I am pretty good at explaining this behavior away, but these 15 years took its toll. I realized at certain point that I started thinking like a racist, which scared a living shit out of me (as I discovered during my therapy) for reasons that I do not think I need to explain. So here I was, surrounded by an environment that was a literal embodiment of the worst racist stereotypes, worrying about preserving my ethical integrity, and on the top of it, hearing from various lefty types that the dysfunction and barbarism that I see around me is actually a good thing and that it is my life style that is a problem.
So you can easily see that in this context Mr. Obama is like a guarantee of my own sanity. I am certainly aware of the shortcomings of his politics - but that is the nature of the US political system, not his personal fault. But he provides a healthy counterbalance to the racist stereotypes fueled by the 'gangsta' subculture and its followers. And I am glad that he is what he is, for my own personal comfort. .......................................
I'm over the posting limit so I'll try to be brief.
First off, let me say that I appreciate your candor.
It would be easy to roughly criticize you for feeling the pull of racist stereotyping while living in a troubled area.
Easy, but incorrect. My Grandmother -- a Black woman who's not afraid to express her opinions (a requirement for Grandmothers around the world, I've found) and whose neighborhood descended from the pristine order of a period of Black middle and working class civic mindedness and fellow feeling which extended from the late 1950's till somewhere around the mid early 1980s -- to decay, noise and vandalism, would no doubt find much to empathize with in your story.
Even so, I'm still puzzled by this clinging to Senator Obama as an antidote to all that.
After all, Colin Powell, Condi Rice and a host of other well known, high profile Black Americans are also 'clean', 'presentable', well spoken' and about as far from lumpen as you can get. It's not as if the Secretary of State, despite her many, many, many shortcomings, is Snoop Dogette.
In short, there's nothing new happening here. Why this fixation on Obama?
Is the Senator a savior of your sanity (in this context) because in addition to being nicely packaged, like all the rest, he's also comparatively liberal?
.d.