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September 16, 2010

Post Racial? Yeah, Sure.

This post was going to be about how despite being a fairly educated working stiff all my life, I have still only achieved one of six benchmarks that guarantee middle class status- a small modicum of health insurance (although in all honesty, I have afforded vacations- in the past). But I couldn’t help but notice the steady stream of ugly, blatantly racist remarks in the Comments section (link above).

These despicable comments were not the cleverly coded attacks and innuendos that say… FOX has mastered on an almost daily basis. In this “post racial” age, when outright racism is supposedly more subtle and code words the rule of the day, make no mistake that this manner of bigotry has not replaced the old- it is simply yet another branch that all too happily coexists with its less literate, albeit more honest ancestor. Many of these comments mirror the ol’ time, knee slappin’, down-and-dirty racist remarks that brought glee to white faces everywhere in the deepest South of yore.

I beeze in da uper class nows, baby. coz obama da man an he done tolds me i will be gittn mo money mo money mo money from him. and i aint gotta do nuttin coz da white man has done stole every thing from me and my peoples.


its bushes falt to and that dik chanie. thats what my peoples says and i be smart nuff to believe it.

i aint gonna have to pay nuttin and da crackers can pay me now. i be rich now.

Cute, huh? At first, many of the racist comments were directed at the fact that Yahoo Finance chose a photo of an African-American family to illustrate this generic Investing Ideas & Strategies article (link above).  Amazingly, some of the latter comments were addressing why that photo was then removed in favor of a… white family?!? And now it has- NO PHOTO at all!!!

– Stan Banos

(cross-posted from Reciprocity Failure. 8/29/2010)

  • http://agrippinaminor.com/scarabus/ Wayne Dickson

    Any word from Yahoo about why they did that?

  • Lost Left Coaster

    Just followed the link, and it looks like they may have taken the entire comments section down. But taking the photo down is absolutely unacceptable — it is reminiscent of the Maine newspaper that recently apologized to its readers for running a positive story last weekend about the end of Ramadan.

  • http://reciprocity-failure.blogspot.com Stan B.

    No word from Yahoo, so one can only speculate as to why they replaced the original photo with a white family (unfortunately, did not catch that photo). They later took down that photo as well and left none- but the 4,000+ Comments are still there…

  • g

    Wow, the comments are amazingly horrible. But what I thought when I first saw the photo was my co-worker, a middle class black woman who’s raising a family with her teacher husband, working a middle-management job and driving a nice, well-maintained mid-sized car. She even has similar hair to the woman in the photo.

    Pretty typical person. Can there really be people in American who would see a photo like this and not know someone fitting this rather commonplace image?