Race Matters

In his run for the Presidency, Barack Obama stuck to the line that his race meant nothing. Supporters called him the first post-racial candidate, and of course, he became the first post-racial President. All's well that ends well. And then, buddy Eric Holder declared we weren't post-racial enough because we are cowards when it comes to speaking about race. Followed closely by the very American "Beer Summit." Guess it wasn't the end, after all.

We fought a Civil War, and almost a hundred years later, we fought the Civil Rights battles. Statutes were passed, blacks moved into the corridors of power, schools ceased to be segregated, and two generations of whites and blacks learned to live together. At first it was uncomfortable and strained, but as the years went on, it came to seem natural. But the left and the race-hustlers just can't leave well enough alone. Keep picking at those old scabs, and with a little luck, they'll re-infect and the government doctors can rush in to save the patient.

But if Barack Obama is actually post-racial, why does he insist on identifying himself with "black causes?" If an assumption of evil must be made between a black person and a white person, why is it always the white person who gets the tar and feathers? The same can be said for Holder. Why did he have his lieutenants dismiss the already- obtained judgments against the Black Panthers who intimidated voters in Philadelphia? Shouldn't his white blood have caused him to protect neutral-color voters rather than black thugs? And of course the answer is simple. Racial neutrality is just fine, so long as it doesn't lose you votes in a large segment of your radical base. The base has blacks in it, but it's largely incidental. It's the doctrinaire left that the Democrats can't afford to lose, and they say "race doesn't matter, unless it works to divide Americans and create a permanent underclass which will also vote for the more liberal Democrats in exchange for a lifelong social safety net."

Democrats try to prove that Republicans are racists, or that they at least exhibit benign neglect in dealing with racial issues. In reality, that's because Republicans largely don't really care about race, just performance. But the Democrats bray: "Why, other than racism, would anyone oppose the welfare state, affirmative action, and wealth redistribution? And why, above all, would they oppose Barack Obama if they weren't secret racists?" Depending on which day of the week it is, the Democrats' elected President is post-racial or black. If he's proposing socialized medicine, he's black, which is the racist reason behind Republicans opposing him (his color is an issue, but not because he's black, but because he's slightly red). But when he needs those votes from the largely white voting population, he's post-racial, just like his typical white grandmother.

Victor Davis Hanson, my favorite historian of the Peloponnesian Wars, has recently produced a very good work on the subject of race. He asks: "Why the progress and tension at the same time?" He sees it as result of some of the political problems mentioned above, but goes into much more detailed analysis of those and other factors. Hanson views it as a problem of the "contradictions in matters racial."

First, he addresses "fossilized categories and programs." He questions what race even means anymore. Intermarriage and assimilation should have made racial lines almost meaningless. "Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Eric Holder talk about being black; but they are not nearly so in comparison with my Sikh neighbors in the Central Valley [of California], who are both darker and, I imagine have had harder childhoods. (What constitutes being 'black,' or are we back to the Old Confederacy for the one-sixteenth rule?)," says Hanson.

He also mentions the fashion of "self-identification." I can speak to that one. My ex-wife's ethnic background is one-half Irish, one-half German, and I am all German. That means our kids are full Northern European. Both daughters are now married to men of Mexican descent. So my older daughter's two sons are half-Mexican, half Northern European. My younger daughter has been married twice. First to a man who was pure Irish, so we know where those two girls fit into the scheme of things. But what about her other four--children of the Mexican/Northern European marriage?

All the grandkids are still young enough not to have made final choices yet, but their public schools have encouraged the two boys of the one daughter and the three girls and one boy of the other to "get in touch with their ethnic past." And they didn't mean the Irish or German portions. Six of the eight have Spanish surnames, and by the fashion of the day, that means they are all classified as "Latino" or "Hispanic." The two Irish/German girls are out of luck. They're just white, or caucasian. Considering the views of their parents and grandparents (including the Mexican families), they will try to self-identify simply as "American." But outside the families, the cards are stacked against them.

Hanson goes on to describe the contradictions that have become pure incongruities. He goes so far as to call them caricatures. "The n-word is a felonious offense. OK--but apparently on the comic stump it can be easily voiced (only) by black comedians." But what are you going to do about a recent fistfight on a bus in Oakland, California, where one combatant was white, the other black? The words got nastier and more pointed, finally resulting in the one calling the other a N----r, several times. Not what you think, though. The worst insult the black combatant could hurl at the white combatant was to call him a N----r. How on God's green earth does that make any sense at all?

Hanson continues with the plethora of racially-confusing and self-contradictory words and phrases tossed about by nearly everyone obsessed with race. "Entrenched old white elite," for example. The races were starting to deal well with each other, right up until the the schools started indoctrinating on the "race/class/gender categories." The otherwise benign word "diversity" took on a much more sinister meaning. Instead of uniting, the liberals use it as a bludgeon to beat anyone who isn't a person of color. Young people wanted to live it and get on with life. They didn't want race differences hammered into their heads constantly, ostensibly for the purpose of harmony. But after years of lectures on white oppression and black persecution, even otherwise race-neutral kids started to view their classmates as potential enemies.

Obama seemed to be genuinely shocked by the reaction to his dumb white guy, smart black guy Pavlovian response to the Henry Louis "Skip" Gates fiasco. Everybody knows that racist white cops perpetually harass innocent black victims, don't they? Well, they may have taught you that at Columbia and Harvard, Mr. President, but it ain't necessarily so in the real world. It's political incorrectness of the highest order to suggest that blacks are ever wrong or whites are ever right. Obama was amazed to find that outside his incestuous group of pseudo-intellectuals and race-baiters, Americans of all races, ethnic groups, and social classes recognize the reality that when a cop detains a black suspect, it is based on genuine statistics of higher criminality among blacks (for reasons that are far too complicated to discuss in this post, and which actually have very little to do with being born black).

Yet Obama felt perfectly free to refer to white conservatives as people who "cling to their guns and Bibles." And Holder felt free to call white Americans "cowards" for not discussing race in a manner entirely favorable to blacks and entirely unfavorable to whites. Neither could understand why anybody would take umbrage at those cracks, because these epithet-slingers are partially-black and partially-white radicals. Aren't all people of such post-racial makeup immune from the disease of racism?

Hanson says, "But among the elite, where the lucrative jobs, prestige, and big money are--sports, entertainment, law, academia, medicine, high-power finance, big government and politics--our elites con each other. They often strain to find some sort of ethnic or racial or gender edge over the competition. Most Americans assume racial affinities and go about their business; elite utopians demand there be none--and then prove themselves far more racialist. The white-guy leftist on television will talk ad nauseam about diversity on the assumption that such preemption shields him from the sort of diversity affirmative action salvo that might knock out his own job."

Blacks who are far blacker than Obama must be dismissed as "Uncle Toms" and "Oreos," lest they upset the diversity apple cart. Thomas Sowell and Michael Steele are perfect examples of black men who have made their way to the top without regard to their color. But according to Obama, Holder, and the racial diversity-crowd, they can't be "genuine" because they are Republicans who oppose the concept of group rights and group victimization. Instead of being able to say proudly that blacks and whites are really very much alike because they can believe such different things from those who are of the same complexion, they see black conservatives as race-traitors.

It's very sad, and it's a giant step backwards from what I dedicated myself to during the Civil Rights Movement over forty years ago. At that time Obama was living a cushy toddler's life in Hawaii while we were getting chased by police dogs and rednecks in the South. We did that to guarantee his right to live anywhere he chose to live in complete safety and equality. He talks the talk. We walked the walk. Many of us feel betrayed by Obama and the leftists who imagine that New York, or Los Angeles, or San Francisco today are Oxford, Mississippi in 1964.