The New Republic: If Obama Loses, Don't Assume Racism

[steve2470]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/17/opinion/main4528585.shtml

In the increasingly unlikely event that Barack Obama does not become president, Martin Luther King's dream would reveal itself as tragically unrealized 40 years after his death. Not, however, because whites were standing in that dream's way, but because of the black people standing alongside them.

Yes, black people. I find myself unable to trust that more than a sliver of black America would be able, if Obama lost, to assess that outcome according to--of all things--the content of his character.

For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a "national conversation" on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a "level playing field," something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.

The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over "the persistence of racism," which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated.

more at link above

[OKNancy]

1. I always like to look up the background on the authors

I admit I wasn't too familar with the author of this piece.

I found something interesting on "The Black Snob"

http://blacksnob.blogspot.com/2008/04/john-mcwhorter-loves-barack-obama-rest.html

This isn't a hit piece at all, it's just interesting. The whole site is kind of neat too.

[MasonJar]

2. If Obama loses, it will be because the GOPers stole it again.