A photo of Obama’s “army” originally posted on the campaign’s Tumblr site and run in conjunction with a BuzzFeed story on the Obama campaign reveals a stunning lack of diversity among the president’s Chicago staff.The Obama campaign’s Chicago headquarters has it all—from Jack Daniels and Ping Pong to bouncy balls and ironic desk mementos.Yet the “army of twenty-somethings” campaign manager Jim Messina has assembled in the president’s hometown is almost uniformly white, according to photos contained in a detailed BuzzFeed report Monday.Further examination of the Obama’s campaign’s Tumblr site over the past month reveals very few black individuals—apart from the president and his wife, Michelle—in the pictures posted in the feed.One of the only featured pictures to include a black individual is one from a recent White House visit by Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols.
Rich irony indeed. Chicago
is 42% white, and 36.8 % black, but there’s nary a black face to be found at
the campaign headquarters of America ’s
first black president. Is anyone surprised by this? Not me. The issue goes beyond just the Obama campaign, and to the very Democratic party itself.
I’m not a fan of “affirmative action” by any means, but it’s
ironic to me that in the party of affirmative action, the same party that likes
to paint the Republicans as racist (and yes, there are quite a few racists in the
Republican party, to be sure), they really don’t practice what they
preach when it comes to diversity. In general elections, blacks
tend to vote 90% + for the Democrats over Republicans, but have little to show
for it. For all the college-educated,
articulate, competent blacks who are mayors, state senators, and occupy many
many positions in state and local politics nationwide, where is the “affirmative action”
and push for “diversity” to open doors
to them to rise to national level politics? Where are the black governors, the black US senators?
Even in the upper levels of the Democratic National Committee,
African-Americans are woefully underrepresented relative to their percentage of
the population, and their overwhelming, support of the Democratic party as a group. Looks
to me like the party that likes to point fingers at Republicans &
conservatives on race issues needs to clean its own house first.
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