dodgy race attitude in news?

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has defended his description of Barack Obama as 'sun-tanned' after facing criticism over his remark. Bill Hayton reports.

God it gets worse.

Originally Posted by northwind

Lots of white people ARE saying that though. I am, it's generally a good sign that Obama's electable, it probably wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.

I meant a white person saying they were glad their president was white.

Obama would have been my choice, but I'd prefer there wasn't a race issue - he's a fabulous concise orator, and McCain made a mistake thinking he could patronise womnen with Palin for the vagina vote.

[northwind]

Ah. I getcha! Yeah, you're right there. But then there's reasons to be glad for a black president other than that you're the same colour to be fair.

A lot of sense spoken in this thread.

It would appear that racial equality is not as simple as speaking about everybody in the same way.

"Our headline today: America elects 44th white president, (the most important thing about this president is that he is white)". Don't think that would ever happen.

Are black people still so downtrodden that this kind of sentiment is warranted?

Is it possible to ever have true equality whilst still speaking about people of different tone in such a way?

"Mummy, why do they call that man a black-man?"
"Because of the colour of his skin"


I just don't like the way the whole thing has been covered. Frankly I've always found that the idea of racism only encourages us to see fundamental differences based on our outward appearance or nationality which aren't there.

I'm glad Obama is president, but certainly not because he is brown skinned.

[northwind]

Originally Posted by sinbad

Are black people still so downtrodden that this kind of sentiment is warranted?

Yup. You couldn't miss the amount of racist sentiment about Obama through the campaign. Sure, a load of people voted for him because he was black, but be sure a lot voted against him for the same reason. Probably that ended up splitting along party lines to a great extent- no offence to the Republican candidate but if you're a white american with racist tendancies, you're probably a republican. I suppose if you're a black american with racist tendancies you're quite likely not to have voted at all before- they do reckon Obama brought out a lot of first time voters, which is good. But still, it would definately play a part. At the start of this campaign you heard it over and over, is american ready to elect a black president, and most people said no.

Put it a different way- a lot of people would vote for Obama because he was black, but nobody ever decided they couldn't possibly vote for a candidate because they were white. No white candidate was ever likely to have huge campaigns maintaining he's a muslim, or to have the attempts to link them with terrorism. Campaigners for McCain didn't get much racist abuse I reckon.

At the end of the day, you've got an election where the republicans were in power and severely discredited, Bush with the worst approval rating in history, McCain's economic policies being ludicrous, and his running mate in a lot of ways a terrifying disaster... And on the other hand you had Obama, with a great VP elect, spending nearly twice as much as McCain, destroying him in debates, huge media support... Basically, with everything for him. When you look at the popular vote, he doesn't have a strong majority at all, around 6% I think. I reckon that wouldn't have been the picture at all if you'd had an equally excellent white candidate. But I could be wrong.

Ah, the old "we're not bothered about race, so it's not relevant" line. Have a look at this - the best explanation I can come up with of why black america, and all americans come to that, should acknowledge the magnitude of what's happened. Let them have their moment:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ra...a-1001275.html

Don't worry - it'll settle down once he's got his feet under the desk in the oval office.

I am glad he won tbh but lets face it Bush was hated so much that mickey mouse could have won this election. If the American economy was not in so much trouble I doubt he would have won in a fair fight.
The same now goes for Brown, no matter how well he has handled the last few weeks hes a lame duck at the next election.