Discriminations

You know we’re getting overloaded with racial inanity when even I am getting tired of it. Yesterday, only two days after AOS (After Obama’s Speech), we had a double dose.

In Dose 1, after all but calling his grandmother a racist in The Speech, Obama described her as “a typical white person” because of her racial fears.

Is this another example of Obama’s now well-known belief that whites and blacks come from fundamentally different cultures, cultures so far apart that they both require the bridge of his conveniently bi-racial self to bring them together?

In Dose 2, John Kerry (remember him?) outdid even Dose 1.

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”

Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

Now, I certainly don’t want to excuse Kerry for these absurd comments, but I do think it’s important to understand where they come from. Before you call his comments offensively stupid, it’s necessary to remember that he is a liberal, and thus it’s necessary to put his unfortunate remarks in the context of liberalism’s history over the past forty years or so.

Liberals of Kerry’s generation formed their political identities in a period when liberalism was rapidly abandoning its former devotion to colorblind equality, a devotion some of them fondly remember from their youth. They have been forced to live their subsequent political lives under conditions alien to the experience and hence beyond the comprehension of most non-liberals — conditions that require them to struggle constantly to reconcile their professed commitment to the principle of racial equality with their determined practice of affirmative action policies built on the contradictory principle of racial preference.

The cognitive dissonance produced by this conflict between principle and practice has led most liberals to jettison their former belief in colorblind equality in favor of an identity politics where everything is seen through the lens of race or ethnicity or gender.

Seen in this context, as it must be, Kerry’s support for Obama because he’s black and his belief that Muslims will like America better with a black president should not be dismissed as lunatic raving, which unfortunately many right wing pundits and talk show hosts have done, but understood as the product of the peculiar liberal experience in modern America.

This distorted dismissal of one of America’s core values is not an aberration limited to John Kerry. It is quite common in liberal ghettos scattered across the country — in academia, editorial offices, and, yes, even the pulpits of many churches.

In short, even though most Americans may be unfamiliar with how disaffected liberals are from a principle they had thought was fundamental and hence widely shared, this delusional race fixation is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between those who have kept the faith of the without regard principle and those who have abandoned it.

And finally, the fact John Kerry acknowledged that even his own grandmother, a “typical” old white liberal, once made him cringe by letting slip that she believed people should be treated without regard to race should not be taken as evidence of his callous insensitivity or her extremism but rather as further evidence that all of us have skeletons in our closet and thus that we need to come together for a national dialog on equality.