Barack Obama: A Post Racial President?

To thunderous applause, Lady Liberty blew out the last celebratory candle that adorned the 2008 presidential election.   America had elected its first “black” (actually biracial) president, Barack Obama.   According to one white writer, Timothy Noah of Slate magazine November 10, 2008, Barack had won “a larger proportion of white votes than any previous nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Carter.”  Noah added, “The sad reality is that no Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson has won a majority of white votes (and even he lost 1964's white Southern vote to Barry Goldwater). “    

Does this mean that the positive black racism obsessed Noah was crediting white America in the media’s perennial white versus black propaganda war?  Not on your life!  Rather, Timothy felt compelled to complain that Obama receive “only 43 percent of the white vote.”   Not even when underscoring that whites had turned out in greater numbers for Barack Obama than for any white nonincumbent Democrat candidate since Carter could Timothy Noah be racially content.   He conveniently forgot to mention that “only” 96 percent of black voters chose Obama.

If Noah had stopped there, he only could be found guilty of “fuzzy” or “sloppy” thinking.  But this was no mere mindless error.  Timothy Noah was determined to rain even more heavily on Miss Liberty’s black-white reconciliation parade.  To do so, he argued that “the stubborn refusal of a majority of whites to vote Democratic is all about race.”

Then again, to people like Noah, isn’t everything ultimately about race?

If a white racial know-it-all like Timothy could find a way to “accentuate the negative and eeeeliminate the positive,” then what about the black identity slavemasters: the Al Sharptons, and Jesse Jacksons?  They were not about to let the “race thing’ get away from them.  They could not survive without real, fancied, overt or covert racial strife.  How would they make a living?  How would they win acclaim?  Where would the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus be if race were put on the backburner? 

No.  Something had to be done and fast.  Thus was born the now clichéd talking point that in one way or another asserts that we have not advanced to a “post racial” America. 

Actually, as I have written many times, I do agree that our country is not racially blind.  I do not believe any country ever has been or ever will be totally racially blind.  But that belief is no different than saying that no country ever will be blind to gender or age.  There is quite a difference, however, between accepting that people are aware of race and the expectation that people must be racially biased because of their awareness.  There is quite a difference between seeing difference and repeatedly underscoring and exploiting it for personal gain to the detriment of the country as a whole.

As recently as the April 9, 2012 edition of Newsweek, Daniel Klaidman, a white man, wrote an article inspired by the Tryvon Martin shooting subtitled, the “treacherous politics of race.” Klaidman spent most of his time writing about black racial identity and the extent of black leadership acceptance of Barack Obama and the Attorney General, Eric H. Holder.  The article concluded with a reference to the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman trial:

Early this week, Holder will get a briefing on the fast-moving developments in the Martin case. Justice Department staffers have interviewed Martin’s parents, and the probe is proceeding apace. The outcome—and how much the Obama administration is identified with it—could have a lasting impact on the president’s legacy on racial issues, and the attorney general’s, too. Come Election Day, it might even help rally the black community, which has sometimes been disappointed that the president has not done more for its members.

Black identity slavemasters—white and black—must keep the nation focused on race for their own self-serving ends.  They need Trayvon Martin and Henry Louis Gates Jr “cases” to keep their racial exploitation businesses going.  In a country of about 312 million people, there always will be plenty of cross race problems to feed the blood lust of racial identity vampires.   In the aggregate, however, you and I will determine whether the ghouls suck America dry.

And, by the way, if Timothy Noah of Slate magazine wants to better investigate the meaning behind his biased belief that “the stubborn refusal of a majority of whites to vote Democratic is all about race,” he should read the Daniel Klaidman Newsweek article.  He might then understand my contention that the stubborn refusal of Barack Hussein Obama and Eric H. Holder to govern America evenhandedly truly is all about race.