Barack Obama Isn’t Black!
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Such is the state of play on the American Left.
Normal, everyday folk, ie those who flee politics much as Petrarch fled the plague, don’t really give a darn what your putative ancestry may be. It’s perhaps a testament to the work of the last fifty years that, these days, you tend to be judged by ‘who you are’ as a person rather than by ‘your skin’s melanin content’.
Unfortunately, ‘race’ is, and will ever be, cried up on the Left as a means of categorizing the citizen body into nice little groups which can be played off against one another, and to whom government-provided goodies can be handed out. The politics of race, class and resentment can be useful in stirring up support for one’s candidates, but ultimately is self-defeating. It’s small wonder that the sizeable and growing black middle class is increasingly conservative; they’ve made their way in the world, and don’t want or need some group of retrograde theorists and second class politicians telling them what their ‘identity’ should be.
So now we have the ludicrous propsect of an entire party which obsesses (rather like Labour, actually) over how to categorize the citizen body–a task which becomes increasingly pointless as intermarriages grow in number and yes, as immigrants arrive from places like Africa and Jamaica.
Heaven only knows what the Left makes of Tiger Woods. Is he Indian? Black? Native American? White? Or is he just ‘Tiger Woods, a great golfer and a pretty decent man’? -
You’ve not seen this then, check it out:
The Tiger Woods bit is over in less than 3 minutes … the big punchline (IMHO) is at 2:45. Hilarious and incisive.
What exactly is accomplished by pretending that “people with dark skin” and “the US African-American culture” aren’t different things? Broad comedy I suppose: they’re both called “black”, hehe. -
Dickerson attempts to square the circle by claiming that ‘blackness’ is some sort of socio/cultural artefact. More properly, the term ‘black’, as a noun, is being misused by Ms. Dickerson, in a decidely bigoted way. Indeed, were her logic to be uttered by a white person, he’d be accused of ‘racism’.
Nobody I know would state, if shown snapshots of Jesse Jackson, Trent Lott, Tony Blair and Condi Rice, that he labelled Rice and Jackson ‘black’ based upon their supposed ‘social and cultural’ experiences. He’d do so because, well, they are dark-skinned, and the Maximum Tone/Trent Lott aren’t.
Any attempt to claim some special mantle of ‘blackness’ based upon ‘ancestors who were slaves’ completely deranges the meaning and everyday use of the term. What, then, are Africans from Kenya: ‘dark skinned folk who look black but ain’t, at least not in the US?’
So not only do we have the absurd politics of ‘race’, but now an attempt to claim a special mantle of ‘blackness’ for a limited group of people whose remote ancestors came over on slave ships. Are we back to the ‘one drop of blood rule’, or must 7 of your 8 great-grandparents been born into bondage in order for you to be authentically ‘black’?
Barak Obama is ‘black’, at least by skin tone and the fact that his daddy came from the torrid regions of Africa. That’s really all that matters, and to my mind it all has nothing to do with his qualifications (or lack thereof) to hold high office.
What a joke it all is…. -
The American left focuses on race, ethnicity and sex because in reality, that’s all they have. Rather than deal with real issues in realistic ways, they continue to compartmentalize people in order to play them off one another. The theory is that the populace is kept off kilter and sniping at each other, and the Democrats can act the benevolent “uniters,” when in reality they are dividing. And instead of looking at certain candidates’ qualifications, we are hearing more about the possiblitiy of the “first” black, woman, Hispanic in the White House.
A joke indeed.
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