 |
| The Bulletin. Keeping a finger on the pulse of the nearly pulseless. |
See, for example, the July 25, 2013 edition of the Boston
Bulletin[i]
(I’d love to link to the actual stories, but the Bulletin, a free paper,
doesn’t post their stories online unless you buy a subscription, and then it’s
just a PDF. All this despite the fact that there’s an ad in the paper that
reads “What drives the internet? CONTENT. Read the Bulletin online at www.buletinnewspapers.com). In it,
among a lot of advertising for things you won’t use, ten actual stories, some
event listings, one editorial and two op-eds. We’ll start with the op-eds.
In “If I Had A Son,” Frank Sullivan (regular writer of the
“Frank Reflections” column) nails the tone-deaf white Irish-American attitude,
implying that President Obama is a racist because the latter had the temerity
to suggest that if
he had a son, that son would resemble Trayvon Martin. Frank, who totally
recognizes that America’s racial history is “disgusting,” argues “I thought we
are not supposed to use phrases that suggest ‘They all look the same,’ [sic]
when describing a black teenager.” His whole follow-up, where he pretends that
if he had a son he’d explain to them that they should respect Rosa Parks and
MLK, but that any present-day racial struggles are fabricated race baiting, is
based on this idea, which is to say “Obama thinks all black kids look alike.”
Except that’s not what Obama is saying. He’s saying if he had a son, that son would
look black and black teenagers, in his experience, are profiled and in the
instance of Trayvon Martin, stalked and ultimately killed for being black. His
point is not that all black kids look the same. It’s that all black kids look
the same to white people.
