Yeah really, is anyone shocked? We've only been saying this for 999 years. It's like we expect racism in the lower half of the country where folk hung from trees but the Northern half gets a pass. There were slaves in New York City, people. Slavery stretched far beyond the dutty dutty.

Get it together, America. Each and every state has its own racism. It might take its form differently in every state depending on the state's economy, social history and industry but racism is entrenched in this country. Please know that. (But with all this new found "revelation," do you think Barack Obama could speak on it? Please. He'd be 'whining.') You step on my foot and I can't even say ouch. SMH That's deep.

my boyfriend is a working class white guy from Michigan. He's always told me about racial tension there. He even has a "Nazi Basher" tattoo on his arm with a spiky club because there's actually a rise of neo-Nazi fuckwads in MI and he likes to pick fights with them.

um, also MI is a working class state. So maybe they're turned off by the media's claims that Obama is anti-working class.

I think that this has a lot to do with all of the industrial jobs that Michigan has lost and below average higher education rates. In situations like that you depend on you large cities to bring alternative resources to the state. Actually Kilpatrick was doing a lot to bring conferences, programs, casinos and other profit gainers to the city and the state before his scandal. In all fairness I can understand white people being skeptical about black democratic leaders in that case. This is the group that Obama needs to try to understand better. The democrats have done to this population the same thing that they have done to black folks. They have taken them for granted so long that they have lost touch.

Linking what some may view as racism to slavery, in this particular case, to me is rather silly. There are other reasons that white people may not like Obama. Being white and not liking him does not make you racist. If we think this then it negates the fact that we as black people may actually like him for other reason than him being black. People want to be understood. I think a common understanding will trump the racism argument.

Did you ever get picked on for being a smart kid? I did. Perhaps Obama is going through that. He may speak to well for the people of Michigan to feel that he speaks for them and a blatant show of understanding for them and people like them would change that view. In politics you have to blame the politician you can’t blame the people.

@ DFP, on a whole different level you have so much going on in your life based on what you post. I mean like really, SO MUCH.

Slick, I disagree. This is so much more than Obama being picked on as a smart kid. Although I would agree white people in Michigan can choose not to like Barack Obama for whatever reason they choose not to like him (that's their right and everything isn't "racist") I would ventrure to guess Barack Obama means a whole lot more to them than that (and Kwame Kilpatrick ain't help NOTHIN. smh) It is not a stretch, in my opinion, to link racism to deeply rooted views held by various geographical regions around this country since these views have played themselves out in America since slavery. A downturn in the economy simply helps bring them out.

Loss of industry in America is inextricably linked to racism because where there's a loss, there's a scapegoat and where there's a scapegoat, there's somebody Black and that's just how we roll. Poorly educated white people will turn on a dime on Black people as the cause of their misery when things go wrong in urban America or with industrialization because there's nobody below them to turn on. (The newest scapegoats, incidentally, are Lou Dodd's "illegal immigrants" and as the textile industry and others go belly-up and move overseas, America's brown people will begin to feel the sting of that, as well. They can't be hung in trees all up and down the road like Christmas lights, so I suppose we have made *some* progress, but yes, people routinely were killed during America's boom industrial years and times got tough and a scapegoat was needed. America has a very violent, bloody industrial past. Wasn't no board meeting. We just shot you.) But yes, when industry fails, Black people have traditionally been the ones to catch the brunt of it on all sorts of levels. And since white factory workers can't attack CEOs or corporate execs because they don't know who did what (and they couldn't get to them if they did,) they can start wondering why Black people still have $35/hour jobs.

Even though Black people are often the first to be fired and last to be hired, when things get tough, somehow Blackfolk are to blame. It's not that hard to trace back…

…with 20th century American industrialization came Northern migration: that is, Blackfolk flocked from the South to the Detroits, Pittsburghs and Chicagos of America to find jobs because they could work in those industries and sustain themselves with little or no formal education. (We won't talk about how hard those labor leaders tried to make it for them once they got there, however [-- and even though they needed them and broke their backs doing painstaking labor--] how they fought tooth and nail to keep them out of unions and paid them pennies on the dollar for their work and busted unions day and night *read Howard Zinn and see Henry Clay Frick* but yes, moving to the North for these jobs was an integral part of the Black American "dream.") So fast forward 50, 60 years and you have the global economy emerging in the 1960s and automotive and steel industry jobs going to Japan in the 1970s and 80s, and Vietnam raging in the 60s/70s and the civil rights movement marching and Detroit and Watts burning and you start to see white mistrust. But the thing white folk didn't get was the way they were beginning to feel is how Black people had been feeling all along. That feeling was nothing new… not knowing how you were going to keep a roof over your head or if you would have job tomorrow. That feeling was just new to *them.* So, as the world economy grew and the American piece of the financial pie shrank, a loss of these industries affected the Black community in far-reaching ways that whitefolk had not felt. But we were catching it from every side. So, the loss of industry is tied to racism (and by extension, slavery) on so many levels for Black people and has been for hundreds of years.

Now— enter Barack Obama? Oh heck naw.

I am from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh went through this whole industrial decimation in the 1980s with the loss of the steel industry to Japan. It is interesting to watch how industry works… how unions work and globalization works and how Black people have never recovered from their losses of 25 years ago.

This view of "blue collar" workers is very deep seated because that segment of American society has been through some things over the last 25-30 years that it had not known since their foreparents got here. It's not some simple "we don't like you, Barack" kind of thing. Whether they choose to trace its history or not, it goes back many years.

sorry. that didn't *look* that long in that tiny little box.

@ Slick: did I mention that my BF is currently serving time in prison? lol yeah I got a lot going on in my life ;-(