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Conservatives went nuts on Twitter in reaction to Obama’s comments on race and racism. He is (you guessed right!) “racist-in-chief.” Some thought the speech was okay, but…

Anyway, you can read ’em all at Daily Intel where Dan Amira stacks them up and Jonathan Chait also looks into the speech itself where, once again, Barack Obama tries to “de-racialize” the issue.

The entire Barack Obama political image has been built in large part around de-racialization — persuading white voters to put aside any preconceptions about race and to think of him in nonracial terms. Obama, according to one analysis, has “talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.” His famed race speech about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign was, above all, an effort to put to bed the race issue. Being seen by white America as a spokesman for the black community, rather than America as a whole, has always been Obama’s number-one political nightmare. He spoke out today in spite of this instinct.

Third, Obama believes America’s racial problem has not only gotten dramatically better over the course of his life — it will continue to do so. Younger people are less racially biased than older people, and Obama believes that process will continue to rapidly transform America’s approach to race.

Point No. 3 may help explain the contradictions between No. 1 and No. 2. Obama understands that interjecting himself into a racialized controversy carries risks, but he also believes that the electorate of the future is on his side. His remarks are probably aimed not at the present but at posterity. …Chait,Daily Intel

What I wonder is whether a particularly tenacious form of racism will finally go away. It’s the racism that doesn’t show on the surface but continues as sign of profound ignorance/unworldlinesss even (and maybe especially) among a well-to-do and highly educated group of American whites — and some blacks — who would never, in a month of Sundays, put themselves in the same group as racists.

They see themselves as highly civilized realists. These folks cling to the belief, admitted among themselves but to no others that blacks just don’t have the stuff to succeed — certainly not without a lot of help. Blacks are innately, irrevocably less capable, have a narrower vision, and are genetically programmed to be inferior: lovely people but… well … you know…

How many of that group have been present in every stage of the life of Barack Obama? Probably a lot. And he has to work with them, day in and day out, just as he has to work with the overt racism and bullying coming from Congress.

Cross-posted from Prairie Weather

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