myopiclunacy.com

awesome piece – I love Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Lacewell – here they are analyzing Beck and Limbaugh among others trying their darndest to race bait and stoke people’s fears of Obama’s initiatives being pro-Black rather than pro-American. This is why Obama dare not address race – and we saw with the Gates comments – it’s a battle he cannot win. He has to let others fight that fight. What the hell is Biden doing these days anyways besides insulting Russia?

wrt the conversation on race, MHL linked to this article she wrote about Katrina and how whites and blacks interpreted the problem of the botched response to Hurricane Katrina ( incompetent governance vs systematic racism ) and how it affected the views of how to solve the problems:

Do You Know What It Means: Mapping Emotion in the Aftermath of Katrina – Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

Abstract

This article explores the interconnection of race, politics and emotion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Americans of different races perceive vastly different realities about the events in New Orleans, but black and white Americans felt different about what happened. The affective responses of African Americans were more pronounced than those of their white counterparts. These emotions are rooted in America’s racial history and it resonance in contemporary US society. Using data from several national surveys conducted in the weeks following September 11, 2001, and the weeks following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this article maps the differences in emotional responses among black and white Americans to both disasters. The survey data is used to suggest that Americans’ political and racial beliefs were significantly related to their psychological experiences in the weeks following Katrina.

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