Our presidential race race

    What's just now being reported should have been reported beginning with the Mississippi primary: the racism of routine white Americans. Back then, race was discussed only along the lines of blacks voting in high percentages for Barack Obama--as if there was something unusual in an American ethnic group voting for one of its own. But race is different. It continues one of America's nastiest habits. It's a reflect that's against something rather than for something. It's the only reason Obama's "electability" is in question.
    It's time for the United States to set up its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

    Here's my ebonyjet.com commentary, posted Thursday morning.

Pennsylvania
the state of "virtue, liberty and independence" showed us the issue behind the issues
04/24/2008
By Monroe Anderson

It’s race, stupid. Not the economy, although even 90 percent of those who voted in the Pennsylvania primary said we’re in a recession. Not the war in Iraq, although 60 percent of America knows it was a mistake.  Not the national healthcare, although there are 45 million Americans without any insurance coverage at all.

It’s a matter of race: Hillary Clinton and John McCain are white. Barack Obama is not.

An exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky during Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary found race mattered for 16 percent of those who cast their ballot and that just 54 percent of those Democratic voters said they would support Obama in a general election. Twenty-seven percent said they’d vote for McCain if the first black to become a competitive presidential contender was the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer; 16 percent said they would not vote at all.

These disheartening confessions came from the white voters who were speaking candidly.

When it comes to the members of this special interest group, who in the past have been called the Silent Majority and then later, the Reagan Democrats, it’s whites only for the exalted position of leader of the free world. They’re not going to vote for a black man, period—no matter how well educated, well-spoken and well-meaning he may be.

He can’t confuse them with the facts on how qualified and competent he is. He can’t overcome the recalcitrant racism, no matter how he approaches them, if even on bended knees. He can’t convince them to vote their economic interests, no matter how economically threatened they are.  He can’t be the president of their America.

More than two months ago in a fleeting moment of public candor, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter, said as much: "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.”

Unfortunately for Obama, conservative whites are here, there and anywhere in America.  They’re the ones that moved away to segregated suburbs, opposed busing and are against affirmative action. They’re particularly Republican but unfortunately too many of them are Democratic as well. They’re in Mississippi, where Obama’s inability to garner the white male vote was reported as if good old fashioned racism was his fault. They’re in Ohio where Obama failed to draw a substantial number of the working class vote wherever it happened to be white. And, trust me, I’m from Indiana—they’re definitely there.

But rather than calling a snowflake a snowflake, the ingrained racism in the American electorate is now spoken in tongues and reported in code.  Rather than examining the glass ceiling Obama is being introduced to, manufactured controversies run rampant in the presidential news coverage and, in the last presidential debate on ABC, the first 45 minutes of moderator questioning.

Obama is judged guilty by association for his truth-telling minister, his radically-left neighbor or his documentable statement that bitter lunch bucket whites cling to their religion and their guns rather than boldly confront the politicians that are engineering their economic decline.

"Considering his financial advantage, the question ought to be, why can't he close the deal?" Clinton said  on the day of her barely double-digit win, outside a polling place in a northern suburb of Philadelphia. "Why can't he win in a state like this?"

Why can’t he close the deal? Is there something wrong with his electability? Why can’t this black man deliver the knockout punch?

These are the questions the superdelegates are going to have to ask themselves, before deciding if they’re willing to throw the black man, with the most dedicated delegates, state victories and popular vote, under the bus and give the white woman a ride. To do that would guarantee the party’s trip to nowhere.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.

Comments

[Greg]

Re: Pat Buchanan
I fail to see how MSNBC justifies continuing to put Pat Buchanan on air.

His remarks about John Edwards, "a trial lawyer with a 28,000 square foot home and gets $400 haircuts", were contemptuous and demeaning slurs, whose Ann Coulter like vacuous viciousness added nothing to the discussion.

Moreover, after months of Bill and Hillary Clinton simultaneously trafficking in and denying race baiting politics , it is galling for Buchanan to suggest that the Clintons now rock bottom support with African American voters is purely a matter of people voting skin color. Does Pat believe, only he is capable of insulting African Americans or that the Clintons get a pass on insulting folk ?

Pat's chief contribution to most discussions is best described as giving opinion that is either devoid of or only minimally associated with fact , and even then , it is often based on observations or assumptions from some bygone era.

He further seems given to making wild unsubstantiated and often offensive remarks indicative of a person with a low regard for certain segments of the population. Buchanan has clearly shown some disquieting tendencies in his on air comments and in his writings.

Need I remind you that Pat recently told fellow quest commentator, Keli Goff, who is African American, to "shut up"? That's language I've never heard him use with any other guest. That incident when viewed with other, unsubstantiated and disparaging remarks about African Americans, poses serious questions about Buchanan's basic respect for African Americans ,and there is no basis for suggesting he can be or has ever been objective about race .

In addition to Pat being an admitted shameless political hack and a demagogue in good standing , is he also another ticking anachronistic social-misfit time bomb? Tick! Tick!...........Tick!

Greg Fuller

[rawdawgbuffalo]

all of this has really turned me off, i just read concept and position papers on the 3 now

[job]

This blog explains a lot of what L. Ross referred to

http://blackstarnews.com/?c=135&a=4470

Wonder how things would be if Barack had inherited his pysical appearance from his mother's side.

[Greg Branch]

Race is a reality. The one benefit in this is the "apparentness" with which the rest of the world will be able to see this and judge America. If you think the world hates us now...LOL!!

As globalization becomes the new vehicle for capitalism and we become more inter-dependant with a global population that looks a lot more like Obama than either of the other two, this will give them (the rest of the world) pause in doing business or anything with us. Natural resource-dominant Africa has already declared China as its 'most-favored' nation and with our dollar being seen as a 'controversial' currency, why do they need to do business with us? India and China lead the world in technology and even Europe/Australia is turning its back on the US and towards the south of the planet.

Besides showing the world how really racist we are, we are also showing them how really stupid we are, if we elect McCain (Hillabee's race is over), then we can no longer say, "it is the American government and not the American people", the whole world watched us discriminate against this man, who looks like them, and they will say, "No, you elected a war-monger, so you must want more war.". It could be come a classic case of, "be careful what you wish for..."

[Mike Dorman]

Have you noticed how blind people become once they've made up their mind and chosen a candidate? For example, last Sunday night, in a discussion with a female supporter of Hillary, I asked her to explain how Clinton could have lied about "dodging snipers" at the airport in Kosovo. She became enraged, tried to justify the lie because it was a war zone and "could" have happened, and did everything to spin the incident instead of admitting it for what it was.
Now, to Monroe's assertation (see preface) that race is the only reason that Obama's electability is in question, I say that your having already decided who your candidate choice is, has blinded you from seeing some potential time bombs that your candidate may be facing. For one, Tony Rezko. The guy's a crook, big time, and Obama made a conscious choice to buy land with him and be a potential neighbor. Poor judgement? Maybe. Big red flag for me. Next, Reverend Wright's Black Liberationist church, with anti-white,anti-semetic, and anti American rants? And Obama makes a conscious decision for himself and his family to be a part of that and claims The reverend was a mentor? Big red flags and fireworks! I can't justify these things to my Hillary supporter because, for whatever reason, they can't be justifed for a man running on the principles of "changing" America, ridding us of lobbyist control, bring back honest government, and working to face racial bigotry in order to end it.
Monroe, clue me in, was Reverend Wright the role model for Obama, and how do you suppose his beliefs will work themselves into Obama's closing the racial "divide" that exists in America, one which you think is the major roadblock to his being elected?

[Francis L. Holland]

I've already decided that if the Democratic Party superdelegates give the election to Clinton in spite of Obama being ahead in all of the traditional ways except skin color, then I am going to vote for McCain in order to punish the Democratic Party for its color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior.

If we are going to lose anyway, it would be better to lose doing the right thing and building a platform for the future, than to lose by taking a fruitless trip through Jim Crow and into a notoriously color-aroused nomination decision that would stain the Democratic Party and the nation for decades.

I agree with you that all of the discussion of color-aroused voting has been discussion of what Blacks have been accused of doing, without discussing the immense number of whites who are willing to vote for Obama regardless of his color, and also the immense number who vote against him precisely because of his color.

I suggest to you that if you use a new model to analyze white behavior, you will find the new model much more fruitful analytically. If you look at whites' color-aroused ideation, emotion and voting behavior, you will find that you are breaking a very complex issue down into elements that are sufficiently discrete that you can begin to study and understand them.

What is their precise ideation? What are their precise emotions? What is their voting behavior (which is much easier to study because it's documented)? Is the ideation, emotion and behavior exactly the same for all white people, or for all color-aroused white people, or does it differ in degree and intensity from one white person to the next?

These are the questions that need to be asked and considered before we can really understand and cope with this phenomenon of color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior.

For example, how far would we get in the study of cancer if we were unwilling to pinpoint the KIND of cancer (esophagus, brain, lung) and if we were unwilling to study it closely enough to reliably distinguish between the states of cancer, from "incipient" to "advanced"? If cancers can be benign and malignant, is all "racism" equally malignant or are some forms of racism more malignant, based on things like their rate of growth in the individual's mind and their potential to cause the death of the sufferer and others?

Unfortunately, if you pose these questions to the vast majority of people who think they know all there is to know about "racism", then you will discover that our common understanding of the "racism" phenomenon is no more advanced than our common understanding of growth rate and prognosis of various kinds of skin cancer.

These are both matters of medical science, but at least we have medical researchers in our society who are studying skin cancer for the purpose of treating it. Who is studying the screening, diagnosis and treatment of color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior? As a medical matter?

Well, that's why the all-explanatory word "racism" that we started with two generations ago is all that we have to understand this phenomenon even after the passage of 50 years. Our scientific understanding of the problem will not grow until we begin to look at the problem as a question of medical science rather than as merely a question of sociology and politics.

Check back with Americans 50 years from now. If we are still using the word "racism", without being able to say anything scientific about the specific ideation, emotions and color-aroused behavior that constitute "racism" in particular individuals, and how to precisely diagnose the state of advancement of the disease in the individual, and treatment strategies . . . Well, then you will know that the absence of progress in these empirical areas means that we really haven't made any intellectual progress in this scientific area at all. And that would be a terrible shame as well as a symptom of a profound intellectual laziness and anti-scientific bias in this area.

If doctors didn't study liver cancer with scientific precision, and didn't try to use their observations clinically in the treatment of liver cancer, then how much progress would you expect them to have in the diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer?

That's right: none. And that's why we're still confounded by "racism" even after 50 years of battling it, legislatively and otherwise. Just as we have advocates for the study of Tourettes Syndrome as a medical disorder, so that progress can be made, we need advocates for the study of color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior, as a medical disorder, so that progress can be made.

[Sharon Morgan]

Oooooooooooooooo wheee... you nailed it on the head AGAIN!

I think white people are afraid that, if a black man gets elected President, he will lead us (the "minority" community that is soon to be the majority) into doing to them what they did to us. I believe white people have a visceral fear of the people they defined and dumped on, for centuries, as the penultimate "other". You can run faster, jump higher, work harder... but you still CAN'T WIN! I REALLY HOPE I AM WRONG.

[Lawrence Ross]

If they do that, then I will NEVER vote for the Democratic Party again. Take me for granted once, twice, a thousand times, shame on me. Take me for granted with Obama, shame on you...

And it's amazing that we ever thought Bill Clinton "got" us. Funny how he turned out to be one of the worst types of racists. The Southerner who thinks because he lives in proximity to us that he knows us. Yeah, he knows us. But we also know that when it came down to it, he would use the same racist techniques as the Republicans.