Ready for a black president

It keeps popping up everywhere this election, this question of America’s readiness for a black president. A Google search on the phrase, in quotes, “ready for a black president” yields over 100,000 hits.

According to a CNN poll released in January, 72 percent of whites believe the country is ready for a black president, while 26 percent believe the country is not ready. Among blacks, 61 percent believe the country is ready, while 37 percent believe it is not.

The poll further found that a stunning 98 percent of both black and white Americans think that the question, “Is America ready for a black president?” is not only a legitimate question, they can even supply an answer.

Since the word “ready” as used here implies both a process of preparation and inevitability, we can conclude from the poll’s finding that, basically, everybody in the United States believes the country is undergoing an unavoidable political transformation from a state of unreadiness to elect a black president to a state of readiness.

Because the white majority has held power in the United States from the country’s founding, the unreadiness everyone assumes either once existed or still exists must be an unreadiness on the part of the white majority in power to vote a black person into the highest office in the land.

In other words, the unreadiness to elect a black president can be laid at the feet of white racism. Readiness for a black president, therefore, will be achieved through one of two ways: either whites will stop being racist, or whites will stop being in power.

My guess is that most Americans—most whites, anyway—instinctively assume the first path will be taken, and don’t think much about the second path. In any case, most whites probably think the first is preferable to the second. But since the whole paradigm is constructed on a myth in the first place, both paths are treacherous.

The myth of America’s racist past

If 98 percent of the American people believe the United States has a racist past, 98 percent of the American people are wrong.

The enslavement of blacks in the American South, the sine qua non of the view that the history of the United States is a history of racism, is said to be America’s great shame. But if slavery is evil, the history of slavery in the United States is more accurately described as America’s great glory.

There are those who seem to believe that the African side of the transatlantic slave trade consisted of white plantation owners from Georgia sailing up to the coast of Africa, grabbing nets, and running out into the jungle to net them some negroes. That’s not how it worked. Overwhelmingly, slaves were captured African prisoners sold to slave traders by enemy Africans.

Human greed was behind the establishment of slavery in the Americas. It was the product of the combined efforts of greedy Europeans, greedy Middle Easterners, and greedy Africans. Greedy Animists, greedy Christians, greedy Jews, and greedy Muslims all profited from the African slave trade, which had been going on for many centuries before the first African slaves were brought, primarily, to South America and, to a lesser extent, North America.

Slavery was an established institution in the Americas long before the United States was, and by the time of its founding in 1776, there was already a strong abolitionist movement against the institution the new country inherited.

In less than three generations from its founding, whites took up arms against other whites as a direct result of the existence of slavery on US soil. By the conclusion of the bloodiest war in US history, slavery was abolished. Is there another example in world history in which members of the same race fought each other at such cost to end a great injustice being perpetrated against the members of another race?

To be sure, in the century and a half since the end of the Civil War, there have been injustices committed against blacks by whites in the United States. There have also been injustices committed against whites by blacks. There are injustices being committed still. History is bursting at the seams with examples of injustice—injustices committed not only here in the United States, but around the world, not least of all in Africa.

I will hold up the United States, however, as providing an example of an effort to stamp out racial injustice unequaled in any place at any time. So greatly has that effort benefited the descendants of slaves in the United States, in fact, that the African descendants of those who once sold their captives into slavery now look with envy on the American descendants of those their ancestors vanquished.

The enormous difference between the social condition of the black race as it was in the United States in 1776 and the social condition of the black race as it is in the United States today is the product of the prodigious efforts, first of all, of black Americans, of course, but also of decent Americans of all races. That difference delineates the history of racism in America—a history of sacrifice, progress, and enlightenment, of courage, struggle, setbacks, and accomplishment.

The history of racism in America is a history of its negation.

Ignorance and modern chauvinism are at the root of the question, “Is America ready for a black president?” The embittered black opportunists who demand reparations from the federal government and apologies from state legislatures for slavery and the degraded white fanatics who seek to oblige them represent that same ignorance and chauvinism taken a only a few steps further.

Electing Obama: how the country says "some of my best friends are black"

The underlying fraud in the debate among 98 percent of the American people over whether the country is ready for a black president is the false premise that the history of the United States is a history of racism. Since the starting point is false, the two paths by which America can make herself ready for a black president—whites give up their racism, or whites give up their power—can lead through anything enroute to anywhere.

Put another way, the directions from point A to point B can be whatever I want them to be if point A doesn’t exist. And we’ll know we’ve arrived at point B when I say we’ve reached the end of the directions. As long as you believe in the existence of point A, I’m in the driver’s seat.

It’s a safe bet that a substantial portion of the throngs at the Barack Obama rallies thrilling to the vision of the changed America he promises views the election of a black president, the election of Obama, as our national destination point B. At long last, this journey of 232 years will be over.

On the day after Inauguration Day, when the throngs are told that, no, no, point B is still a long way off, how sad it will be to watch them, crestfallen, but still earnest, still believing in the existence of point A, trudging off back into the endless swamps toward point B.

That we will never reach point B via the path of whites giving up their racism was demonstrated in an issue of Ebony magazine that came out just before the South Carolina primary. In a cover story on the Obama candidacy, it was asserted that black voters will be the "unsung heroes" if Barack Obama becomes the next president.

Leaving aside any questions about whether there is something heroic about voting for someone of your own race, if any race can claim credit for Barack Obama’s meteoric rise, it is the white race.

Blacks didn’t stampede en masse to Obama’s corner until after the Iowa caucuses. While blacks were still polling almost evenly for Hillary Clinton, over 239,000 Iowa Democrats showed up to caucus one cold night in January. Obama received 37.6 percent of the total—about 90,000 votes. The entire black voting-age population of Iowa, according to the Census Bureau, is 39,813. Subtracting those in correctional facilities, even if every single black Iowan who could caucus showed up and caucused for Barack Obama, they still would have accounted for only 42 percent of his total.

It wasn’t black Americans who propelled the freshman senator from Illinois to where he is now, it was white Americans. But Ebony magazine won’t let that fact get in the way. Black voters will be the unsung heroes if Obama wins the presidency, and whites will still be out in the swamps trudging in the direction of point B.

Mythmakers

It is a myth that the history of the United States is a history of racism. If anything, the history of the United States is a history of racism’s negation. So how did 98 percent of the American people come to believe such a grossly offensive falsehood concerning their own history?

Hollywood. An immigrant from South America recently asked me whether I thought America was ready for a black president (he used those exact words). I asked him why he would ask that question. After some pressing, he said he didn’t think white Americans would vote for a black candidate because of the racism prevalent in white America.

I pointed out to him that Obama was the top recipient of campaign contributions in [at that time] four of the ten whitest states. You are from South America, I said. Where did you get the idea that white Americans are racist?

Well, you know, we learned it from American movies, he replied authoritatively.

So there you have it. Even though white Democrats are supporting Barack Obama at a higher percentage than Latino Democrats, this South American "knew" that America wasn’t ready for a black president. The white poobahs of Hollywood have taught the 600 million people who live in South America that white Americans are racists.

Media. For New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, it is simply a fact that a white America is a racist America. In his Feb 17 column, The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama, Rich makes no attempt to hide his contempt for white Americans, his hatred, even, of the old white traditional America. He sees the ascendency of Barack Obama as the embodiment of the disempowerment of the white majority, over which he positively gloats.

Writing about John McCain’s victory speech after the Virginia, Maryland, and DC primaries (and demonstrating how down he is with the bruhs), Rich wrote,

"What distinguished [McCain's] posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male…For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a face off with Mr. Obama…

[albatross? Here are some exerpts from the rest of the column:]

I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of Virginia’s white vote last week…

[NYT columnists just know whites are racists--perhaps they are watching too many movies?]

For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship…

[the opposite is the truth, see below]

And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration…

[opposing amnesty is nativist overkill? Amnesties encourage more illegal immigration, as everyone knows...hmmm...given Rich's overt hatred of the traditional white majority, and his glee at whites becoming a minority (see below), what are the racial motives behind Rich's defense of amnesties and illegal immigration?]

Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s GOP primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.Mr Obama’s ascension hardly means that racism is kaput in America, or that the country is “postracial” or “transcending race."…

[see? Republicans are racist because most Republican primary voters are white—proof that electing Obama doesn't get America off the racism hook]

…the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs. Clinton does…

[Mrs. Clinton reeks of the past? Reeks? What past does she reek of, Frank Rich?]

As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. (former Virginia governor George) Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia.

For Frank Rich, the only path to readiness to elect a black president that will do is the path that requires whites to give up power by becoming the minority. He is giddy at the thought. There is something really shocking about the sheer bitterness of Frank Rich’s hatred. But, judging by his picture, he is white himself. It doesn’t make sense, that kind of self-hatred. The only explanation I can think of to explain that level of hatred is that he sees himself as a minority—he is Jewish—and salivates at the thought of the Christian majority getting theirs.

If that’s true, then that’s real bigotry. That’s a bigoted hatred that is as wrong for Jews as it is for Christians. It’s disturbing that the New York Times even carries this man’s venomous hatred.

McCain: victim of the old racial gamesmanship?

Though he “reeks of the past” even more than Hillary Clinton does, John McCain is one Republican who has been the victim of “racial gamesmanship," according to New York Times columnist, Frank Rich. Rich cites as evidence the racially based smear campaign—widely credited to Karl Rove— that targeted McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary.

A far more central feature of McCain’s political persona, however, is his habit—a habit he shares with Frank Rich—of lashing out at white males with the charge of racism regardless of whether it’s deserved.

Steve Sailer pointed this out that same year in a much more perceptive analysis of McCain and racial gamesmanship. In 2000’s John McCain—licensed to hate, after citing several examples of McCain attacking white males as bigots, Sailer writes:

Being just about the whitest, malest, and most intolerant politician around, McCain is always at risk that the enraged forces of love and acceptance will devour him next. Thus, like a Russian peasant throwing his sleigh-mates to the pursuing wolves to buy time, McCain has taken to tossing his fellow white males to the media wolf pack.

The analogy of the Russian throwing sleigh-mates to pursuing wolves is an apt one. It can be extended to include more than individual white males. If memory serves me, the analogy comes from The Brothers Karamozov. In the novel, a wedding party decides, late at night, to carry the party to a nearby town. Horses are hitched to sleighs, and the party sets out. But that winter was particularly hard. The wolves in the area were starving. Driven to desperation, a large pack began to pursue the sleighs.

As the wedding party raced toward the safety of the town, more wolves poured out of the trees on either side of the route and gave chase. The wolves caught up to the hindmost sleigh first and the horses and humans on the sleigh went down to hideous deaths. But there were too many wolves to be satisfied by one sleigh, and they kept up the chase. They caught the next sleigh, and then the next one. Finally, there remained only the lead sleigh, which contained the groom, the bride, and the best man.

They were then within sight of the town, but the wolves continued to pursue them. It began to look as if they would not make it. At the very last minute, hoping to lighten the weight of the sleigh and perhaps satisfy the last of the pursuing wolves, the best man shoved the bride and groom off the sleigh to their deaths. The best man made it safely to the town.

While nothing could ever be proved about what had happened on that trip, everyone sensed that the best man had done something monstrous. No one ever looked at him the same way again.

Dostoevsky’s point (again, if I remember correctly) was that the best man could never look at himself the same way again, either, for he knew he had done something monstrous. He would forever after have to agree secretly with his neighbors and think of himself as a dishonorable man. Though he had saved his own life, he had lost his life, for he had saved a life that was no longer worth saving. He had done something monstrous for nothing. Eventually he became insane and committed suicide.

Sailer’s analogy with McCain throwing his fellow white males to the media wolf pack to keep them from turning on him can be extended to his willingness to throw his constituents—the entire country—into the insatiable maw of Frank Rich’s hatred.

Like the best man, McCain holds a position of honor as a US senator. Like the best man, McCain is willing to betray the very people who placed him in that position of honor, to sacrifice them to his own self-interest, regardless of the consequences to those who trusted him and honored him.

I’ll leave it to the reader to judge whether the analogy extends to a comparison between the best man’s sanity and John McCain’s famous temperament.

The best man threw the bride and groom to the wolves. McCain throws his white constituents to the grand designs and glittering hatred of their enemy, Frank Rich—a man who can’t conceal his delight at their impending disempowerment. In particular, McCain wields Frank Rich’s primary weapon for him on the main battlefield in Rich’s war against the white community. The battlefield is immigration policy, and the weapon is amnesty.

Rich writes for a paper that once editorially advised Republicans to embrace an amnesty for illegal aliens, but to call it something else. In other words, Senator, lie to your constituents.

Both Rich and the New York Times know that amnesties have one invariable consequence: more illegal immigration. Given his open hatred for the traditional white majority in the United States, the America whose history reeks, to use his word, and the unconcealed delight he takes in its rapidly approaching minority status, it is fair to say Frank Rich’s defense of John McCain’s efforts to betray his constituents on immigration policy is editorial support for McCain’s racial treachery.

That, not Karl Rove’s dirty politics, is the old racial gamesmanship.

Tags:   democracy · Ebony · Frank Rich · Hollywood · McCain · New York Times · Obama · racism · Sailer · slavery1 Comment