John McWhorter takes those Obama supporters who have been eager to make it seem that they really, truly believed that Hillary Clinton and her supporters were making true racist comments in an effort to win the primary. He refers to the kerfuffle over Hillary's comment that it took LBJ to get the Civil Rights Act passed into law.
Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and countless black bloggers hear a grievous insult in her simple observation? The outcry is so disproportionate to the stimulus that one can barely help suspecting something outright irregular.
I think of a study published last year in the Journal of Black Psychology. It documented that the extent to which black Americans perceive their lives to be affected by racism correlates with symptoms of general paranoia disconnected from racial issues.
To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.
But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?
There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.
I think there is something even more cynical at work here. The Obama people thought to score political points by pretending that they saw some sort of racist insult in her words. They don't believe that she is racist, but they saw the value of playing the victim, especially in front of South Carolina's Democratic primary which will be dominated by black voters. And she was not making any sort of racist statement when she tried to remind people that it takes elected officials to provide the leadership to get a controversial law enacted. But once the whole noise from the Obama campaign erupted, her supporters like Bob Johnson and Charlie Rangel weren't adverse to continuing this racially-tinged climate in the hope of winning white votes for Hillary by making veiled cracks at Obama. As McWhorter says, the Obama camp's righteous indignation is doing no favors for blacks everywhere.
Of course, there is a less depressing interpretation of the current uproar: Mrs. Clinton's critics are playing political hardball. You know, let's get blacks to vote for Mr. Obama by playing the race card to pretend Mrs. Clinton is dumping on King. John Edwards, for example, is obviously not mouthing agreement with these people out of insecurity about his blackness.
Well, politics is rarely pretty, but in this case the price is too high. For one, misinterpretation of statements in this vein makes black people look disinclined to process detail and context -- in other words, dim. It only gives that much more fodder to views on black intelligence like those uttered by James Watson.
Think, for example, how utterly unreal the notion is that Bill Clinton, our "first black president," would call Mr. Obama's whole candidacy a "fairytale" rather than referring, specifically, to perceptions of his record on the Iraq war. It's as if the outraged crowd is only capable of processing seven words at a time.
In an election that is supposed to focus on larger issues such as America's role in a violent world, playing the race card in this fashion distracts us from real problems. When most new AIDS cases are black and the murder rate among young black males is sky high, what kind of black representative throws tantrums over extremely unlikely implications of something someone said?
0 comments:
Post a Comment