The Obama phenomenon as the fulfillment of multiculturalism

A commenter at Lucianne.com puts the Obamenon in a nutshell:

Reply 2—Posted by: Justjoe, 2/11/2009 7:03:47 AM

If you want to know how Obama got as far as he has, the news conference was the whole story in miniature. All the white libs are deferential, uncritical, admiring—simply because he is black. If that is not racism, what is? So it has been with his professors in college and law school, with everyone around him pretty much all his affirmative-action life. The result is that he is—as he always has been—in way over his head. But now he is POTUS. God help us.

The Obamenon, in which whites are “deferential, uncritical, admiring” of Obama, “simply because he is black,” is clearly a subset of multiculturalism, the white cult of the nonwhite Other. Correction: the Obamenon is the culmination and fulfillment of that cult, which I described some years ago in an unpublished manuscript:

When mutually irreconcilable concepts of truth have achieved critical mass within the same society, only two options remain: a remorseless group-power struggle, or a pre-emptive surrender by one group to the other’s “truth.”

The message of multiculturalism is that it is whites who must surrender. The head of the New England Independent Schools Asso-ciation has written: “The essence of multicultural change is to listen to the uniqueness of others and to change our uniqueness to accommodate theirs… . True diversity will involve being humble first of all, humble before the knowledge and experience of oth-ers.” [Emphasis added.] In a multicultural manifesto, pathetically entitled We Want to Change, the all-white city of Dubuque declared: “Diversity calls us into a world that focuses on the many-splendored beauty of others.” In these continuing endless calls to multicultural transformation, whites are never told why they must embrace the “experience,” the “knowledge,” the “beauty” of others. Multiculturalism turns out to be a kind of mysticism, in which “salvation” is found in surrender to whatever is most different from ourselves.

As this nation founded on Judeo-Christian truth mutates into a multicultural regime, the religion of God is being supplanted by the religion of the Other. The New York Times publishes an op-ed by a Columbia University Law School professor who proposes revising the words of the Pledge of Allegiance from “one nation, under God, indivisi-ble” to “one nation, united in our diversity”—deliberately replacing God with ethnic pluralism. In A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, David K. Shipler, a former New York Times reporter and a fervid apostle of white liberal guilt, uses for his epigraph St. Paul’s famous verse from First Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” St. Paul, of course, was talking about man seeing the risen Christ face to face; Shipler is talking about whites seeing blacks face to face. In Shipler’s antiracist gloss on the New Testament, the highest goal of life (for whites) is not perfect love and service to God, but perfect love and service to black people, who, along with all nonwhite and non-Western people, are now seen as holy. Here, from its web site, is the slogan of the National Council for Catholic Evangelization:

Our First Task in Approaching Another People, Another Culture, Another Religion, Is to Take off Our Shoes—for the Ground We Are Approaching Is Holy…

The name of a national conference organized by this group was “Holy Ground,” featuring, alongside the words “Holy Ground,” a large picture of an elderly South American peasant woman standing bent over in a field.

Given the prevalence of such views among both Christians and secular liberal Jews such as Shipler, it is no surprise that much of our official and popular culture today reflects an almost transcendent conception of minorities, especially blacks. From presidential bill-signing ceremonies to Republican National Conventions to the casting of Hollywood movies, a sacred iconography has been established in which whites are endowed with tangible “grace”—or at least a certification of their moral legitimacy—by showing how much they care about blacks and by having black people situated conspicu-ously at their side. Just as Martin Luther taught that faith covers up (though it cannot remove) man’s original sin of disobedience to God, contemporary white elites seem to believe that having some appropriate minority at one’s side covers up (though it cannot remove) the original sin of white racism. The government itself has embraced the religion of black uplift. On February 15, 1996, the United States Depart-ment of Justice turned over its impressive and historic auditorium for the gala inauguration of Kweisi Mfumi as President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a ceremony conducted with all the solemnity and self-importance of a religious service. In fact, it was a religious service—for a private organization in a government building!—with President Clinton in attendance holding hands with Mfumi in prayer. Even as any remaining vestige of Christianity has been forced out of our public institutions, civil rights, or, rather, the worship of blacks, has become our official state cult.

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February 13

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Your quote from the National Council for Catholic Evangelization is depressing, but not exactly surprising. I can give you two more examples I have encountered of the same phenomenon, the deification of the Other.

In Indiana, at the University chapel in Bloomington, the Stations of the Cross that encircle the sanctuary are not actually images of Christ’s Passion. They have been replaced by photographs of Third World nonwhites—Christ carries the cross is rep[resented by an African peasant woman carrying a bundle of sticks on her back.

Also in Indiana, at the Archdiocesan Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul, there is actually an icon—an icon, Larry, with the halo and everything—of Martin Luther King hanging in the main sanctuary opposite an icon of the Blessed Mother. I wish I was making this up. Nevermind that King was not even Catholic, much less a saint (honoring anyone named Martin Luther inside a cathedral can only signal a decadence of the most terminal kind).

Anyway, this kind of thing makes it very difficult to keep from running like a man on fire straight to Orthodoxy. But that’s obviously no way to deal with it. I just wonder how the Church thinks it’s going to fare when it becomes clear to most Catholics—as someday it certainly will—how thoroughly it has sold them out and doomed their grandchildren to the most servile racial and religious dhimmitude.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 12, 2009 01:14 PM | Send