The Race Factor

If RACE was not a factor in this election, shut up about Obama's race already!

Is Obama a post-racial president? Then why is the media obsessed with his race? Why was his race a constant undertone of this campaign (“I don’t look like the picture on the dollar bill”).

In a doctor’s waiting room yesterday, the TV was tuned to (I believe) CNN and the interviewers were talking to several “black leaders” about the wonderfulness of Obama’s election. What does his race have to do with his policies which should be a concern for everybody, not just in the US but in the world?

Ace of Spades refers to the absolution of white liberals. You've Been Absolved

Once everybody gets over the happy-happy, joy-joy of finally shattering any remaining myths about the great white bias in this nation and starts getting a good look at his policies, they might actually start wondering why the hell they voted for him.

His color was never a detriment, but an effective weapon to bludgeon his detractors with and too many people bought into that. The sycophant boot licking from the press just added to the entire distasteful episode.

Baldilocks (need I add that she’s black, [black enough to criticize?]) responds to someone calling himself uptownsteve. She lists the issues that she considered when making a decision on her vote:

• Barack Obama’s decisions about the Surge conducted in Iraq

•His words regarding the success of that Surge

• His words about the US Constitution in 2001

• His words to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

• His voting record in the Illinois Senate

• His voting record in the US Senate

• His words about his association with domestic terrorist William Ayers

• His adherence to Black Liberation Theology as formulated by James Cone and as articulated by Jeremiah Wright, Emeritus pastor of Trinity United Church of “Christ”

• His claim to not know the nature of Wright’s theological stance and to not have heard the latter’s more incendiary sermons after sitting in the pews of Wright’s church for twenty years.

• His stance on abortion and on the “Born Alive” provision in Illinois law.

• His stated intention to conduct presidential-level negotiations with rogue heads of state

• His promise to accept public funding for his campaign

There are many more factors but I hope that I have formed a picture---I did not like Barack Obama's words and/or subsequent actions regarding the above topics. … if a presidential candidate goes against every dearly-held ideology and principle in which you believe but is your same color, it’s a no-brainer to make the decision to vote against him/her.

Because if a candidate’s political, social and moral values are an anathema to a given voter but that voter chooses that candidate anyway solely because the voter shares race/ethnicity with the candidate and/or because of historical precedent, that voter has exchanged principle for emotion and for carnality. The voter has exchanged political, moral and spiritual values for pride of tribe (blacks) or to assuage tribal guilt (whites).
And that, good sir, is the very illustration of a selling-out.

And the white liberals I know who are pleased with the election’s result all, without exception, focus on the fact that we have just voted for a black president. For them the election of Obama was the culmination of the freedom marches they participated in a young people.

We are exhibiting the characteristics of a tribal nation. I am old enough to have witnessed the election of 10 presidents. Each election was filled with some level of emotion for the victors and the losers, but I have never seen the hysteria that the mobs that assembled to celebrate Obama’s victory exhibited. It’s the sort of emotionalism that we see in video images from third world countries who have just acclaimed the ascendance of their latest man on horseback.

The 20th Century was a time when America attempted, with modest success to export representative democracy to counties run by despots and oligarchs. A system of government that is sober and reasoned, that tries to move beyond tribal, ethnic and religious loyalties. During that time, the nation that was called the “great melting pot” has begun to separate itself into tribes at war with each other.

I’m very much afraid that we may have caught the third world bug.

I will know that we have transcended race when the MSM stop their obsessive focus on the color of his skin, and how great it is that we have someone with that skin tone as president.

And have you noticed that Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio are NOT obsessed with his race?

UPDATE:

Victor Davis Hanson has more: How to Criticize Our Next President

On matters of race, at some point the country will evolve beyond the current narrative of the last day that runs something like—‘You redeemed yourself by voting for Barack, and now we can all say we are truly Americans’. The problem with that understandable sentiment is a number of its corollaries: ‘Unless you support European socialist solutions offered by a charismatic African-American candidate, then you confirm America as a quasi-racist nation.’ And this thought: African-Americans voted for a black candidate at a 95% rate; Hispanics at perhaps 75%; yet the country was judged as free of racial tribalism on the basis of whether whites voted for a black candidate far to the left of any Democratic nominee during the last three decades in pluralities greater than they did for past white Democratic candidates like Gore or Kerry. And they did!

It will be interesting when the first Hispanic candidate wins to see whether Mexican-American citizens en masse reaffirm the country to be finally fulfilling its promise—and what would be the reaction of African-Americans and Asians to such ethnic solidarity.

This solidarity may be a natural reaction, but something is still puzzling about hours of television showing African-American ecstasy based on apparent racial pride rather than glee that someone of Obama’s views was elected—all often editorialized by teary-eyed objective journalists. A person from Mars who watched this post-election celebration, might study the popular reaction to the Obama victory and become puzzled: “Aren’t people now saying pretty much what Michelle Obama said twice, and to great criticism, during the campaign: that the emergence of Barack Obama was occasion for many to have pride in their country for the first time?”

Read the whole thing.