Nathan Scandella (personal)

Black and White

If you're like a lot of Americans, you spent Tuesday night glued to the television/web browser, watching the election coverage. As it became clear that Obama would be the winner, we quickly went to reaction shots of the crowds, and reaction commentary from the pundits. Despite Obama's beautiful job during the general election at making the race about the issues, and not about race, this is all we got after the winner was declared. All the black commentators had to be interviewed. All the cameras had to pan to black faces in Grant Park. Of course, Obama's white supporters were elated to be done with Bush, and spared another four years with a guy just like him.

But, you didn't see the tears streaming down the faces of Obama's white fans, or on the faces of the white, asian, or latino anchors on the networks. But you did on the majority of the black faces you saw. The words told the same story: disbelief, shock, joy, relief. Is this merely a beautiful moment, or something else?

Is it ok to root for a candidate because he has the same color skin as you, and empathizes with your plight? If so, what is the difference between rooting for him, and rooting against the other guy, who doesn't look like you? Why do we tell white people that they need to be color blind, and then celebrate black people when they overwhelmingly choose the black candidate?

Maybe they weren't just voting for Obama because he was black. After all, black voters historically have voted Democratic, so maybe they were just voting for the Democrat. Well, that doesn't explain the high voter turnout, and it also doesn't explain the demographics in the Democratic primary race between Obama and Hillary Clinton. In the primary race, you had two candidates with almost identical platforms. Clinton actually had more experience, and was generally held in high esteem in the black community prior to this election season. But in primary after primary, while Democrats on the whole were nearly evenly divided between Clinton and Obama, black voters picked Obama by a more than 5 to 1 margin. That's a pretty big difference for two candidates who weren't that much different.

[Aside: I love playing with numbers. Look how the author of this chart graphs Clinton and Obama's share of the vote on different axes, to make it look like they were about the same. Clever.]

Oh sure, you can talk about Bill Clinton's comments that the South Carolina results were about race. I'm not sure how that's more offensive than Michelle Obama stating that she was proud of her country "for the first time" after her husband won a primary. Either way, neither of those two foot-in-mouthers were the actual candidates running.

My point here is that there clearly was bias in favor of Obama on the part of the black community. I hate to ever agree with Rush Limbaugh, but when has Colin Powell ever endorsed a white, liberal candidate? Especially, one who openly criticizes our intervention in Iraq, a decision that Powell still defends. On election night, Powell shed a tear. But, he shed his objectivity first.

As most black Americans would agree, having a black President isn't going to solve all our racial problems. But, how will we solve any more of them if we continue to believe it's ok to discriminate based on the color of someone's skin, as long as the discriminator has one of the approved "minority" colors? You can't setup those kinds of moral grey areas and ever expect to have a moral society. As a perfect example of what the tolerance of "reverse-racism" has produced, take a look at the issue of gay marriage, which was recently voted down via California ballot measure. Blacks overwhelmingly voted to deny gays the same rights that heterosexual couples had. So, here we are, 40 years after the civil rights movement, 3 days after electing our first black president, and we haven't even taught the segment of our society that has been most oppressed in our country's history that bigotry isn't acceptable. We've only taught ourselves that bigotry against black people isn't acceptable. Wait, correction ... bigotry against black, straight people isn't acceptable.

You can't make these kinds of exceptions when you determine what's moral and what isn't. This isn't the tax code. It's either wrong to discriminate based on race, or it isn't. There shouldn't be anything controversial about that statement, but our collective behaviour indicates that there is.

Posted at 02:09AM Nov 07, 2008 by Nathan in General  |  Comments[0]