this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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shit take. gay people shouldn’t have to act as a token friend to teach you not to be a shitty person. as a minority he should understand it even more. does he think all the dumb proud boys need a black friend so that black people can take on the burden of showing racist assholes they are normal human beings?
Also I know tons of gay dudes with 0 empathy barack, not every gay man is an empathic queen. Maybe you should have learned some empathy though before you droned all those people
Here's the pertinent section from the article:
So his point was really that people need a diversity of types of people as role models, and that one of his own was a gay professor who showed empathy and kindness. The meme changes it a bit.
Reminds me of that Terry Gilliam interview where he said
And everyone was blowing up about how he was being a racist POS. But then if you actually read the whole thing:
But engaging with a nuanced opinion is boring. Everyone wants to divide the world into manichean extremes, to find out who we hate now.
So he words it better in the article but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted is essentially the same
“[the gay professor] would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant”
Granted one can’t learn the struggles of every single minority group in existence but maybe take it upon yourself to learn empathic approaches to listening and communicating. You won’t be perfect of course, no one is, but you’ll put a lot less people in the position of having to explain to you “this is why you’re being an ass right now”
That is not remotely what he said. You're trying really hard to find a reason to be offended by this, huh?
How would you describe elevating someone described as “he called me out when I said ignorant stuff” if not “this man performed the emotional labor I was unwilling to do so instead of asking society to be better I am asking it to further burden people like him with the task of educating people like me”
Are you unfamiliar with how humans interact with each other within that society you're talking about? They call each other out on shit an the time. Some people only listen to their close aqaintences. No one can know everything, we all rely on others to tell us if we're wrong about something.
He did not say to solely rely on one person to make you not am ignorant biggot. He said make sure you have a diverse set of aqaintences so there's more than one perspective to call you out on stuff for. See the difference?
Are you familiar with the concept of minority stress and micro aggressions?
This goes back to the core point: maybe instead of being a society of people who are shitty to each other and need to be constantly called out we aim to be a society that is more empathic so that the callouts don’t need to occur?
There is a difference here between social boundaries of differing opinion (like oh I don’t like it when someone is a hugger so I have to define person space by “calling them out” or more appropriately said as implementing boundaries in this context) and basic decency. obama is saying that he was saying some “ignorant stuff” in 1978 as an undergrad so this was probably pretty heinous by modern standards. Who knows what that was - “isnt it weird”, “thats gay”, “whos the woman”, some biblical judgement shit, etc.
For the latter why does someone need to call you out, especially at college age? Why havent you learned basic respect for others and decorum? This is the issue. By putting minorities in the position where they must hear your ignorance and then choose to either ignore it or call it out you create stress that other classes do not have to experience (thus the talk of privilege) and eventual anticipatory anxiety (“is this person going to give me the look and treat me weird”) based on patterns of behavior from other people
That’s why obamas rhetoric is offensive. Because it puts the onus of action on the minority, not on the privileged class. The minority needs to act as a role model, the minority needs to call out behavior, the minority needs to accept integration with a populace that has historically rejected them and will continue to do so, and they need to tolerate that rejection until their nagging and call outs finally shift the behavior? seems like a bum deal to me.
Maybe for once in history the privileged class can suck it the fuck up and learn to not be assholes instead
That's not the message I took away from what he said. What I got is that people should have diverse role models because if everyone is just like you, you don't learn empathy. He had someone who would correct him when he was wrong in a kind way, and that person happened to be gay. That experience helped him learn empathy and kindness.
As a straight white guy, I also feel that I've benefited from getting to know queer folk on a personal level - that that experience helped me understand and appreciate diversity, even for people from groups that I haven't yet gotten to know personally. I get to know someone who's, say, trans, and get at least a little exposure to what their experience of life is and how it's differed from mine. It makes me work that empathy muscle, so it's more developed when I met the next person whose experience is different from mine.
That doesn't mean that those people have some responsibility for educating me or teaching me anything. It just means that my exposure to people from different walks of life is useful for my own personal growth.
I think what you say is better than what he said
You describe hearing people you consider friends and learning from them with empathic listening. Reading the article (though tbf I did not listen to the podcast to hear his full remarks and what is in the article is extremely limited) obama presents the idea of minority ambassadors to empathic reasoning:
“That’s one of the things that I think a lot of times boys need, is not just exposure to one guy, one dad. No matter how good the dad is, he can’t be everything.
“And then that boy may need somebody to give the boy some perspective on the dad.”
Perhaps I’m reading too much into his words but this, to me, reads as “pick up the slack for shitty dads that are letting the Internet turn out an army of andrew tate clones”
Also note that unlike you he does not refer to having “friends” but “role models”, putting people on a pedestal and inherently being part of the problem. I again think your comment is better largely because of this point; rather than elevate to a prop you consider these people your actual friends. Again, maybe this is something that obama says in the podcast, which I assume is far longer, but also maybe as a career politician he is so disconnected from reality he doesn’t know what friends are anymore haha
Podcasts tend to be pretty conversational. I'm sure Obama didn't put the thought into the comment that he puts into his speeches, where every word and every sentence is crafted. I just took it to mean that he had this diversity of experience with people he looked up to, and that helped him grow as a person. I personally didn't have a lot of people growing up that I thought of as role models (not that my life was in any way bad, just that I didn't tend to relate to people that way). So maybe the way I took it was slightly different than he meant it because of the differences in our experience of growing up, or maybe he was just trying to equate exposure to diverse people with the development of empathy, and did so in the way it worked him him. Hard to say.
I just fucking love little bites of information shared in meme form out of context. Really gives a good enough picture for judgement, right?
Here's the article that probably prompted this: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/07/21/barack-obama-gay-college-professor/
If you read it through, the message is just a bit different from the sentence in this image.