Obama Staff: We Need More White People

During a Michelle Obama appearance at Carnegie Mellon University, the school paper The Tartan reported the attention-getting phrase:

The Tartan's correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, "Get me more white people, we need more white people." To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, "We're moving you, sorry. It's going to look so pretty, though."

"I didn't know they would say, 'We need a white person here,' " said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. "I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn't know it would be so outright."

Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard has a stranglehold on the meaning of this passage:

The Obama campaign discriminates against people of color, and their own supporters no less, in what is presumably a misguided pander to white voters.

Michael Goldfarb is a sack of crap.

I mean that metaphorically, of course. If you took a sack and filled it with crap, there's no way you could get it to type something that stupid. However, in American colloquial parlance, a person who speaks falsely or misleadingly is said to be "full of shit," which a sack of crap, and Michael Goldfarb, most certainly are.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time trying to explain how people have tried to "flip the script" in this campaign, trying to paint the Obama campaign, and black voters, as racist. I read the crap on our message boards every day, and if a truth so obvious eludes people, what's the point of deconstructing it? To systematically segregate and discriminate against and oppress an entire race of people, and then have the balls to call them racist because they're separated from us by the separations we imposed?

I know, many white people will object to the use of the words "we", or "us." Barack Obama cannily identified the source of a lot of white frustration in his "A More Perfect Union" address, this idea felt by many of us that we, individually, have enjoyed no privilege derived from our whiteness, yet we feel the sting of black anger. Even more, many of us feel divorced from responsibility for the black plight in America because we never owned slaves, or refused to hire a black person, or tossed around the N word.

Those are all excellent points. The rationale is certainly appealing. The fact of the matter is, we do need more white people. In this case, "we" is the collective soul of those in our nation who yearn for an end to the legacy of racism, and a beginning to the struggle of all American brothers and sisters against the Goliaths who have pitted us against each other for centuries.

We need more white people to believe that our system is still rigged against black people, that racial profiling and discrimination are inherent to our law enforcement, criminal justice, and prison apparatuses.

We need more white people to recognize that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow continues to tilt the playing field against black people today, even if it doesn't seem to be helping us. We need more white people to understand that the horror and depravity of lynchings are not something you can "just get over."

Senator Hillary Clinton illustrated this point very well in her controversial statements earlier in this campaign about Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ, and her husband made it, less directly, by comparing Senator Obama to Jesse Jackson.

MLK needed white people, and he got enough of them together to achieve what seemed like miracles. Jesse Jackson needed more white people, but he couldn't get them. So he became "the black candidate," a guy who couldn't win.

The controversial part is not that they needed white people, it's why they needed white people. They needed white people because we were, and still are, enlisted in the system of oppression. If we remain silent, or refuse to recognize the problem, we contribute to the heavy weight of the boot on the neck of black America. We may not be pressing down, but neither are we trying to lift it off.

So, sacks of crap everywhere would want you to read this story and believe that Michelle Obama is discriminating against black people by wanting more white people on the stage behind her. I believe there should already be more white people standing behind her, and I am proud to be one of them.