relations'
Rudy Giuliani: Electing Obama has 'taken us back 40 or 50 years on race relations'
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani blamed Barack Obama — the nation's first Black president — for a deterioration of race relations in the United States. On his Sunday radio program, Giuliani called Democrats "the party of slavery." "These miserable anti-American leaders of the party of slave.....
You're viewing a single thread.
Adolph Reed Jr has probably the best response to Obama from the left, a black political scientist himself who was still alive when Jim Crow laws were in effect in New Orleans and lived through the aftermath and written countless books on things like race relations and black politics. This was published in 1996:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
So, Obama was too presidential? He held the general appeal to be elected, so he wasn't “my” type of activist? Instead of agitating for better race relations, he simply exercised to office of President, as an inspirational leader regardless of skin color, and set an example for all to follow? The horror
Would you say we are in an improved state today vs Obama's time? America is in a degrading state right now and Obama was hugely influential in this system. Trump basically created his political brand in a similar fashion to Obama's.
If you seriously think Obama was good explain how things are better now. You do realize about 13% of Obama voters supported Trump? Arguably Trump won because of former Obama supporters.
True, I agree that President Obama hasn’t done anything for the country lately. The guy is really slacking off. Thanks, Obama
He said on Pod Save America the other week that we have collective blame for what's going on in Gaza. Do you have blame for that? I think of you more highly than he does apparently.
And what did he do, approved drones to kill kids at weddings and other civilian bombings and atrocities in Afghanistan, knowing full well how terrible it was going but not wanting to take the L? Come on you don't need to stoop to the level of pretending this was a good person. He was a great brand and orator with mass public appeal that sold neoliberal capitalism as something new and different, the same economic arrangement that caused the situation you're currently in was something he proudly promoted, and it led to fascism, just like what we were all saying at the time from the black left.