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Entry: Obama is Right Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/obama_is_right#23943 Post contents: Kindly let me explain why US Senator Obama's Pennsylvania remarks created the buzz they did. Although Obama and the media focused on the use of "bitter," there was no evidence adduced outside of a few interviews, here and there, that there was a factual basis for such a claim among rural or small town dwellers. And in fact, the buzz was not about bitterness, it was about something that the diverse white American peoples have not experienced on such a lordly scale before. To be honest with you, it is something that diverse white Americans have handed out over and over again, but this time we got a dose of it and it didn't feel good. (This does not excuse Obama because it just shows what a tin ear he has when it comes to delicate feelings about people. He'd already shown that with "acting white" and "typical white person," so he didn't need to do it again.) To make this clear, remember how an NAACP convention hissed and booed presidential candidate Perot when he went at their invitation to speak and he used the term, "you people"? Most of us didn't understand what would be so distasteful about such a label, but it is on the same spectrum that Obama played with when he so casually named and described the diverse white American peoples the way he did. I know that's not going to go down well, but in fact the number one property we own is our name and the right to describe the cultural, social, and political groups to which we belong. When anyone starts to name or describe anyone in a group of which he or she is not a member, that creates feelings of discomfort and dismay. It's not what is said, it's the claim to have the right to name and describe the other which is always based on a claim to supremacy, and it's very unsettling to get the treatment. So that's the secret to understanding why Obama's remarks naming and describing what is to him, the other, have the power to jar one's worldview. It didn't help that he more-or-less called small town dwellers racists and isolations in the same sentence, but it was his claim to have the right to name and describe the other that mattered. There's a lot more of this coming so get ready. Sent at: 2008 11 23