Discriminations

One of my favorite legal journalists, Stuart Taylor Jr., thinks he is.

Barack Obama embodies and preaches the true and vital message that in today's America, the opportunities available to black people are unlimited if they work hard, play by the rules, and get a good education.

Electing a charismatic, intellectually supercharged African-American president who preaches hope and opportunity would do more than anything else imaginable to tell young black people what they need to hear: This land is your land. And more than any other, it is a land of opportunity.

Why? One reason, according to Taylor, is that Obama’s election would help to

relegate to the dustbin of history the snake-oil salesmen who have been anointed by the media as the leaders of black America, even as they have used their prominence to poison race relations while (in many cases) living high on the hog. These include Jesse Jackson, aptly dubbed “an extortion artist for the grievance elite” by black conservative Shelby Steele; Jackson competitor Al Sharpton, the dishonest demagogue who rose to prominence by orchestrating the infamous 1987 Tawana Brawley “rape” fraud; NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and much of the rest of the current leadership of that deeply degraded shell of a once-noble organization, which even now is emulating Sharpton by doing its utmost to keep alive the collapsing Duke lacrosse team “rape” fraud; the victimologist professors who dominate most university departments of African-American studies; and the fatuous slavery reparations movement.

That’s a strong argument. Another one, fundamental to Taylor’s view of the promise of Obama:

... Obama's soaring success should tell black children everywhere that they, too, can succeed, and they do not need handouts or reparations. It should tell those white Americans who still don't get it that people with African blood can and regularly do achieve at the highest levels.

Yes, it “should,” but would it? More to the point, would Obama’s election teach that lesson if Obama himself doesn’t preach it?

Has he been preaching this lesson? As far as I can tell, the answer is a resounding ... Yes and No. First, let me say that I, too, have on occasion been impressed by Obama, as here, discussing his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. But I have also been critical of Obama enthusiasts, such as the Washington Post’s William Raspberry, whom I criticized here. Raspberry, I noted, has responded enthusiastically 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.

So far, so good, I responded, but:

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.
....
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 [in his address to the Democratic Convention, which I then quoted in part]....

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 concluded that post by stating: “I approve of Obama's vision, but I'm not sure he does.”

Stuart Taylor seems to assume that the lesson that “should” be taught by Obama’s ascent is the lesson that would be taught, perhaps regardless of what Obama himself says. I would like to think he’s right.