Quiet Riot

[BT]

Obama Warns of 'Quiet Riot' Among Blacks

HAMPTON, Va. (AP) - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.

The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.

"This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane.

"All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said.

Obama's attack on Bush got ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset.

Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city's black neighborhoods.

"Those 'quiet riots' that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths," Obama said. "They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better."

He argued that once a hurricane hits or a jury renders a not guilty verdict, "the frustration is there for all to see."

Obama, who is bidding to become the first black president, took the stage after a succession of ministers repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet, singing, praying and swaying to music.


http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8PIQ1800&show_article=1

[Michael Tee]

So what's the O-man gonna do to stop that quiet riot?  If anyone still gives a shit.  Personally, I think the whites are pretty much resigned to riots ever decade or two, Watts or South Central, what's the difference?  They know by now it'll never spill over into their little gated communities and that the bulk of those killed will be blacks, and most of the remainder white trash who can't afford to distance themselves enough from the blacks.  This "problem" is, in a way, similar to the deplorable state of public health in America - - the national averages are dragged down by the permanent black underclass, whereas the average white is well-enough off so as not to care.  The extent to which race permeates American public affairs, though incognito, is really astonishing.  America never solved its racial problems, it just swept them under the rug.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I noticed that the US decided that what Iraq needed was gated communities in Baghdad, but the idea pissed the Iraqis off so greatly they had to drop the subject.

The ultimate City of Perfection is Epcot in Disney World.

Everyone pays admission, it's surrounded by major security, and at night they run everyone out.

Years ago, we lost a ticket there, and my ex-wife, who is about 4'11", managed to actually sneak in to Epcot. One minute she was on this side of the fence, and *poof!* the next minute she was on the other side.

She is Mexican and quite talented in that way.

[gipper]

The term "quiet riot," contrary to Tee's apocalyptic sensationalism, denotes instead to me a day-to-day rejectionism, studied or "spontaneous," which expresses itself in myriad ways but most obviously in hip-hop culture, fractured use of language or use of idioms not shared by the wider culture, the attitude that schooling and to some extent working are the white's man's prescription and downplayed or downright rejected for that reason. This is a complex topic, and it finds expression in the attitudes of a long-time out-group, outsiders trying to get along yet keep their critical perspective. A sociologist, I guess, would call it alienation.

[Michael Tee]

Well, I wasn't trying for sensationalism.  "Quiet riot" to me meant a smouldering, festering grievance like an underground coal-mine or peat fire that burns away smokelessly for years or decades, periodically flaring up spectacularly.  Not quite as hip or as purely cultural a phenomenon as domer describes but similar in some ways.  The point I was trying to make is that nobody else gives a shit, since the whites have come to a modus vivendi with real riots, and so are hardly likely to get their knickers in knots over "quiet" riots.

[gipper]

Michael, I can honestly say as a simple matter of fact that I care deeply. I've been dubbed an "honorary black man" by black friends, which is one way of illustrating the point. I have also dubbed myself an "honorary Jew." In either case, with appropriate passion, preserving my own I-I identity (Irish-Italian), I fancy myself as championing their causes as if they were my own.

[Plane]

White people used to riot now and then , why did that stop?

[Michael Tee]

Well, domer, when I said that "nobody else gives a shit," I obviously didn't mean literally nobody.  Obviously, liberals give a shit.  You give a shit.  I give a shit.   But from the Bush gang's POV, nobody who counts (i.e. nobody in sufficient numbers to deter them from their crypto-fascist, racist objectives) gives a shit.  The majority of Americans who still bother to vote don't give a shit (and hopefully, America will, albeit late in the day,  prove the Bushies wrong!) but so far their calculations have paid off.

[Michael Tee]

<<White people used to riot now and then , why did that stop?>>

I think because they found ways to perpetuate all the racist shit they had perpetuated before, just a little more discreetly.  Everything the Jim Crow Democrats used to give them is still being offered up by the same racist bastards as before, only now they're "New Republicans" in a "New South."  About the only thing they lost was the lynching bee, but maybe they'll get that back too.  If I were a white Southern racist, I wouldn't see a hell of a lot to bitch about these days.  If I wanted to torture and murder dark-skinned people virtually at will, there's still the good ole USMC.  True, I'd have to be a bit more discreet about it, but that in itself's no reason to riot in the streets.

[Plane]

Well, domer, when I said that "nobody else gives a shit," I obviously didn't mean literally nobody.  Obviously, liberals give a shit.  You give a shit.  I give a shit.   But from the Bush gang's POV, nobody who counts (i.e. nobody in sufficient numbers to deter them from their crypto-fascist, racist objectives) gives a shit.  The majority of Americans who still bother to vote don't give a shit (and hopefully, America will, albeit late in the day,  prove the Bushies wrong!) but so far their calculations have paid off.

I don't see this as concrete fact, in terms of black persons appointed to high office , or other minoritys , are Democratic administrations more prone to make their cabnets look like America or look like a collection of Ivy league validictorians?

Contrasted with Republican administrations I don't see any advantage.

On the other hand there is a real diffrence in the respect shown to persons of a minority , one side is very prone to belittle the ability of a minority person and claim that without special favors there is no possibility of a minority person competeing on equal terms. The other side can search out  valdictorians who are both competant and representative of minoritys.