How Angry Will Society Allow Obama To Be, Part 2

CNN's John Blake actually runs through a pretty decent discussion of the topic I brought up yesterday on black men traditionally not being able to show anger in our society, and how that applied to Obama.

If you've followed the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, you've heard the complaints that Obama isn't showing enough emotion.

But scholars say Obama's critics ignore a lesson from American history: Many white Americans don't like angry black men.

It's the lesson Obama absorbed from his upbringing, and from an impromptu remark he delivered last summer. Yet it's a lesson he may now have to jettison, they say, as public outrage spreads.

"Folks are waiting for a Samuel Jackson 'Snakes on the Plane' moment from this president as in: 'We gotta' get this $#@!!* oil back in the $#!!* rig!' But that's just not who Obama is,'' says Saladin Ambar, a political science professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

But we've been here before, as I've said.

But Obama has "gone off" before and that didn't work too well for him, says Ambar.


During a news conference last summer, Obama casually said that police acted "stupidly" when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates in his home for disorderly conduct after a confrontation with a white police officer.

Obama's comments infuriated many white people, and even some black supporters. Obama had to have a Beer Summit to calm the public uproar.

"He flashed genuine anger," says Ambar. "At that moment, when he touched on the issue of race, he spoke frankly and passionately about what he felt and it got him into a big deal of trouble."

As I sqaid yesterday, the rule are different, and it's high time we stop pretending otherwise.  That's starting to be the case, at least people are asking why there's this double standard, and why Obama has kept a leash on his emotion.  But the simple reason that while he'll be attacked for not being "angry" enough as a President, he'll be attacked even more if he goes over the line.  Skipgate, anyone?  He was forced to nationally apologize over that.

So yes, that's why he's not getting angry.  Good for Blake to look into this.