Intensely Demonstrating Animosity

Posted by J. Alexander Mitchell on 09.19.2009

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man."

I believe it is human nature to begin responding to a thought before the presenter has finished communicating the thought. One must be a very active listener to resist falling into the trap of responding to someone's statements before you have listened to them in their entirety. Allow me to give an example. Here is what I heard, emphasis mine, when President Carter made his statement about race and criticism of President Obama:

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American."

My initial reaction was that this statement was very well-meaning, but ultimately wrong. I couldn't begin to fathom an "overwhelming" portion of the President's detractors acting with a majority of emphasis on race.

Over on the 411 Mania boards, fellow writer J. D. Dunn broke down the key sentence in a slightly different manner. I would dare say he actually listened to President Carter, whereas I did not. Here is that same statement, with his emphasis:

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American."

The difference between these two statements, once we focus on the specific key phrases, is astonishing. I believe President Obama responded as though he interpreted it in the way I did, hence his rebuke of the analysis. Of course, President Obama, in my opinion, goes out of his way to avoid any focus on his ethnicity, so I am not surprised by this (frankly, I believe that the President's method is considerably wiser given his position, which would explain why he is the President and I write political blogs). However, the latter makes a huge difference. The intelligent conservative that understands and argues the fiscal repercussions of an expensive health care reform package is not the target audience of President Carter's statement. The soldier that sees the battlefield difficulties of continued presence in Afghanistan is not the target audience of President Carter's statement. The Senator that debates that an insurance co-op is an alternative to the public option is not the target audience.

So who is the target audience? People that don't believe the President was born in the United States are the target audience. Those that would immediately call our President both a Nazi and a socialist are his target audience. People that would bring a semi-automatic weapon to a place the President is speaking are the target audience (I know that some of those people are Black – the character of Uncle Ruckus in The Boondocks was not created from whole cloth). Essentially, if a reasonable conservative might use the term "loony", "fringe", or "crazy" in regards to the person, that person is probably the target audience for President Carter's statement.

I wish I could say I was alone in not listening to the former President, but I am beginning to see that a lack of listening is a fairly common trend in America today. In our Internet-driven "reality entertainment" world of politics, the trend is to immediately dismiss without thought, and immediately draw lines in the sand before we even find out whether we are standing on a beach or not. Therein lies the biggest threat to the United States – not the economic power of China, not any spending difficulties, and certainly not Afghanistan. The fact that we lack the desire to understand each other is our current biggest weakness.

Fellow 411 writer Jake G. wrote a recent article about the need for a singular White voice in regards to racial issues. I have to admit that I initially thought he was joking in the column, and, as one could guess, did not agree with many of the viewpoints he shared. As an experiment, however, I went on Facebook and asked my Caucasian friends to give me their thoughts on whether or not Whites need a singular voice. I agreed with some of the thoughts and disagreed with others, but I can honestly say that I came away from that thread with a different and deeper understanding on the viewpoints of some White people, particularly in regards to their pending status as "a minority". I would like to challenge 411 readers to do the same – when you find yourself immediately rejecting a thought as wrong, make a concerted effort to understand why the person that says it makes the statement that s/he does. I don't know what will occur as a result – maybe you will change your mind, and maybe you won't. But I think the country will make a tremendous step in the right direction if we tried more often to understand what someone else thinks.