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Thoughts on Obama last year and now
VFR’s previous biggest discussion on Obama, which took place last March, began with my comment on a long Steve Sailer article on Obama where I said:
In his diffuse and disorganized 4,000 word article about Barack Obama in The American Conservative Steve Sailer signally fails to make the case about Obama’s supposed racial hangups that he claims to make. For example, Sailer writes: “And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.” But Sailer doesn’t demonstrate this. Yes, as Sailer points out, Obama has written frankly about his ambivalent racial feelings and his search for identity that you would expect the son of an African man and a white American woman to have undergone, but nothing that adds up to what Sailer is saying.There then followed a long discussion in which a lot of people took me to task for, as one blogger wittily put it, “praising Obama with faint damns.” A commenter told me that Obama’s good personal qualities were not the point, but the fact that he was black, and the effect this would have on the country. He may have been right, but I can’t think something until I think it. I can’t see something until I see it. And seeing the other evening the shocking degree to which Michelle Obama is a “race woman,” seeing that Barack Obama has this permanently angry female at his side whose racial anger he has done nothing to quell, made me see what a Barak presidency would bring: the empowerment of anti-white blacks like Michelle Obama. If Barak, whatever his nice qualities, failed or never tried to reform his wife’s anti-white resentment, he sure isn’t going to do the same with other blacks in the event he becomes president. Very simply, I do not want an angry anti-white black woman as the First Lady. Another thing. Watching on the Web the Sunday night Democratic Fox News Forum in New Hampshire, I was struck by how white Obama is. There is something odd about simply calling him black. He’s not. His physical, mental, and emotional qualities are those of a person who is half white. Sorry if that sounds crude, but liberals and mainstream conservatives demand too much when they tell us we are never to notice the racial dimension of human reality. It is not invidious for human beings to take an interest in these things. It is normal.
Ken Hechtman writes:
Like it or not, America didn’t have the European tradition of classifying people as mulattos and quadroons and octoroons based on exactly how much African and European ancestry they had. It didn’t even have the South African tradition of a third legal and social regime for people neither purely European nor purely African. We’re kind of stuck with the legacy of the “one-drop rule.” And sure, the one-drop rule is odd. It created situations where people might look and act white enough to “pass” as white, but if their little bit of African ancestry was discovered, they’d be classified as and treated legally and socially as black.LA replies:
But is your last point true? Would, say, Jared Taylor not recognize the white half of Obama? And do you remember the discussions at VFR about David Mills, with many commenters fascinated by how white he was, and even saying, where does this guy come off calling himself black? According to your theory, such a discussion among race-conscious white conservatives could not take place, because they would see David Mills as simply black. Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 08, 2008 02:41 AM | Send Email entry |