For BgMC and other Obama experts

**Kratos** · 10-31-2008, 11:34 AM

Basically I'd like the real story about what Obama did as a community organizer. Who was paying the bills, why, what he was organizing, was it race motivated? I don't want to post half truths in this thread or stuff to make Obama look racist, so anyone who has that motive please don't post unless it's the truth. I want to know what the deal is. What was he doing on Chicago's south side in a mixed race neighborhood that was converting to a black neighborhood?

A few excerpts from US news and wold report
Obama, then 23, quickly emerged as a tireless and pragmatic advocate for the community—traits that characterize the kind of president he says he wants to be. "His work as a community organizer was really a defining moment in his life, not just his career," his wife, Michelle, told U.S. News. It helped him decide "how he would impact the world"—assisting people in defining their mutual interests and working together to improve their lives.

programs for poor and working-class residents of Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project where 5,300 African-Americans tried to survive amid shuttered steel mills, a nearby landfill, a putrid sewage treatment plant, and a pervasive feeling that the white establishment of Chicago would never give them a fair shake.

Jerry Kellman, a social activist who recruited Obama, recalls, "He was very bright, very articulate, very personable, and very idealistic," inspired by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of nonviolence. Kellman offered Obama a job at the annual salary of $10,000, and he threw in $2,000 so Obama could buy a ramshackle car to get around.

Obama insisted on "staying in the background while he empowered us." By Obama's own admission, there were few big victories.

In public Obama has gone from calling it community organizer to community church organizer. Why?

I understand the concept
it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say black people in a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money.

I can't help but feel like there is signifigance to racisim here. After all the best way to agitate a group of black people into collective action is on the issue of race. Would like more info on the specifics of the meetings and what went on if there is such info in exsistance. Everything out there either makes him look like a total racist (which I'm not interested in doing if it isn't true) or doesn't get to what was really going on in Chicago.

**Voland** · 10-31-2008, 11:50 AM

obama? never heard of him.

**Kratos** · 10-31-2008, 12:57 PM

But look, let's call a spade a spade: When Giuliani sneered about community organizers on the "South side" of Chicago, it's pretty clear what he was saying: Barack Obama spent his time rabble-rousing among black people. It's no different then when the RNC called him a "street organizer." A community organizer can be a PTA member or a Christian Coalition lieutenant. Indeed, there's something deeply conservative about the vocation, which informally organizes citizens to demand better, fairer, and wiser treatment from detached government bureaucrats. But that's really not what Palin and Giuliani and the RNC are getting at. Community organizer isn't being used to describe a job but a background. Obama organized poor black people. Helped channel their anger and grievances and anxieties. That's change you can fear.
Ezra Klein American Prospect Mag

**Kratos** · 10-31-2008, 01:02 PM

So, the republican's use of Community Organizer has been labeled racist. Why? If there is nothing racial about the job itself?

**Kratos** · 11-02-2008, 12:26 PM

So nobody knows?

**BgMc31** · 11-02-2008, 01:27 PM

from what I understand, he did most of his work from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. He received most of his funding through them. Although he worked in largely African-American communities, many of the communities he dealt with were multiethnic.

**Kratos** · 11-02-2008, 11:30 PM

http://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2008...anizer-anyhow/

Part of the mythos of the Obama campaign is that Obama was a “community organizer” in Chicago. What does a “community organizer” do anyhow? I mean, the streets are already there, the water and sewer pipes, the schools, churches, PTA’s, girl scouts and boy scouts. What’s left? And who would pay someone to organize more stuff?

Well, I don’t have the answers to any of those questions, but I do have a family story about Barack Obama. It’s a short story and an incomplete one, but a true one and one that touched my family, and for that reason I find it intriguing.

Once upon a time, a neighborhood was changing. In Chicago, when a neighborhood changes, it always changes from white to black, not the other way around. I have lived in a “changing” neighborhood, on one of the 11 “integrated” blocks that are the real demographic of Chicago’s “racially mixed” neighborhoods. Yes, there were incidents, on both sides, and there is no point in pretending that one particular race has a lock on moral purity and does not engage in race-based violence and intimidation.

I have heard stories from whites who lost their homes, everything, when blacks moved into the neighborhood. Unscrupulous real estate agencies engaged in “panic peddling” to pinch them between the emerging racial violence and a crashing housing market. It wasn’t the personal financial catastrophe they talked about, though. It was leaving the neighborhood cemeteries where their parents were buried.

Enter Barack Obama.

~~~~~~~~~

In this story, a southside Chicago neighborhood is changing and there is a meeting set up between church members of different races. Eight people show up at the meeting, and Barack Obama shows up. He is the community organizer. As a result of the meeting, the people who showed up invite each other to their homes. My family member in this story (black–we’re not ALL Swedish) invited a white woman to visit. When the white woman got there, she cried. End of story.
~~~~~~~~~

Not much of a story. No punchline, or big moral conclusion. But it doesn’t dovetail with anything I know about Obama, and it opens up a lot more questions. When Obama has talked about his days as a community organizer in his campaign speeches, he has talked about not being able to draw a big following. What was he trying to get people to follow? (It was mentioned in his Super Tuesday speech if anyone wants to track down an exact quotation.) He talks about telling his coworkers to look at a little black boy and think about that boy’s future and not give up. What does a black boy’s future have to do with interracial church groups in changing neighborhoods?

And why did the white woman cry when she visited the black woman’s house?

Was he serving and organizing the mutiethnic or just the black population?

I think this is an important question.

**Kratos** · 11-03-2008, 07:42 PM

So, people voting for Obama can't defend this and don't have a problem with it?

**KingTenderloin** · 11-03-2008, 10:02 PM

Originally Posted by Kratos

So, people voting for Obama can't defend this and don't have a problem with it?

You said no half truths were allowed so that leaves Obama supporters with very little to say

**DeputyLoneWolf** · 11-03-2008, 10:17 PM

Originally Posted by BgMc31

from what I understand, he did most of his work from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. He received most of his funding through them. Although he worked in largely African-American communities, many of the communities he dealt with were multiethnic.

Pretty sad response dude, Don't you have anything better? Oh thats right I forgot you are soooo informed.

And I'm guessing your still going to say your not just voting for him because he's black...

**Kratos** · 11-03-2008, 10:30 PM

^BgMc is pretty well informed and I asked his opinion because I thought he really might know more about the job^

I'm suprized nobody is concerned about this though. I don't care about a black person being pres, but I don't want a black actavist.

**DeputyLoneWolf** · 11-03-2008, 10:41 PM

Originally Posted by Kratos

^BgMc is pretty well informed and I asked his opinion because I thought he really might know more about the job^

I'm suprized nobody is concerned about this though. I don't care about a black person being pres, but I don't want a black actavist.

Ok true, I bet BgMc does know a lot about Obama and the whole ACORN thing and just chooses not to mention anything because theres nothing good about Obama's involvment in the whole thing.