Open response to Nia-Malika Henderson's OPINION piece titled: 'What President Obama gets wrong about 'acting white''

OPINION “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.” It’s one’s personal views, attitude, or judgment.

I started not to read YOUR OPINION piece because in MY OPINION you usually take on a negative tone in your comments about the Obamas, with sometimes, seemingly disdain for who they are.

As an educated 60-year-young African American female with a ton of life experiences and who has raised three children, which two have earned professional success and one having more than two degrees, I addressed this issue with them when they were younger. I wholeheartedly disagree with YOUR OPINION about what the Obamas mean when they explain the phrase "you're acting white."

I know opinion writers use provocative headlines to grab the reader’s attention and it is highly appropriate for you to offer an alternative view of what they said but to emphatically declare that he is “wrong” suggests that the ONLY right answer is your opinion, which can be judged as borderline narcissism. You see how that works?

President Obama offered HIS OPINION based on his and his wife's personal experience. YOUR OPINION of HIS OPINION was based on your perception of research on the subject by others. In MY OPINION, your column promotes YOUR OPINION as somehow superior to HIS OPINION because of your PERCEPTION of the research you had done.

PERCEPTION: “to recognize, discern, envision, or understand.”

Researchers quoted in your piece had empirical data to form their analysis and conclusion, which my response is not intended to address.  However, your provocative title boldly declares that the President of The United States has gotten it “wrong” because your explanation and understanding of that dreaded, loaded phrase “you’re acting white” differs from his explanation. Granted, as an opinion writer, you are not expected to be objective.

Despite my reluctance to give your writing a read, I read your article TWICE to be clear in MY OPINION of it. In response to President Obama’s comment at Walker Jones Education Campus:

“Sometimes African Americans, in communities where I’ve worked, there’s been the notion of “acting white” — which sometimes is overstated, but there’s an element of truth to it, where, okay, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that? Or why are you speaking so properly? And the notion that there’s some authentic way of being black, that if you’re going to be black you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes, that has to go. Because there are a whole bunch of different ways for African American men to be authentic.”

You wrote: "But there is a problem with the Obamas’ focus on "acting white" as an explanation for how black student's perceive academic success and the achievement of their peers?"

I don’t agree with YOUR OPINION that their explanation is about how black students perceive academic success. They’re simply saying what I and many other black parents say to our children and that is don't listen to the naysayers. Don’t listen to those who would rather tear you down, keep you down rather than lift you up. Listen to the positive voices that encourage, inspire, and motivate you.

I view it as the Obamas saying to those students not to listen to those negative voices that want to tell you that you're not good enough as you are, voices that are urging you to limit yourself to someone else’s definition of success. It’s about telling them to live up to their full potential no matter what others say.

Click here to continue reading. . . .

GOP and press roles as co-conspirators in racism in politics and the media

Racist: “A person who believes in the doctrine of Racism, that a certain human race is superior to any or all others.”

Republicans vehemently reject the notion that their objection to President Barack Obama is racially motivated. The reigning king of hypocrites Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC ‘Morning Joe Show’, categorically rejects any notion that GOP opposition to the first black president has anything to do with racism.

In May, Scarborough went into one of his infamous rants and attacked West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller for his comment that Republicans’ opposition to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is because they hate the black president. Senator Ron Johnson was the only Republican in the room at the time and took great offense to his remark.

“That’s one of the stupidest, most offensive things I’ve heard a sitting senator say. He owes Ron Johnson an apology,” Scarborough fumed. Of course his emotional outburst was exaggerated because he's savvy enough to know that his rants are regurgitated on the Huffington Post. In the past he penned Senator Harry Reid with the title of 'Saying the stupidest and most offensive thing Joe Scarborough has ever heard.' 

Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson defended Rockefeller by contending that “objectively” some of the opposition to President Obama is fueled by racism.

“Of course not all opposition to the president is fueled by race, but there is some of that out there,” Robinson claimed.

MSNBC resident Republican, who is paid over five-million-dollars a year to host a controversial three-hour morning show that relentlessly disparages and attacks the character of the Democratic President of The United States and his party, wasn’t buying that his party was a bunch of racists disguised as politicians in two-piece suits without their white hood. 

"And unless I'm wrong, this is the first majority-white country that has ever elected a black person,” Scarborough continued with his diatribe. 

One would conclude from his assertion that most whites supported Barack Obama for president, which is not true. Whites primarily vote Republican. A GOP candidate for president would garner the vast majority of white votes regardless of the race of the Democratic candidate. Scarborough fails to accept that the demographic of the electorate has changed and Barack Obama won because of historical turnout by African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asians, single white females, and young people. Scarborough tried to make it seem that he won because whites were gung-ho about having a black man in the White House. His tendency to have selective amnesia allows him the luxury of forgetting the racially motivated assault on candidate Obama by Fox News and the rest of the media when it came to the Reverend Wright saga.

Republicans like Scarborough view attacks on the GOP as liberal bullsh**. They like to point to Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, who signed an Executive Order (Proclamation) to free slaves who were not fighting on the side of the Union, and use it to attack Democrats for being the racists at that time. Republicans conveniently leave out that Lincoln was a reluctant warrior. He believed in the doctrine of white supremacy and was actually pressured to act because of rising opposition to slavery in congress and the country. He believed slaves had certain unalienable rights but they were not superior to whites. Meaning he was a racist by definition but did the right thing for the country. Republicans point to Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation as definitive proof that Republicans are not a bunch of racists. If you have to go back 151 years to prove that your party is not racist, then, well, you’re in deep denial about your party’s support for the doctrine of white supremacy over the last century.

We all know that not all Republicans view themselves as being superior to all other races, but we do know that all those who believe in the “doctrine that a certain human race is superior to any or all others” vote Republican.

These far-right radicals have expressed in words and deed an intense fear and dislike of President Barack Hussein Obama because they perceive him as foreign and inferior to the white man. We see that play out in the press and on cable news and the networks.

Click here to continue reading. . . .

Why do the news media immediately label young white killers as mentally ill and young black killers as thugs?

“No excessive news coverage to uncover missed signals that could have prevented the deaths of his victims. No Anderson Cooper or CNN delving deep into his life for clues. He is simply a useless member of society. Toss his ass in jail and throw away the key. Thug No. 999,999,999 is how society thinks of him.”

In the United Kingdom’s Mental Health Act 1959, the legislation says a "Mentally ill person means a person who owing to mental illness requires care, treatment or control for his own good or in the public interest, and is for the time being incapable of managing himself or his affairs . . ."

In the U.S. mental illness is used loosely to describe just about any act of violence by our citizens. It has become synonymous with people acting like a natural fool, lunatic, imbecile, idiot, and incompetent, demented. Our first response to mass shootings is that he’s a crazy lunatic. We loosely label a mass killer as mentally ill even though he was not medically diagnosed that he required protection from himself or the public, and he was capable of managing his affairs. Yet, he is labeled mentally ill to explain his violent behavior, which in effect is saying that he was not responsible for his actions. But there’s a double standard.

Click here to finish reading

BLOG: If you don’t vote, don’t complain

You can’t even have a conversation with me about politics, the government, or much anything else if you don’t vote. Seriously. I’m very civic-minded and dogmatic about citizens seeing voting not only as a right that others died for, but as a duty.

If you approach me complaining about Republicans or Congress or even President Obama (Warning: You liable to be cursed out if you think you can disparage Barack Obama in my presence. For real.), the first thing that I ask is “Did you vote?” If you say yes, we can talk. If you say no, then your complaint is invalidated and I turn a deaf ear to anything you have to say. If you don’t vote, then don’t complain because you are a part of the problem.

While canvassing in 2010, I had a black guy to tell me that he “don’t vote for no white dude.”  I was stunned speechless.  What the hell . . . .

{Continued reading at . . . }

http://smaxxmahaffey.newsvine.com/_news/2014/03/05/22972216-blog-if-you-dont-vote-dont-complain

Race Relations in 1947 America vs. 21st Century America

White Americans, majority of them on the far-right and aligned with the Tea Party and some southern state Democrats, reacted to the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the first African American President, in a much more racially charged and radically insensitive way than whites did in 1947 when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, which effectively integrated major league baseball. White objection to Robinson was not muddled in political correctness…he was a black man and simply not good enough or deserving of the same opportunities afforded a white baseball player. They spoke it out loud and were unapologetic. 

{Continue reading at....}

http://smaxxmahaffey.newsvine.com/_news/2014/03/05/22972161-race-relations-in-1947-america-vs-21st-century-america

A Democrat and Obama loyalist takes on Ed Schultz and the so-called “professional left”

After an anonymous source leaked to the Washington Post that President Obama had put Social Security on the table in the debt ceiling debate, Adam Green, Brian Sonenstein, and MSNBC Ed Schulz took the unsubstantiated story at face value and sprung into action with threats to withdraw support from the President and Democrats seeking re-election in 2012. Have they lost their collective minds?

I do not trust one single word that comes from some supposedly anonymous source in a newspaper column. Journalists today will lie, distort, concoct, and hack into people's email and phone to get something on air or in print.

Green of Bold Progressives and Sonenstein of Firedog Lake emailed their members an urgent petition to sign immediately, and by the way, send us money too. Schultz, in his usual, bombastic style threatened what is tantamount to a voter boycott of the 2012 elections. That’s just did it for me. I had heard enough, and I had had enough.

It is debatable whether they caught me on my bad day or good day, but below is my response to Ed Schultz, and I sent a variation of the same text directly to Adam Green and Brian Sonenstein.

Are pictures of his wiener more important than images of children and women forced into prostitution?

Two press conferences, interruptions of regular programming, scores of discussions, interviews and punditries, professional journalists behaving like tabloid reporters, unlimited coverage spanning weeks for a scandal involving Twitter pictures of a Congressman’s penis. “Coverage of the saga occupied 17 percent of the news hole between June 6 and June 12,” according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Never have we seen the mainstream media spend that much time covering the kidnapping and selling of American children and women as sex slaves. To be blunt, sex trafficking also involves a man’s penis and how much he's willing to pay, and to what extinct he's willing to go in order to satisfy his sexual perversions. Once a little girl is sold into sex slavery, a man uses his penis to force her into submission, to break her little spirit, rob her of her innocence, and crush her dreams and hopes. Scandalous, but since it does not involve a politician's penis,the scandal goes unreported or under-reported.

The media is selective about penis coverage. A politician sending pictures of his penis to women on Twitter is a more sensational story (, and by their coverage...more important), than an international criminal cartel that supplies children to perverted men in the U.S. and around the world. If the news media spent just a tenth of the time they spend on a politician's sex scandal tracking down men in America who are buying children for sex slaves, it could lead to the capture of some of these girls.