techPresident - Walter Mondale - Comments

It's nice to read it now...

jtelo — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:14:49 -0500

Hi everyone!

It's nice to read this article now, when Obama win the elections! Did you rememeber this Micah L. Sifry, "candidate in American history has ever raised $32 million in a single month--"?

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My perspective...

davemyers — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:30:28 -0500

I'll start from early on in my evolution... I am a biracial man whose father is African-American and mother is Caucasian. My parents met in 1959 when my un-wed mother was in a nursing school where my father was employed as a nurses aide... my mother was engaged to a white man who was attending engineering school. My father had an African-American wife and (5) children at the time of his extra-marital relationship with my mother. At some early point of my mothers pregnancy with me she made the decision to marry her fiance, and to lie to everyone about who the father of her un-born child was... she achieved this by claiming that I had been afflicted with a skin-disease called "melanism".

My mother and step-father had four more children together in the space of nine years after I was born, and we grew up together in a middle-class household in white america where the subject of "race" was never discussed. My earliest recollections of having to be aware of race was when I was asked questions about the color of my skin by other classmates in first grade... "Why was my skin dark?", "Was I adopted?" race was certainly a hot-button issue in 1965-66 when I began school , but any awareness that my mother and step-father had achieved from growing up in their white neighborhoods in the 40's and 50's was insufficient in preparing them for raising a biracial child... and to complicate things, they were both in complete denial of their complicity in my mis-education. When I came home from school after having been asked questions by fellow students from my all-white school district, my mother then explained "the skin-disease story" to me... "other kids with this disease usually have dark blotches all over their bodies, so you should feel fortunate". When I would tell my mother about other boys and girls who would call me names or act aggressively for no apparent reason, I began to understand that I would get no further assistance from her to explain this rationale... my step-father was even more removed from the conversation and would only add, "You know what your mother said".

By the time that my step-father transferred jobs and our family of (7) had moved from the all-white Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Stow to the all-white school district of Portville in Western up-state N.Y. it was the spring of 1970 and I was in fourth grade, and already the veteran of many racial incidents and altercations between myself, classmates, and even some adults. My four younger siblings had also been told the same story, and had to explain the same things to their friends when asked why they had a brother who was black... "Hey, did your mother fool around a little bit??" I remember how much that hurt me when I heard it, and I'm sure that they felt just as badly when they did... nonetheless, this was a "subject" that we never discussed as a family, not once, at least in my presence.

I was taught through my observations of my mother and step-father to keep quiet about things that I wasn't sure about, and I was also taught to ignore the obvious.

As I matured into my teen-aged years and began to experience societies issues and insecurities in coming to terms with this countries racial in-equalities during the 70's, I felt an increasing need to rationalize and then codify the information that my mother had given me, regardless of what I was beginning to realize inside... I felt a growing discomfort/conflict, yet there was no one in my life to offer any prospective... I had learned that black people were a part of society that we didn't talk about. ( There was a black family in my small town, and they were poor and lived in a run-down house near the river...I never had any opportunity or reason to associate with them)

I was a "B" student and also began taking an interest in sports where I was above average. Meeting other schools and student athletes were opportunities to then be exposed to populations that had not been inured by my story yet...I was just another black kid to them.

Communicating my experiences to my mother and step-father was difficult because they had no experience with racial prejudice, therefore when I had problems with other children it would be looked at as an issue that "I" had in getting along with others(as well as intra-family sibling issues).
Because "race" was being ruled-out entirely, by my mothers denial of my father, she could not logically use that rationale to explain any conflicts that I would have. My step-fathers complicity in this was to blindly support my mothers viewpoint.

The "white" viewpoint has always been that blacks(black society) were pretty well cared for, and what contact they did have would be polite and careful... What, with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts being passed, the playing field had been leveled.(re: my mother and step-father's generation)
The feelings and comfort of my mother were apparently what was important, and her inculcation had to have been partly comprised of the idea that white society acted as the gate-keepers and care-takers of an infantilized black population.

questions:

How has black society formed its identity?

What role models have been used, and how does white society react to positive
black role models today? (Are they held to a more critical prism??)

Is there enough information readily available for black people to easily form a
positive racial identity?

Is it important that black society is able to connect accurately the dots of its social
evolution in America? and is it also important that white society can connect those
same dots??

What is White Privilege?

What is White awareness?

What is Whiteness?

What about Affirmative Action?

Is Race just a social construct?

How do we improve our society in America?

Is there any other way(besides the attrition of the old guard) to achieve this??

Dave Myers
www.discussrace.com

The Movement vs. The Machine

Jo Lee — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:36:30 -0500

Great post. Having worked for Israeli companies while working out of the US, I tip my hat to you for being so coherent in such a sleepless state.

I’d like to tease out more fully one facet of your argument that identifies the important role that the Internet has played in Obama’s campaign. The power in Obama’s “Yes We Can” messaging stems from the authenticity of his movement-oriented politics. Obama is able to inspire not because he is talking about a royal “we” but about us as a movement that has been growing since the Dean campaign, MoveOn and the netroots turned the Internet into a line of communication between youth and politics, and a forum for a diaspora of progressives. The Yes We Can video’s success depends on this movement politics. Without the critical mass of nodes on the Internet that make up this movement, the viral capacity of the Yes We Can video would not have existed, despite its slickness. What this movement is, I’m not exactly sure though a defining trait is its call for transparency, inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism. However, I firmly believe that Obama’s “movement versus machine” framing owes a great debt to these political forbearers that realized the Internet’s low-cost, bottom-up broadcasting potential and wired us to demand a greater voice in our future.

Paul and the Internet vs the Old Media

johnfkosanke — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:45:38 -0500

The old media has all but crowned Hillary the queen. They like Obama because he likes big government. But they like Hillary much better, because she represents the established establishment.

On the "right", is a much different picture. If one had followed the media push, one would have clearly noted that Giuliani was the media darling from the beginning. Immediately after 9-1-1, major players were already suggesting a run for the former mayor. Of course, the Internet was not kind to Giuliani. The big media couldn't stop the skeletons from popping up.

McCain was the second choice of the old media. Today the top stories are declaring that he has the Republican nomination all but wrapped up. There is no mention of the likely brokered convention. But they wouldn't be terribly disappointed with a Romney victory.

While the old media dislikes Huckabee, they have given him a surprising amount of attention. According to some reports, the Democratic party is holding its attacks on the preacher candidate until after the convention, in the hopes that he secures the nomination, giving them an "easy kill".

But it will be difficult for any of the pro-war candidates to win the general election, with the large 70% public disapproval of the war - which is increasingly seen as offensive and ineffective. The great shifting of the Congress to the left in the last congressional election is largely attributable to anti-war sentiment.

And then there's Ron Paul, whose political positions have not changed one iota in 30 years. When he ran for president in 1988, he got no media attention, and scored about 1/2 of a percent of the vote in the general election. Today the only attention he is given is from the renegade media, cable, alternative press, and, of course, the Internet.

The unfortunate have-nots, with only TV and major newspapers and magazines as information sources, are completely in the dark about the anti-war constitutionalist, who would like to do some major cancer surgery on the Republic. They haven't heard of the grassroots fundraising records, which would have been the headline of every major newspaper - were the money earned by any other candidate. They haven't heard about any of his second place primary finishes. Heck, a lot of people still don't even know who he is.

Some reporters have bet their lives on Paul's defeat. They have declared him "unelectable" since he began his campaign in March of 2007. Clearly the old media still largely decides the elections. But it's just a question of time until the Internet becomes the new big media - that is, if the Internet remains free.