Saturday, December 5, 2009

You can read it in the times (NYT)
Jag har kopierat här mitt inlägg i dagens (5/12 eller 12/5 om du är Amerikan) New York Times opinion article by Charles Blow. Eftersom jag läser NYT OnLine jag får alltid vara först att lägga in inlägg eftersom jag lever på svensk tid. Texten nedan är bara en kommentar till en artikel men jag vill se till att något finns och hoppas att jag skriva mer senare.

Barack Obama had two chances to do something for "blacks" (I explain the quotation marks below). 1) He could have concentrated all his energy on seeing to it that new health policy is passed that provides for universal health care. 2)To do this he could have decided that "winning" in Afghanistan will cost more in deaths incurred, souls (US military and Afghanis)destroyed, and deficit exploded than his announced decision is worth.
On the medical front one need only look at infant mortality in "blacks" (presumably mostly African Americans)and the dramatic exception in one county in Wisconsin (reported in the Times)to see how important universal medical care - here specifically during pregnancy - is for the black population. On the war front one need only consider the financial cost that George W. Bush never wanted to meet via increased taxes and that his successor is likely to find impossible.
Why "blacks" in quotation marks? I write from Sweden as retired American citizen where for a striking percentage of "ethnic Swedes" blacks are ALL who do not have the skin color of an ethnic Swede. I commend Charles Blow in a sense for using the simple term black since the use of this term includes, for example, the Somali immigrants (Bantu clan) in Burlington, Vermont. Furthermore, use of the simple term black emphasizes that it is not genetics (except as determines skin color) but rather skin color alone. Note, however, that according to the Times African Americans are not willing to accept Somali immigrants as African Americans because the Somalis are muslims.

Finally, let it be known that many of my Somali, Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdish friends here in Sweden who had hope with the election of Barack Obama now ask me daily - Why does the USA always continue warring? And many - yesterday Somalis - said one by one "I am disappointed in Barack Obama". So am I. (De frågade mig då jag var på Rödakorset här i Linköping).

1 comment:

  1. I suppose as someone who lived in America for any extended period of time, I don't need to tell you it is similar here. At the time of slavery, any child born to a slave mother was still a slave, even if the child had skin as white as our own.

    The believe continues now that if someone is even a little darker than "typical," they are of black parentage and therefore black themselves.

    I don't appreciate "vi mot dom" mentality.

    ReplyDelete