racismreview.com

The Sun Journal on September 13, 2008 reported that

activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap. (Source: AP News)

The conference where the product was first introduced to the public was at the Values Vote Summit which was co-sponsored by the conservative American Values and Focus on the Family Action.

Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.”

The Summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon. On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?” The article goes on to note that the boxes were simply “political satire” and that the waffle reference was “poking fun at [Obama’s] public remarks and positions.” Even though the product was reportedly pulled, I noticed one could still purchase the boxes from a sponsored website.

On the site it is noted that

Obama Waffles are selling like, well, like hot cakes!

To me that simply signal that those running the machine of oppression are simply feeding the hunger that is the heart of many Americans. We as a nation should be mortified.

[Open Thread: What Do You Make of This Story and the Image?]

UPDATE: Courtesy of M. in comments, and of stuffwhitepeope do, here is a video of the white guys who did this.

MediaMatters reports this continuing saga of leading media commentators questioning from a Senator McCain perspective and periodically framing the world, without apology, from the old white racial frame of society: (credit: MSNBC)

On the July 7 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews teased an upcoming segment by saying: “They’re the working-class white voters Hillary Clinton won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama now win over the regular folks, white folks, against John McCain? We’ll ask the strategists.” On the June 30 edition of Hardball, Matthews similarly teased a segment by asserting: “Up next: They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?”

This is the year 2008, right? And we are a “colorblind” society? Right?

According to the Bureau of the Census estimates, the Latino population reached 44.3 million in 2006, which represented 15 percent of the nation’s total population. Many whites have responded to this population growth with alarm. They see the specter of a foreign Latin American surge as a menace to ‘American values’ and the U.S. “core culture.”

Language lies within that core, and the dramatic growth of the Latino population is viewed by many members of the ruling racial group as a direct threat to the survivability of English, what is often termed by them “the official language of the country.”

The influential Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has recently articulated a deeply xenophobic and naïve assessment of Latinos’ use of Spanish at home and in public places. This situation, in his view, portends aggressive bilingualism and the growth of two distinct segments of U.S. society unable to communicate with each other. Huntington and other monoglots have neglected a basic step, namely, asking ordinary Latinos about their views on the issue. If Latinos are embarking on a Spanish predominance campaign, this should be reflected on their views on language.

Joe Feagin and I collected data from 72 in-depth interviews of mostly middle-class Latinos carried out in 2003-2005 in numerous states with substantial Latino populations (Ethnic and Racial Studies, July, 2007). Our interviewees did not voice any derision toward English. In point of fact, not one of them advocated that Spanish should replace English as the standard language of the U.S.

They asserted, however, that language diversity should be encouraged. As one of them put it:

“The more languages you know, the more culture you have.”

Cultural groups struggle to keep their language because it is fundamental to social life and expresses the understandings of its associated culture in overt and subtle ways. Many Latinos prefer to use Spanish because it affords them a richer form of communication. Analysts like Huntington accuse Latinos of being a threat to the “American way of life,” which for them means Anglo-Saxon ways of doing things. On closer examination, this is a peculiar accusation because many Latinos are accenting the virtues of language diversity and pluralism, values that reflect one of the pillars of the dominant U.S. ideology : “melting pot” imagery.

~ José A. Cobas