Obama - held back by racism?? True or Not True ...

An excellent article written by Cynthia Tucker - about how race is very much still an issue when it comes to our Vote for the next U.S. President; My comments are below.

RACIAL STEREOTYPES ARE DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN OUR CULTURE

By Cynthia TuckerSat Jan 19, 7:56 PM ET

After a recent column describing Barack Obama as "a presidential candidate who happens to be black -- not a black presidential candidate," I received countless responses from readers, a handful of them odd. That odd handful declared they take no notice of superficial traits such as skin color, and they took me to task for making any reference to Obama's race.

"I thought of (Obama) as a person. I did not see black or white or Hispanic or that he was a man -- I saw a person! If people really, truly want racial equality, then the first step has to be to STOP looking at skin color," wrote one reader.

"When I look at a person, the last thing I think about is skin color or heritage," wrote another.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. While I am sympathetic to any desire to get past dated and useless habits of mind -- especially the contentious politics of the color line -- that's just nonsense. None of us, black, white or brown, is colorblind.

Those readers may think they don't notice skin color, but it's just not so, says University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald, an expert on implicit biases and common stereotypes. "Even if they can't see anything out of their eyes, they're not colorblind."

That's not a condemnation, not a presumption of malicious bigotry. It's just an acknowledgment of the peculiar burdens of humanity, especially in these United States. Assumptions about race and ethnicity are so deeply embedded in our culture that we can hardly help noticing skin color.

Each of us is stuck with prejudices, and I'm using the denotative meaning here -- "an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason," according to Webster's. But we don't have to be governed by them.

Cutting-edge work by Greenwald and his colleagues, who include Harvard University's Mahzarin Banaji and the University of Virginia's Brian Nosek, suggests that people can learn to put aside their biases to make rational, fact-based judgments about people who may be black or Mexican or Mormon. "To the extent that we can influence what we learn and believe, we can influence less conscious states of mind," Banaji says.

But the first step -- as in any self-help project -- is to own up to the problem. Many people don't realize they're prejudiced because, well, they really don't realize they're prejudiced. That self-knowledge is not necessarily difficult to acquire, but it's quite often difficult to accept.

Racial bigotry is a social taboo in this country, so much so that only an extremist fringe -- assorted neo-Nazis and skinheads -- admit their rank prejudices. That may explain why some volunteers who have taken Greenwald's Implicit Association Test, which uses word association to detect unconscious biases, are furious when the test shows they hold hidden negative views of black Americans.

"Some people have a concept of themselves as non-prejudiced, so anything indicating a chink in that armor is threatening," Greenwald said. But his research has also pointed out that most people simply aren't aware of their implicit assumptions.

Take the current Democratic primary, with its history-making narrative. Greenwald and colleagues modified the Implicit Association Test (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit) to search for unconscious biases among Democratic voters. When asked who they planned to cast ballots for, a sample of voters reported strong support for Obama, who held a 42 percent-to-34 percent lead over Hillary Clinton among the sample, with John Edwards coming in at 12. But when the same people took the Implicit Association Test, measuring their unconscious preferences, Clinton was "the runaway winner," favored by 48 percent of them, and Obama was dead last, with 25 percent. Edwards was favored by 27 percent, according to the researchers.

And here's one finding that upends conventional wisdom: According to the test, black voters, too, held implicit biases that worked against Obama. But how could it be otherwise? Black Americans are products of the same culture as white Americans, with its myriad stereotypes of black incompetence. And black Americans have internalized many of the same stereotypes.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when his children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But that day has not yet arrived. We might hasten its dawning if we'd admit that what we see is not necessarily what we believe.

Oops! In a column about rigid voter ID laws, I mistakenly referred to the Bill of Rights in underscoring the right to vote. I knew better. The right to vote is explicit in the 15th, 19th and 26th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Read the Original story Here:

I've been saying all along, that while I do Hope Obama wins, it's unlikely - because America is still Very racist; If you've ever been in a chat room, when the topic of race comes up, overwhelmingly there is a negative vibe towards black people.

Mexicans may get riled a bit for the illegals, but seemingly all races stick together against black people. It's truly a sight to behold - You wouldn't realize that so many Americans felt that way, in 2008 - but they do - because Nothing is truly being done to end racism in this country.

People are not being made aware of what's truth and what's brain washing - propaganda - and what's real, versus what has been made real.

As human beings, made in the image of The Creator - we too, can create.

And we do it all the time, every day - some of us may not realize it, or stop to think about it, but we all have created our lives - and together we have created the human experience - full of domino effects.

Everything is like the game of Chess, not Checkers, and then again perhaps all games can teach us that for every move, there is a counter move - or a next move that can only follow the initial move - and this can be applied to racism.

White people started racism, and it's been my belief for many years that white people must make the first move to end it; When they make that move the counter move, or the following move, will be made by blacks - to further embrace white people, once they've been shown evidence that white people no longer hold an interest in seeing black people get the short end of the stick.

Recent Events that do not display this: Katrina, Jenna 6, and now one might even argue, Obama.

We need white people to take racism seriously enough to move past their prejudices so that black people can let go of the feeling, that white people don't like them; I mean, so long as white people don't like blacks... what else are blacks gonna think?

Also, I think it's important that we not play semantics here - I know that not all white people dislike blacks; So please don't wrap your minds around the way I phrased that sentence - go deeper - instead of focusing on the white people who don't hate blacks... think of all the white people you know, who do! And from this day forward, realize that They are The Problem.

Then, deal with them, their ideas, their beliefs - get them to feel shamed for them. Only for the purpose of helping them heal - so that they can recognize the error of their ways.

Nobody is perfect - not even me - but we can all strive towards it.