Raspberry On Obama: He Still Doesn’t Get It

UPDATE II [3 August 9:30PM]

And while I’m at it…. I can easily understand why someone who has experienced racial discrimination would see a certain kind of justice in finally receiving some benefit because of race, just as I can understand the white liberal desire to compensate for past discrimination, though I disagree with the preferential policy based on those feelings. What I have a harder time understanding is why so many successful blacks continue to believe it is fair for their own children, even grandchildren and beyond, to continue to receive race-based benefits such as preferential admissions.

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Original Post

Like just about everyone else (including me), William Raspberry loved Barack Obama’s address to the Democratic Convention — “even if,” he writes, “all of us haven’t quite figured it out.”

Raspberry responded positively to Obama’s vision of “One America” and, thus, negatively to

the political marketers [who] have become so adept at finding America’s fault lines lines that they have almost convinced us that we are mindless elements of a jigsaw puzzle, incapable of complex beliefs. If we take religion seriously, then we must be undereducated bumpkins with no appreciation of the Constitution or science. If we believe the government has a duty to protect the weakest among us, then we must be silly tax-and-spend liberals.

This is all good, but what Raspberry still doesn’t get (or more accurately, perhaps, doesn’t get that he doesn’t get it) is that it is not only, or even primarily, “the political marketers” who are cramming us into pre-defined little demographic boxes. Among the leading villains of this practice are Raspberry and his friends who, through their defense of racial preferences, sow racial and ethnic divisiveness by rewarding some and punishing others because of their race or ethnicity.

If they really believe what they say about “One America,” they should stop it.

[Note: I made similar half full/half empty criticisms of Raspberry here, here, and here.]

UPDATE [2 August 11:00PM]

In fairness to Raspberry, I should add that the more significant inconsistency between a vision of “One America” and support for racial preferences is not Raspberry’s but Obama’s.

Obama clearly and explicitly supports affirmative action; see here and here. That means that he supports racial preferences, since I assume he is too honest to deny that “affirmative action” entails racial preference. The ball, then, is in his court (though Raspberry is welcome to try and return it for him) to explain why racial preference is not an example of the very division and divisiveness that he so eloquently opposed:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

(APPLAUSE)

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

But if “spin masters and negative ad peddlers” should not compartmentalze us into “a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America,” then why should employers and college admissions officers do so, and why should Democrats so uniformly approve? Why should Democrats applaud when the state itself treats some of its citizens differently from others only because of their race?

I approve of Obama’s vision, but I’m not sure he does.