More Letters to the editor: Educators Succumbed to Racist Pressures

Geraldine wrote: “Vestiges of prejudice in our state have re-emerged and interfered with our children’s education once again.“

You know Geraldine, this nonsense is getting really old and the older it gets, the less it can be taken seriously. Which is a tragedy when people experience REAL racism and try to contend with it in a society quickly becoming desensitized to charges of racism. While you’re obviously of an age to assert prejudicial motives behind the opposition to Barack Obama’s speech, maybe you’re not old enough to remember how republicans got their nose way out of joint with Bill Clinton and how far out of joint democrats got their noses with George W. Bush (Bill Maher got his nose so far out of joint about Bush that he got his own HBO show - Real Time - where he still makes GWB IQ jokes once a week and his audience still obediently laughs at them). This president, like the ones before him, is politically polarizing - history should tell you in giant HOLLYWOOD sized letters that anyone who takes the office of president proposing and attempting to fundamentally “transform American” (Obama’s words not mine) is going to meet up with a some significant resistance and suspicion, no matter what color he or she might be. On top of that, this president is on television and in the face of the American people more frequently than any previous president I can recall (my earliest point of reference is Lyndon Johnson) - people are growing weary of constantly looking at him and listening to him - skin color having nothing to do with that. I know I’ve got Obama fatigue.

I trust you ignored the fact that a written assignment was issued in advance of the speech in which an essay question asked students to list ways they could help the president (which is open to political interpretation). Along with, but independent of the speech and the assignment, Demi Moore puts out a video with cult-like chanting
in favor of the president and pledges to be his servant. Put all three together and you’ve got a problem. Once the three crown jewels were separated into their component parts and understood for what they were, people eased up a bit. I didn’t care if my kid heard the speech, he’s too smart to let President Obama blow smoke at him and he’s certainly smart enough to accept encouragement from the President.

But, if you want to understand any racial hostility that might exist, maybe you should consider the racial content of his two autobiographies (that’s quite an achievement for someone who had written them before he reached 45) which had some pretty sweeping generalizations about whites, his 20 year relationship with Reverend Wright, his “the police acted stupidly” comment regarding the arrest of Skip Gates and his appointment of self avowed communist and black nationalist Van Jones to the position of Green Jobs czar. Thankfully, I’m a bigger man than the president and don’t surround myself with individuals like this.

PLEASE don’t throw the race card at white folks on behalf of a president with more personal baggage than Paris Hilton on safari as it relates to race issues. Maybe you should quit judging the hearts of other people - in street parlance, “you don’t know me”.

People are getting sick of being wrongfully accused of being racist. As someone whose sensibilities on justice are probably ultra refined - you should know better than to judge the hearts of others without credible evidence.

Until you and those like you who make accusations of bigoted racial motives can start producing some 1 to 1 correlating cause and effect data representing indisputably that this is a race problem, you’ll continue to be dismissed as a paranoid goof. You’ve not presented a direct linkage to racism - you’ve simply eliminated a very limited number of causal possibilities and, in light of the hard work it would take to consider other factors, you’ve jumped to the conclusion that opposition to President Obama MUST be race based and made accusations based on a gut feeling. Sorry, I can’t buy it.

Jamison: As a retired naval officer, maybe you need better intel. I trust you were challenged at least once in Officer’s school about presenting opinion as fact. Eric Cantor indicated that he was using his blackberry to take notes during the president’s speech. With the complete lack of evidence otherwise, I suggest that a bi-partisan loving individual such as yourself, take him at his word - like I take you at your word that you’re a republican (while I am suspicious, I’ll take you at your word because I don’t have evidence to the contrary).