4 years ago: ‘Yes we can’

December 14, 2009, here on slacktivist: ‘Yes we can’

And anyway we don’t need to replay all the thousands of hours of Obama’s speeches or reread the millions of words he has written or said. We can figure out why Medina is so scared and angry by considering just three of those words, three words that Barack Obama said several times a day, every day, on national television, for nearly all of 2007 and 2008: “Yes we can.”

Twisting that statement into some kind of negative comment to support the claim that Obama “does not love our country like most Americans do — and like [the 43 white] presidents do” is not easy.

“Yes” is, by definition, as positive a statement as one can make. And “can” is almost as irrepressibly optimistic.
That just leaves “we.”

For Medina, Palin, Beck, et. al., “Yes we can” is a negative statement because of the word “we.”

Lorie Medina has never heard Barack Obama say anything good about America because she cannot comprehend that the word “we” could ever be spoken by someone who looks like him in a way that was meant to include someone who looks like her. She cannot conceive that “we” could be used in such an inclusive way because that is not how she uses the term herself — not the way she understands it or is capable of understanding it. When she says “we” she is, emphatically, not including people who look like Barack Obama and so, when she hears him say it, she assumes he must likewise be excluding people who look like her.

And thus that three-word expression of unambiguous love for America sounds instead, in the ears of a Tea Partier, like a threat. To them it sounds like the war cry of outsiders, usurpers determined to shoulder aside people who look like her so they can take over the place to make it a home for people who look like him.

And just to be clear, by “people who look like him” and “people who look like her” above I do, in fact, mean black and white. And by that, yes, I mean that Lorie Medina and the Dallas Tea Party are a sad little bunch of racists.