Discriminations

Newsweek has an article, “Obama’s Postracial Test,” discussing the impact the campaign to pass initiatives in five state barring racial preferences will have on Obama’s claim to be a post-racial candidate.

The article is afflicted by all the usual liberal biases. The subtitle, for example, asks “How will the Democratic candidate deal with potentially divisive ballot initiatives calling for an end to affirmative action?” Why, some of us are left to wonder, are efforts to end favoritism based on race deemed “divisive” while the racial favoritism itself isn’t? Another example: it mentions — not once but twice — that Ward Connerly has, or seems to have, “a wealthy donor base” without ever mentioning that he has been outspent in every one if his initiative campaigns, in Michigan by about 4 to 1.

Still, without ever asking clearly and directly how Obama can claim to help us transcend race and lead us into a jolly postracial future while continuing to support policies that treat some people better than others because of their race, it does manage to get that question across.

ADDENDUM [29 March]

The assertion that any questioning of affirmative action, especially any attempt to prohibit racial preferences via state initiatives, is “divisive” is a constant refrain coming from opponents of colorblind racial equality. This notion that the fires of our cultural civil war are being stoked by radical extremists trying to abolish a deeply entrenched domestic institution is reminiscent of identical charges from earlier opponents of racial equality leading up to an earlier civil war.

For a generation many historians (Civil War “revisionists”) echoed Southern sentiment by placing a disproportionate amount of the blame for the coming of the American Civil War on the abolitionists, militant opponents of slavery whom they regarded as uncompromising extremists.

The abolitionists at the time — and their subsequent defenders — replied with great force that it was the evil institution of slavery itself that was disruptive and (to use our contemporary word) “divisive,” not those attempting to put an end to it.

Today, as then, it is the practice of racial discrimination and those who defend it who are truly “divisive,” not those trying to abolish it.

UPDATE [29 March]

Take a look at this Newsweek article on Obama and race and see if you can figure out from it a) what Obama believes about affirmative action and b) what the Newsweek author believes Obama believes about affirmative action.

II could do neither, although it might have been easier for most readers to figure out how he would approach the impending state initiatives to prohibit racial preferences, which were mentioned in the article, if the author had seen fit to mention that Obama went into Michigan in 2006 and campaigned against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, on which the current initiatives are modeled.