The New Racism?

The New York Times is running a disturbing article – So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted. I’m not sure what is more racist, the implication that an African-American candidate would automatically get the black vote (are they sheep?) or the main gist of the article which is that some (many?) black voters don’t think Mr. Obama is black enough (i.e. his ancestors weren’t slaves and his mother is white). What is tangentially shocking to me is that people still think Hillary is a good candidate. I’ll let Wil Shipley field that.

Let’s take a look at some of the content:

We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.

Hrm. Now I could be wrong, but I don’t recall a single Native American president. Seriously, you’re going to ding this guy because his family hasn’t been American that long? News flash, none of our families have been. The only thing truly interesting about American history is the amazing lack of it. The Queen of England lives part of the year in a castle that is more than twice as old as our country. Being born here, a so called natural-born citizen, is a requirement for becoming president but Mr. Obama qualifies on that count. The rest of the very short list of requirements doesn’t say anything about eating your meals here or even being raised here.

He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.

Phew, well its a good thing he married black, because we sure as hell wouldn’t want him to marry for love alone. What exactly is “acting black”? Is there a set of guidelines that those of us at home can keep in mind to judge the “blackness” of our candidates by? I’m assuming the last sentence implies that Mr. Obama is a black African instead of an African-American but this is very confusing to me. Isn’t he in fact the very essence of African-American? He father was a black man from Kenya and his mother a white woman from Kansas. Let’s see, Kenya is in Africa and Kansas, I’m pretty sure, is in America. Would that not be an African-American? Ah but see, his ancestor’s weren’t brought here from Africa during the time of slavery, so apparently African-American carries with it a time requirement as well. Well hey, two out of three ain’t bad.

His supporters, who note that he carried the black vote in his Senate race, say they are unperturbed by a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that found that 20 percent of black voters surveyed supported Mr. Obama while 60 percent supported Ms. Clinton.

I can’t blame them for being unperturbed. Who exactly were they polling? No, strike that, I don’t want to know what demographic is comprised of a majority of voters who think Hillary could actually be elected.

He doesn’t share the same kind of background as most African-Americans

How many serious contenders for the presidency do?

He’s a black politician for whom whites don’t have to feel guilty.

Reh? Do we have to feel guilty about other black politicians? Hrm, I must have missed that amendment.

He’s going to have to win over some African-Americans … They have a right to be somewhat suspicious of people who come into the country and don’t share their experience.

Why is that exactly? Why must Mr. Obama be treated with suspicion just because his ancestors didn’t suffer slavery? How many of the other candidates’ ancestors were slaves? Perhaps a better question if they really want to dwell on this is how many other candidates’ ancestors owned slaves?

Barack will tell us that we don’t have to go back to being just a white America or a black America, that we can now become something else, together … That’s the promise of his campaign, and his challenge.

It would certainly be nice if that were true, particularly since whites and blacks are not in fact the only races who call America their home. Unfortunately this article has made that seem a little less likely than I might have otherwise thought. Go back far enough and all our ancestors were black. Africa was the birthplace of homo sapiens. Let’s not judge our candidates by the color of the skin but by their values, their record, their sincerity, and their goals. I don’t know Mr. Obama’s position on most topics yet, having really only caught him briefly being interviewed by Charlie Rose, but I know that his degree of “blackness” is not what will make him a good (or bad) president.