It’s an awkward way of saying that we should seek out a broad variety of peers, friends and acquaintances.
A shocking number of comments in this thread that apparently were not able to parse that out. Sure it was awkward but it wasn’t that monumentally opaque this many people should have missed the message.
Yet OP still felt so compelled, so out of the loop to ask… so here we are all talking about it.
The entire post feels like it is made of false pretense… “what do you think of [obvious] X?”
It feels pretty damn much like OP is cooking BS here… the original post feels disingenuous.
There are some horrible gay men out there. Ask gay men. Or look at Peter Thiel. Like yes you should ideally have some variety in your friend group because that helps with empathy but this is not explicitly about gay men. Kinda tokenizing to act like it is. Similar to “You need black friends so you learn to dance better” or some bs like that.
Yeah. I was about to post the first gay man (that I knew was gay) was an asshole. I didn’t think all gay men were assholes, but I learned empathy before high school, so I was able to assume he was just a selfish dick.
you met a gay man for the first time in high school ?
Yes. He was in high school too. Maybe I should have said a gay male? Since he was a teen.
My current wife was friends with him and he was trying to be straight for a while. He dated a girl in high school before he came out, but it was odd.
Yoi bet. Must have felt off for him too
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:
Reflecting on his own experiences, Obama shared that young men need a “diverse” network of role models – and that one of his own was his out gay college professor.
“I had a gay professor in college at a time when openly gay folks still weren’t out a lot, who became one of my favourite professors and was a great guy and would call me out when I started saying stuff that was ignorant,” Obama shared.
“You need that — to show empathy and kindness.”
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
I hated ‘Black Panther.’ It makes me crazy. It gives young black kids the idea that this is something to believe in. Bullshit It’s utter bullshit
And everyone was blowing up about how he was being a racist POS. But then if you actually read the whole thing:
"What I don’t like is that we all have to be superheroes to do anything worthwhile. That’s what makes me crazy. That’s what these movies are saying to young people. And to me it’s not confronting the reality of, you know, the quote-unquote human condition. You know what it is like to be a normal human being in difficult situations and resolving them surviving,” he said.
“Where’s the gravity, where’s real gravity? Because [in superhero movies,] everything is possible,” Gilliam said of the limitless worlds of the MCU. “It’s the limitations that make life interesting. Okay, so your suit burns up. So you get another suit because you’re Tony Stark. It’s not enough. They dominate so much”
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”
but the core message that minorities should carry the burden of emotional labor and growth for the ill informed and bigoted
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.
does this apply to women? do women need lesbian friend to learn empathy and kindness? asking for a friend.
as a society we already teach girls to be more reserved, thoughtful and kind, which also encourages empathy. the problem is that we teach boys to be tough and strong, and not much else. so they either need to learn these values from women or gay men who may have avoided the traps of toxic masculinity. of course if you’re friends with women or gay men you’re already self selecting as you’re also avoiding some trappings of toxic masculinity.
though Obama is bullshitting obviously because he showed none of that when he ordered drone strikes on random brown people celebrating and dancing in a wedding and shit… but the point stands.
how DARE you
🥰
Jenny/Amber?
Nice in an ideal world
But just as it’s not a woman’s job to teach men emotional skills, it’s not a gay persons either.
Others can’t keep carrying the burden for this.
Kind of a dumb quote. We need to be around gay men to learn how women feel when we’re trying way to hard to bang someone who isn’t interested.
Ah. Yeah. So when I first went to uni, I had long hair, oversize jeans and in general for me it seemed kinda hippie, but apparently made a different impression.
So there’s a moment when I stand talking to others from our group, feel a so-o-oftish touch on my shoulder and a male-made-feminine-with-effort slow voice “hi, my name’s Rustem”. I was fucking terrified.
So, not gay, but being autistic I might sometimes look that for normies. Broken signals might be perceived as gay signals or something like that.
Love the sentiment. Diversity helps empathy. People don’t need a specific type of friend. But I do like the general idea that people need exposure to others.
No idea what the expanded context is though.
Isolating from people who haven’t developed social skills is how we got incels in the first place.
And then he started blasting
I disagree with it. Nothing wrong with having friends of whatever shape or size. But to act like you need those sorts of friends in order to learn basic human traits is utterly false.
Also, in terms of role models and gender stuff, it’s just weird to think how that’d come in to play for a younger person. You can look up to role models for any reason – typically for excelling in a field or pursuit that you’re also interested in pursuing. But it’s a personal relation imagined in your head between you and them. When gender enters into that relation, in terms of who you’re modelling your behaviour after, a straight guy modelling himself off a gay man doesn’t make sense. If you have an interest in the gender of your role model, as a guy, it’d be mostly in seeing the reaction they get from women, and wanting to emulate their success by dressing / behaving similarly. Like kids who saw rock stars gettin bras thrown at them, pursuing becoming a rock star because they wanted the same gender-oriented treatment.
Hell, you could argue that’s one reason the incel’s are so keen to model themselves after psuedo “alphas”, and shitheads like Trump – Trump’s a disgusting pile of yuck, but he’s rich, has a hot younger wife, a large family all living pretty well, and has tons of extra-marital affairs without any seeming repercussions (he’s likely to dodge even that Epstein stuff). It’s hard to argue that he hasn’t ‘succeeded’ at life. Same goes for all the tech bro fascists who’re fathering, literally, hundreds of kids. Meanwhile, Mr Too Much Empathy is going to internalize all the negativity about men from feminist sources, won’t be able to ask a woman out because of that internalized trauma, and will disappear from the gene pool.
Ahh yes because kindness and empathy is stored in the gay genes of course lmfao, what dribble.
That’s him advocating for wider adoption of prison culture or what?
Also I think I’d be dumb to try to make Röhm’s stormtroopers my role models to learn empathy and kindness, and they were much into that. Or Spartans.
There are not enough gay men around for that. But also who knows if this is really a Obama quote. And there are also enough wemen who can be role models for that an hetro, bi, and whatever non gay men who can be role models for empathy and kindness.
Obviously not drone-Obama.
Or other men. Anyone can be an ass, anyone can be kind. It isn’t a sexuality or gender thing.
it was said at a 2015 WH conference on aging. he expressed the thought at other times, too. Yahoo seems to suggest he attributes the thought to a gay professor he had, who modeled empathy and kindness to him.
To be clear, having a role model that is empathetic and kind is what’s needed. Looking for that in a particular flavor of humanity is… unnecessary. There are, IMO, rather few flavors of humanity in which you can’t find those qualities. (not saying it’s universal, but it’s not something tied to race or creed or generic social constructs. Except fucking nazis and their ilk. we won’t get into that.)
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Well I’ll tell you I think a lot more of it than I do of that engagement style title used on this OP.
I think it makes a lot of sense though if you actually pay attention to how teenage boys are behaving lately. There’s a lot of anti-gay sentiment. The best way to fight bigotry is exposure. That’s why conservatives hate the idea of college so much. They don’t like people of different backgrounds and beliefs mixing.
