Race And The Race

A reader writes:

While I understand your clear-headed delineation of each of the candidate's broad strengths and weaknesses, you're really missing an important way that race does play a role in this election. There are swaths of White Americans still relatively uncomfortable with African Americans in positions (political) power. More to the point race plays a role in people's aversion to Obama not necessarily because out and out they hate black people but rather they don't trust or believe he deserves to be president.

The problem for Obama is that, given his age, biography and the seemingly relative ease with which he has ascended, his success just gets to people. He is a vessel for all their pent up angst against what they see as the alleged favorable treatment that being black affords due to "liberal bias" and its accursed affirmative action policies.

These are the people who have a few discreet boxes for African Americans (ghetto/hood, entertainer, preacher man, pimp, athlete, single-mom, etc.) that are understood and accepted. These people also have a sense of history and while they may not acknowledge it, were often witnesses to and fully aware of the rabid racism of pre-civil rights America.

It comes down to this: "How can we trust someone who comes from a group we previously defined by very limited boundaries (dancin', preachin', ballin') and give him access to the most powerful job in the world? We've always had the power and we resent them having it and what they could with it, especially against us."

That's why the celebrity thing works. It devalues and diminishes Obama to the fast talkin' Black guy. Can't trust that. In his biography, they don't see bootstraps they see affirmative action. In his remarkable defeat of Clinton they see "white guilt" and the usurping of the proper hierarchy. For PUMAs and the rest it's all about the "uppity negro" who needs to know his place (since policy wise they're on the same side being former Clinton supporters).  The irony is that the founding principles of America created the possibilities for a Barack Obama (I mean it is a democracy right?), the America these people supposedly so love and want to protect. This really isn't about changing policies for a lot of people it's about keeping power in the hands of "good" White Americans who deserve it more (Paging Geraldine Ferraro..).