1. OBAMA CONCLUDES "THAT'S JUST HOW WHITE FOLKS WILL DO YOU"
After listing a few examples of racism directed at him by whites, Obama concludes:
"That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some.It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know that they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn." pg 80
2. OBAMA SAYS WHITE PEOPLE ARE AFRAID AND HAVE DEMONS
Barack Obama, referring to his reading of the book "Heart of Darkness:"
"...the book teaches me things," I said, "About white people, I mean. See, the book's not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance its all there, in what's said and what's left unsaid."
"So I read the book to help me understand what makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate." (emphasis added). Pg 103
3. OBAMA SAYS THE OTHER RACE WILL ALWAYS REMAIN MENACING AND APART
"The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien and apart." Pg 124.
4.OBAMA STOPPED TELLING PEOPLE HIS MOTHER WAS WHITE BECAUSE HE DIDN'T WANT TO INGRATIATE HIMSELF TO WHITES
"..I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites..." pg xiv
5. OBAMA SAYS WHITES SPOKE ENDLESS FALSEHOODS ABOUT BLACKS
"To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black." pg 110.
6. OBAMA SAYS THAT THE INSTINCTS OF MANY WHITE PEOPLE OF HIS GRANDPARENT'S GENERATION ARE LIKE THOSE OF THE MOB
"...for many white people of my grandparent's generation and background the instincts ran in an opposite direction, the direction of the mob." pg 21
7.OBAMA ACKNOWLEDGES HIS GENERAL DISTRUST OF WHITE PEOPLE
"It was obvious that certain whites could be exempted from the general category of our distrust," pg 81 (emphasis added).
8. OBAMA SAYS WHITES ARE PHANTOMS TO BE EXPUNGED FROM DREAMS
"Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality-that whites were not only phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program." Pg 202
9. OBAMA RIPS WHITE AMERICA FOR MOVING TO SUBURBS -- SAYS WHITES DO IT TO DENY THE LINK BETWEEN BLACKS AND WHITES
"And while none of this was unique to black politicians or black nationalists-Ronald Reagan was doing quite well with his brand of verbal legerdemain, and white America seemed ever willing to spend vast sums of money on suburban parcels and private security forces to deny the indissoluble link between black and white-it was blacks who could least afford such make-believe." (emphasis added). Pg 203
10. OBAMA SAYS BLACK NATIONALISM - A STEADY ATTACK ON THE WHITE RACE - WOULD BE JUSTIFIED IF IT COULD DELIVER
"Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people's brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race!
This process of displacement, this means of engaging in self-criticism while removing ourselves from the object of criticism, helped explain the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the lives of drug addicts and criminals. But if it was especially well suited to those at the bottom rungs of American life, it also spoke to all the continuing doubts of the lawyer who had run hard for the gold ring yet still experienced the awkward silence when walking into the clubhouse; those young college students who warily measured the distance between them and life on Chicago's mean streets, with the danger that distance implied; all the black people who, it turned out, shared with me a voice that whispered inside them -- "You don't really belong here."
"In a sense, then, Rafiq was right when he insisted that, deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward. And as I thought about Ruby and her blue eyes, the teenagers calling each other 'schvartza' and worse, I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq wasn't also right in preferring that that anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to the the task." (emphasis orginal).
"It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions-between individuals of goodwill and those wished me ill, betweem active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I'd discovered that I couldn't escape it if I tried.
And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate time called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, time were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence. (emphasis added)
"If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq." Pgs 198-201
11. OBAMA BRAGS ABOUT HIS TRICKS
"It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved--such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time." pg 94
12. OBAMA FOUND HIMSELF ACTING "CRAZY" IN THE STREETS OF NEW YORK AFTER SEEKING INSPIRATION FROM FORMER BLACK PANTHER LEADER
"The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments. Every path to change was well trodden, every strategy exhausted. And with each defeat, even those with the best of intentions could end up further and further removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve. Or just plain crazy. I suddenly realized that I was talking to myself in the middle of the street. People on their way home from work were cutting a small arc around me, and I thought I recognized a couple of Columbia classmates in the crowd, their suit jackets thrown over their shoulders, carefully avoiding my glance." (emphasis added). pg 139-140
13. OBAMA CALLS REAGAN DIRTY, AMERICANS MANIC AND SELF ABSORBED
"When classmates in college asked me just what a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead ,I'd pronounce the need for change.
Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on his dirty deeds.
Change in the country, manic and self-absorbed." Pg 133
14. OBAMA DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS A WESTERNER NOT ENTIRELY AT HOME IN THE WEST
"...but for me that only underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers." Pg 301.
15. OBAMA CONSIDERED HIMSELF "A SPY BEHIND ENEMY LINES" WHEN HE WORKED IN CORPORATE AMERICA
"Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived at my mid-manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal..." Pg 135
16. OBAMA ATTENDED SOCIALIST CONFERENCES AT COOPER UNION IN NEW YORK
"Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences that I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem or Brooklyn during the summers-a few of the many diversions that New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at the Rockefeller Center." pg 122
17.OBAMA WENT OUT OF HIS WAY TO CHOOSE MARXIST PROFESSORS AS HIS FRIENDS
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." pg 100
18. OBAMA HUNG OUT WITH RADICALS, GROUND CIGARETTES OUT IN HALLWAY CARPET, BECAUSE HE WAS ALIENATED
"We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated." pg 101
19. IN COLLEGE OBAMA AND HIS FRIENDS WOULD GO ON BINGES
"I tried to change the subject, but Reggie was on a roll. "I'm telling you Regina, it was wild. When the maids showed up on monday morning, we were all still sitting in the hallway, looking like zombies. Bottles everywhere. Cigarette butts. Newspapers. That spot where Jimmy threw up...Reggie turned to me and started to laugh, spilling more beer on the rug. "You remember, don't you man? drek was so bad those little old Mexican ladies started to cry. "Dios Mio" one of 'em says, and the other starts patting her on the back. Oh drek, we were crazy..." pg 109
20. OBAMA SAYS HIS FATHER GAVE HIM AN IMAGE TO LIVE UP TO
"And I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint." pg 129
21. OBAMA ON HIS MUSLIM AND CATHOLIC STUDIES
"In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn't overly concerned. Be respectful, she'd say.
In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes and then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words." Pg 154.
22. OBAMA PUBLICLY DISPARAGES AND EMBARASSES CATHOLIC PRIESTS IN CHICAGO WHO HELPED HIM
"Part of the problem was our base, which-in the city at least-had never been large: eight Catholic parishes flung across several neighborhoods, all with black congregations but all led by white priests. They were isolated men, these priests, mostly of polish or Irish descent, men who had entered the seminary in the sixties intending to serve the poor and heal racial wounds but who lacked the zeal of their missionary forefathers;kinder men, perhaps better men, but also softer for their modernity." Pg 166
23. OBAMA KNEW THAT REV WRIGHT HAD BEEN INVOLVED WITH ISLAM AND BLACK NATIONALISM BEFORE TRINITY UNITED
"He had grown up in Philadelphia, the son of a Baptist minister. He had resisted his father's vocation at first, joining the Marines out of college, dabbling with liquor, Islam and black nationalism." Pg 282.
24. OBAMA KNEW FROM THE FIRST SERMON HE HEARD REV WRIGHT PREACH THAT WRIGHT USED THE PULPIT TO BLAME WHITES FOR THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS
Barack Obama quoting the first sermon he ever heard Rev Wright preach, "The Audacity of Hope":
"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere... That's the world! On which hope sits!" Pg 293
25. OBAMA DRANK HEAVILY AND TRIED DRUGS ENTHUSIASTICALLY
"I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically," pg 93
26. OBAMA SAYS POT, BOOZE AND COCAINE HELPED HIM
"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped,and booze;maybe a little blow when you could afford it." (emphasis added) pg 93
27. OBAMA CONFIRMS THAT HE WOULD WRITE THE SAME THINGS TODAY
"I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine--that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be iconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research." State Senator Barack Obama, 2004. pg ix
28. OBAMA ADMITS THAT HIS BOOK REVEALS SOME THINGS ABOUT HIM THAT CAUSE HIM SOME SHAME -- AND THAT HE HASN'T BEEN ABLE TO CHANGE
"Still. I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed. Not because the past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist concious choice and that, on the surface at least contradict the world I now occupy." (emphasis added). pg xiv
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Topic: Obama On Whites - His Own Words!!! (Read 955 times)