LEFT WING LOONS
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Title: Inside Pete Buttigieg’s years-long, and often clumsy, quest to understand the black experience
Source:
Washington Pest
URL Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elec ... b&ocid=NL_ENUS_D1_20191216_1_3
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Author: Robert Samuels
Post Date: 2019-12-16 09:32:46 by IbJensen
Keywords: None
Views: 1123
Comments: 4
Renee Ferguson, a prominent black television journalist in Chicago, arrived outside the swanky office building with a videographer and her intern — a Harvard sophomore named Peter Buttigieg. © (Afterwards I've got a big surprise if you can take it) In the summer of 2002, Ferguson had been reporting on an investigation about a sex offender working at a day care in the building’s basement. The three wanted to capture undercover footage of the man on the job. But when Ferguson tried to get into the building, a security guard turned her away. The videographer, who was also black, tried next. The security guard turned her away, too. Then, Buttigieg gave it a shot. When he approached the door, the security guard let him in. Buttigieg secured footage that would help Ferguson win one of her seven Emmys, but what stayed with her most was the prejudice that she figured led the young, white intern to acquire access that two black reporters could not. “I think I understand what white privilege looks like,” Ferguson recalled telling Buttigieg. “I don’t know if that’s what’s going on,” he said. “Yes, you do know,” she said. “I couldn’t get in, but you could. Think about how many times in your life that you’ve just been able to walk through doors and the rest of us got turned away.” Seventeen years later, Pete Buttigieg is still thinking. As a presidential candidate who has rocketed to the top tier of the Democratic primary field, he is scrambling to address what has emerged a glaring deficiency: his inability to connect with black communities. Just off a tour of black churches, colleges and neighborhoods in the South, he has tried to introduce himself to voters who, as he has said repeatedly, “might not yet know me.” But the issue is not simply a matter of whether the black community knows him. He is battling doubts that he knows the black community well enough to be the Democratic nominee. As a white man with a privileged background who has fumbled relationships with minorities as mayor of South Bend, Ind., the 37-year-old Buttigieg has long been on a quest to grasp the African American experience — and his relationship to it. The journey began even before running for office, as a college student, an intern, a young adult trying to make sense of his heritage and his sexual orientation. Friends and colleagues describe him as a man still forming a sensibility about African American issues and culture, a work-in-progress. When confronted about the subject in South Bend, even Buttigieg’s critics there concede he can be well-intentioned and thoughtful. He listens. Nonetheless, they found themselves surprised and frustrated by a streak of attempts to assure black voters that have come off as clumsy, at best. In his first appearance last summer in a nationally televised presidential debate, days after a white police officer who didn’t turn on his body camera shot a black man in South Bend, Buttigieg admitted that he was unable to figure out how to diversify his city’s police force. “I couldn’t get it done,” he said. His campaign angered some African American leaders in South Carolina after at least one was listed as endorsing Buttigieg’s agenda for the black community when they had not. Making matters worse, his campaign issued a photo promoting that agenda featuring a black mother and child who live in Kenya, not the United States. (Just a southern negro accent, like Hillary, and you'll have them eating out of your hand.) Just this month, Buttigieg shocked some of his own residents when he said that in South Bend, his racially stratified hometown, he had “worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated.” “It sounded like he wasn’t even from here,” said Henry Davis, Jr., a city council member who ran against Buttigieg for mayor in 2015. Davis wondered how a man who was so intellectually curious that he learned Norwegian to better understand a novel, who went out of his way to learn an Aboriginal wooden instrument called the didgeridoo, could be so unaware about segregation patterns in his own city. “I think it’s irresponsible for him to not know, when trying to assume such a prominent leadership role,” Davis said. “By admitting his ignorance and still expecting to serve at a such a high-level, he is just playing into his own white privilege.” Buttigieg tried to play down such criticisms. “I think that’s an uncharitable interpretation of the humility that I try to express, knowing how big a mistake it would be to pretend that I understand African American culture or life any better than I do,” Buttigieg told The Washington Post in an interview. “A part of this is negotiating differences,” Buttigieg said. “I guess there’s two ways to do it. One is to make a show of how much you think you understand. The other is to lay out how much you know that you might not know and put it out there. And some folks will, hopefully, view that as an invitation to continue the dialogue.” 'Feeling a little different' That dialogue started in earnest during the summer of 2002, when he interned at the Chicago television station with Ferguson. Although Buttigieg said his memory of the undercover pictures was “fuzzy,” he said his relationship with the journalist was eye-opening in terms of understanding race and racism in America. “My best chances, especially growing up, of understanding the black experience were through literature,” Buttigieg said. “I mean, I knew some number of black folks in my life, but until Renee — not a lot that we could talk about race.” The two had first met earlier that winter, when Ferguson was on Harvard’s campus to receive a journalism award. A professor told her there was a student he really wanted her to meet, Ferguson recalled. (What? Me worry?) <.)
Poster Comment: Unable to post the rest of the article. Read if you wish and note the photo of Sharpton and Buttplug and the bottle of Hillary hot sauce. Sickening little pervert running for president and getting all hot and bothered over all that tarpaper.
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#3. To: IbJensen (#0)
No aids receptacle for President.
#4. To: A K A Stone (#3)
It's really hard to take this guy seriously...lol. Can you imagine the soulless screeching we will hear from the Feminazi RATZ if the historic first "First Husband" in American history comes without the requisite female POTUS?!! I relish the thought, but not enough to support Mayor Buttplug for anything...MUD
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