the difference between humor and racism

I am a left wing liberal commie agitator. I call myself that because I know it's what right wing agitators call people who hold my political views. I find it funny. In fact I find a lot of political humor funny even when the butt includes left wing liberals, such as:

A man is drowning 100 yards off shore. The right wing conservative will throw him 50 yards of rope and tell him that if he can't swim the other 50 yards he doesn't deserve to be saved. The left wing liberal will throw the man 200 yards of rope, let go of the other end and move on to find the next problem to solve.

However, it seems that many people don't draw a line between humor about choices, such as being a left wing liberal, or a right wing conservative, and racism. A young teacher showed me something he considered humorous and because I had laughed at other jokes about the bailout and such, he thought I might find it funny. I don't remember the wording exactly (more about that in a minute), but it was something to the effect of:

Barack Obama will be a good role model to blacks. There hasn't been a black person who's held a job for four years before.

I gasped. He knew he had offended me, but as I thought about it, it wasn't so much the joke that offended me, but the fact that he found it funny shocked me.

He is a bright, energetic teacher who, like the rest of us, has many minority students. If he truly finds that joke funny, does he really believe that blacks can't stay employed? I mean, even thinking only of names every American should know, I could start lecturing him, starting with Colin Power and Condeleeza Rice and work my way back to the Tuskegee Airmen, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver. and move into actors, comedians, sports figures and other well known blacks who have held the same job for decades. From there I could continue my tirade to include the principal and two vice principals, and several teachers at our school.

But I know he knows all these things and still found that "joke" funny, and I find that sad. So that brings us back to the joke. I tried to find the "exact wording" of it by searching on the web. What I found in the process was so scary that I stopped looking. My coworker is nothing compared to the blatant racism found on the web. The page that made me stop looking was this one. It made me want to barf to think that it falls under "free speech".

So in the long run, I hope that President Obama does have an effect on people, both black and white, and maybe make people who think like those who spread racist Obama humor be shunned by those around them. And I do hope that Obama's security is good enough to keep these crazies away from him.