Beyond Class Warfare

We hear about it every day:  Barack Obama is attempting to incite class warfare.  To my mind this is a true but an incomplete assertion.   The class warfare that Obama promotes to his self-serving ends is more than class warfare; it is class warfare as a subset of identity warfare.

There is a critical difference:  Despite all its faults, class warfare is, at least, objective.  In class warfare one sets a measurable criterion to differentiate friend from foe.  Using a purely class warfare standard, Barack, for instance, might tell us that anyone making more than $250,000 a year, anyone who votes Republican, or anyone working on Wall Street are the enemy.  But Obama goes beyond class; he includes race, ideology, education, and whatever issue du jour suits him in any particular situation; he then decides on the fly the subjective criteria that determines who or what gets labeled as it does.  For instance, any black, no matter how black, is “not black enough,” if he or she disagrees with Barack.  You can be sure that Herman Cain would not be considered a “real” African American according to the Obama metric.

Barack Obama is fond of finding a scapegoat, exaggerating what he feels are its negative qualities, and encouraging his followers to denigrate, humiliate, and castigate the scapegoated person or idea.  Watch him, listen to him, and you will find this occurring again and again.  

In short, the President who does not embrace his biracial identity not only is a slave to his own identity conflict, he is an identity slavemaster.  Like Santa Claus, Barack Obama makes his list, checks it twice, and then determines who’s naughty and nice.  Unlike Santa, Obama is not content merely to put coal in the stockings of the naughty.  Barack Hussein Obama also incites his minions to punish anyone whose identity conflicts with his own.  Remember Joe Wurzelbacher, the plumber, who on October 12, 2008  challenged Obama’s tax plan?  According to Julian Sanchez,

In the days following the debate, The Columbus Dispatch reported this weekend, Wurzelbacher's file at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles was accessed three times. The information requests came from accounts associated with the office of the state attorney general, the Toledo Police Department, and the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency. The attorney general's office has said, however, that the request did not come from their office, but from a "test account" used by their IT division and shared with other law enforcement agencies.   

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/joe-the-plumber-database-snooping-under-investigation.ars

Racialized Thought: A Special Form of Irrationality

In the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks, the American lexicon expanded to include “stovepiping,” an information science term used to explain how government agencies had created separate intelligence-related data bases that were not being shared among law enforcement, and thus endangered American security.

  
Post hoc, everyone realized the danger of rigidly compartmentalizing information.  We all knew that truth and informed action result only when relevant ideas climb in the ring together and engage in a knock-down, drag-out fight within the public discourse arena.  To remedy the stovepiping problem, talking heads advised security analysts to “connect the dots,” meaning, of course, that information should be culled from multiple sources, juxtaposed, and honestly evaluated—a suggestion so obvious that even Barack Obama endorsed the practice so long as the resulting information did not undermine his Machiavellian ends.

On the other hand, Barack Obama always has stovepiped the elements of his racial identity, separating the black half of his being from the white, dragging out the white portion only when he needed to do so.  You recall, for instance, that Barack first got into hot water during the 2008 presidential election by denigrating working-class Caucasians by suggesting that "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." and then distributed a political ad showing himself surrounded by his white mother, grandmother, and grandfather.

Obama’s stovepiping is one example of a general form of racial irrationality rampant within contemporary American culture—an irrationality that permits black and white raceketeers to separate racially related information mostly in the service of a pro-black agenda.  

Switch on your radio or television and you will find multiple examples of racial stovepiping.  For instance, I recently heard a news report lamenting the fact that the black unemployment rate currently stands at 16.7%, its highest rate since 1984. From time to time the piece said or strongly implied that the black rate was disgraceful and an example of American racism. 

Certainly, everyone should be sympathetic to any group suffering unemployment.  But let’s add another data point: black underachievement.  When expedient to raise support for increasing inner-city school budgets, we hear that African Americans have a shamefully low 57% graduation rate.  Data point number three: communities with the least educated workforce have the highest rates of unemployment.

Let’s help raceketeers connect the dots.  Black unemployment is a direct result of insufficient black educational commitment.  The racial storm troopers should spend their time facilitating African American education and other training rather than searching for cultural scapegoats.

Racialized thinking is a dead end strategy that benefits no one—least of all black people.