"I'm Just Sayin'"

Whoopi Goldberg offended me with her warning to the white folks: you white folks have to watch what you say when Obama becomes President because what you say is often taken differently by black people. She clarified for both the panel on The View and the audience, using her favorite phrase, "I'm just sayin'," that there is no way we white folks can understand because … we’re white.

Of course, there is no rebuttal opportunity because she’s based her conclusion strictly on her personal perception that color is the definitive quality in judging a person's character, motive, and intent. If anyone challenges her premise, we're back to the racism argument: if a white person disagrees with a black person's perception, the white person is a racist.

Whoopi took offense because a white person used the word “articulate” in referring to Whoopi's informed discourse on a topic they were discussing. Whoopi believes that the compliment implied that blacks are usually not articulate and that the white person who made the comment was surprised that Whoopi is articulate! "Articulate” is not a secret white code for ignorant, it’s a function of clarity of thought and syntactical construction in expressing one's self in written or spoken communication.

The way Whoopi explained the incident, one would think that calling a black person "articulate" is tantamount to a racial epithet!

Whoopi's inference is a huge leap of the alleged racist chasm that exists and will be widened and deepened if all blacks share Whoopi’s characteristic of inferring meaning from innocuous comments made during social conversation. An articulate person is simply well-spoken, regardless of the color of the person's skin.

I am appalled by the condemnation and the threats of black people who seem to have forgotten Martin Luther King, Jr’s articulated philosophy of judging people on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. That philosophy goes both ways, and as a white woman, I’m not liking the content of some of the black characters in the media these days.

I am no longer considering voting for the first black president. Oprah’s overtly racial “this man, this time” speech, in my opinion, sold Obama solely as a black man, not as the most well-qualified person for the job. The tapes of Obama's minister condeming all white people for hundreds of years of alleged racism, followed by Whoopi’s “you white folks” warning that once a black man occupies the White House, we white folks better watch what we say or deal with the consequences, leads me to believe that the country--and we white folks--are better off passing on this historic opportunity.