Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Obama Won't--Can't--Help With "Minority" Civil/Human Rights

Barack Obama’s no liberal. But he carries that mantle, for no other reason than his ("obvious" and certainly inevitable) popular association with issues important to “people-of-color” and with “minority interests” in general, which are defacto regarded as part of a “liberal” politics. Half black, half white, still he is taken as an avatar of black, and not white, America.

Way back, right at the beginning of this, I suggested all over the place that Obama’s candidacy wouldn’t be an unalloyed plus for so-called ‘minority/human interests,’ because it couldn't be, without alienating white voters wholesale. I guessed then that he would be forced to eschew interest in ‘fairness,’ or ‘equitability,’ or any other idea that makes it seem that that’s what WHITE folks haven’t been "fair," and that the distribution of wealth in Murka has been anything but "equitable," or have somehow been remiss in these departments. Just as Hilary Clinton would have been required to disavow any sympathy for "womens' issues," or "choice," because--though not a "feminist" per se--her gender destines her to 'represent' women. By some quirk of patriarchic hierarchicalizing, only white men are allowed to represent 'everybody.'

Therefore it does not strike me as particularly paradoxical that Obama would be called upon by the white, Village punditocracy to prove his electability by requiring him to to actually reject, and work to diminish, or overturn, minority “entitlements,’ in order to prove--to whites--that he would be “fair” to all.

Everybody knows that Obama's prominence, his presumptive position at the top of a major-party, national ticket, alone and by itself itself, proves that Murka has gone "past-racial." Racism is no longer relevant. Obama killed it. Now he must cut off the ears and the tail.

Of course, that means throwing “minorities” to the sharks, by explicitly rejecting anything that reminds Whites that they have had anything at all to do with the oppression of African-Americans and other communities of color.

Which side will he come down on?

Me? I wouldn't want to have anything really important riding on his candidacy, once he's forced by 'conventional wisdom' to wink and smile and ass-fuck his base constituency...

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