Thursday, October 6, 2016

This ad is why Black People Support Hillary and here is a hint, it is not the ad itself...


This ad is powerful and not for what it says, but for the fallout and the comments.  The most powerful result of this ad is what people are saying about it. See a lot of the reaction is from white people and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
When I first saw this ad on Facebook, I thought it was very compelling and it made me think.  Then, I looked at the comments underneath.   The range is spectacular.  The vast majority of them were what blacks see on a regular basis. 
First, there are those who change the subject to attempt to mitigate its power. There are comments about her emails, Benghazi, the usual.
Second, there are those who inform blacks that Hillary is only using them.
Third, there are those who try to light things up by saying things like "these people need to go back where they came from..."  and they stop just shy of saying anything related to color.
The first two camps have a singular goal, no matter how benign it seems on the surface.  The goal of one and two are to remove agency from the black population.  It boils down to people saying to black people that they do not know what it means to be black.  It is a rhetoric that tells blacks their experience is invalid and "Don't let Hillary Clinton tell you that you can think for yourself, let us tell you that she is trying to control you so that you will vote for Trump."
The third camp is a group that ties themselves in knots trying to say this is all about race while not using terms like African American and black or "nigger".  This is the same group that uses terms like monkey to describe our current president and have spent the past 8 years saying that he was a Muslim born in Kenya.
The interesting thing is the fourth group.  I read through all of those comments and I found a voice that was missing was ...wait for it... the voice of many black people.  This ad is going to circulate.  It is going to gain ground but it is not going to circulate in the places frequented by people in those first three groups. 
It is like when Trump went to those huge rallies and spoke to predominantly white crowds to talk about what he had to offer black people.  Or the way he brings out Omarosa et al to talk to us about how sensitive he is to the plight of the black man!
So, people can attack the ad and swamp the comments section, but the problem is and always will be that you are not talking to the people you think you are talking to. You are preaching to the choir.  I read the comments because I have an interest in this, but for the most part, it is a bunch of people talking to themselves.

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