Sunday, September 28, 2008

Looking beyond a candidate's skin color

Bill Maher skewers our stereotypes, pointing out how specious they are in his New Rules:
Now, take a look at these pictures. Here are the CEOs of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the Lehman Brothers. I know the first thing that jumps out about these faces is that they all happen to be white, and they all happen to be responsible for stealing. But what you have to understand is that these whites are a product of a society that made them that way. It was the neighborhoods and the schools they went to: Harvard, Yale, the Wharton School of Business. They never learned the value of doing real, actual work and the first step to fixing that is better role models, so kids growing up white today don’t think the only way out of Westchester is corporate crime. Or a government handout or sailing. So I get it, the temptation is to look at McCain and vote against him because you don’t see an individual, you just see another typical welfare whitey.

And it’s true, he’s spent his entire life shuffling from one low-paying government job to another. Well, except those years he spent in prison. Typical! And between you and me, he’s not very articulate. Oh, he may have some street smarts, but he’s not what you call an educated man. He freely admits he’s ignorant about the economy. And apparently the only thing his white running mate knows how to do is crank out one baby after another. And now of course, her teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. Because she learns it at home! But that doesn’t mean we should assume all white people are like that, just because so many of them are.

h/t to Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars
--the BB

2 comments:

June Butler said...

But that doesn’t mean we should assume all white people are like that, just because so many of them are.

Right, Paul. There's you and me. Last time I looked, we were both white. But the two of us are from a white underclass of a sort, you being gay and me being female. Still, others are worse off.

Paul said...

And they's nothing whiter than a white underbelly. Oh, you said underclass. All right then. And unlike some CEOs I've only gamed the system once. In spite of being unemployed at least half the time in the past many years I've only filed for and collected one week of unemployment. Were I a corporation I could take billions in tax breaks and subsidies without blushing. But I can still blush.