I wrote a post yesterday...

...in which I said that the term "community organizer" in Republican circles means "black troublemaker." 

And I struggled with that. 

For the rest of the day, I thought to myself, Should I have used the word "black?" Should I take that out of there? Do I sound like some crank? (Don't answer that last one.) 

I decided to leave it in. 

Then, later in the day, I heard that Romney surrogate John Sununu, above, said this about President Obama (my emphasis): 

"He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn't be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia," he said. "And, frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago." 

(Socialized structure? What the heck is he talking about?)

Look: as the title of this blog indicates, I'm a white guy. What's more, I've been a white guy all my life. And I know how white people talk about black people when they're not around. In the white suburban world in which I live, the term "community organizer" is a derogatory one. It doesn't mean, some guy who graduated from an Ivy League school who chose to go into the city to try and make people's lives better instead of taking a job on Wall Street. No, it means, some black guy who went into the ghetto to stir up trouble. 

Or, as my father used to say, a militant, as in, "Is he a militant?" 

"No, Dad, he's one of the good ones." 

"Oh, okay." 

So don't kid yourself. When you hear some old white guy like Sununu say -- usually with a smirk -- that somebody was a "community organizer," it really does mean "black troublemaker." 

___  

By the way, the Developing Communities Project is a faith-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes on Chicago's South Side. It was organized in 1984 in response to the hardships caused by lay-offs and plant closings in the area. When President Obama worked there he helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project. 

Troublemaker.