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Obama’s Race

July 23rd, 2008
By ROBERT STEIN

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It’s not as if John McCain has become irrelevant, but in the main ring of the ‘08 electoral circus, all eyes are now on Barack Obama’s solo high-wire act as he walks a racial, political and cultural tightrope toward the White House.

The questions are less about the two candidates’ policies and personalities than about the larger meaning of it all: “Could an Obama Presidency Hurt Black Americans?” CNN asks while citing those “who warn that an Obama victory could cause white Americans to ignore entrenched racial divisions while claiming that America has reached the racial Promised Land.”

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, the author of a book predicting that Obama can’t win now says that he “has already won a cultural mandate to the American presidency. And politically, he is now essentially in a contest with himself” to persuade “even Middle America to feel comfortable as the mantle they bestow on him settles upon his shoulders.”

This portentous pronouncement comes at the conclusion of a column titled “Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama,” which argues that Jackson and his peers presided over “an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage.”

Obama, he claims, is moving beyond all that to become the anti-Jackson “to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.”

All these exegeses are enough to make voters’ heads spin as they watch a gifted political figure weaving his way this week through a Middle East minefield and heading toward what promises to be a tumultuous reception in Europe.

Whatever the subtexts of Barack Obama’s American journey turn out to be, one conclusion is inescapable: Unlike the current occupant, if and when he moves into the Oval Office, a person of substance will be sitting there.

Cross-posted from my blog.



This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 am and is filed under White House, Black/African-American, Bigotry, Newsweek Blogitics, John McCain, Racism, 2008 Elections, Race, Society, Barack Obama, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 6 Comments

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    The most unexpected consequence of Obama's candidacy is the dsiplay of the 1001 different angles from which it is being analyzed, parsed, spun, and generally used as fodder for pundit self-expression.

    It would all be good, if it didn't come across as a competition for the one and only true way to understand the impkications of race.
    It's not either/or, folks.

    Oddly, the white part of Obama's racial heritage is rarely acknowledged. That would be a worthy topic to explore by one Obama watcher or another.
    What does it mean that it's not?
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    The best thing is that Obama is not one of the dinosaurs from the past who exploit Perpetual Victimhood Forever, Inc. [tm], and he is a positive PC channel for many who otherwise would keep repeating the myths about our continued "oppressive" society (but where no racism is demonstrated they say it's just "hidden" or "in code," etc.) and a continued need for White Guilt Over Slavery. (Civil rights were restored in 1965 and even the South got cleaned up by the 1980s. Many of us are not about to succumb to the pathological guilt-and-atonement nonsense; I never enslaved anybody, am not racist, and am not to be expected to behave in a diseased manner for others' choices and decisions to satisfy a few "progressives" [sic].)
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    "What does it mean that it's not?"

    PC is powerful.
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    Other dinosaurs from the past epxloit a degree of progess to practice denial about the continuing pervasiveness of racism and the racial institutional consequences of the past.

    If only all the dinosaurs would hold their own convention, while the rest of us TALK about the past, the present and the future - all three, fully.
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    It that is a response to what I have written, it is illogical nonsense.

    While the kiddie "progressives" make a big deal of race and engage in all kinds of fiction and worse when referring to "racism" that isn't there, the rest of us simply look at and evaluate Obama as this year's Dem candidate and likely future President.
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    Thank you runasim for the best and truest one-sentence summaries I've yet come across: The most unexpected consequence of Obama's candidacy is the dsiplay of the 1001 different angles from which it is being analyzed, parsed, spun, and generally used as fodder for pundit self-expression.

    That was poetry. Unfortunately, you offered said pundits more fodder with: Oddly, the white part of Obama's racial heritage is rarely acknowledged. That would be a worthy topic to explore by one Obama watcher or another. What does it mean that it's not?

    I suppose it's only natural though. Obama's candidacy is unusual in many different ways -- and singularly unusual in many more. Because of that it stands to reason he would be put under a microscope -- the kind of microscope that only an extremely capable and extremely confident individual could withstand. Time will tell if he is such an individual.

    Just between you and me though... I hope he is. But I also hope that my hope doesn't transform itself into some sort of mindless self-projection based upon trivialities of one sort or another.
 
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