Dwayne Monroe posted:
The Racial Conflict Behind Obama's LossesTohoku Glue writes:
Dadgummit, Dwayne, I was hoping you'd chime in with an editorial quip or three on this pseudo- scientific dreck... your humor typically goes well with the morning mug of hazelnut brew, except it's pushing 1am in JP and I'm sipping Suntory whiskey. "For relaxing times, make it Suntory!" Hell, for really relaxing times I'd just as well guzzle, not sip.
The _prescience of pop culture_? What kind of axiomatic so-dumb-it's-smart claptrap is that? It's neither absolutely false nor absolutely true... and precisely because of that it sure is banal.
AFAICT here's the riddle embedded in the data. Before Obama struck a chord with the African- American masses, he was often remonstrated for not being "black enough," i.e. zero blood descent from chattel slaves. While some criticized this variety of negative fetishism, it made perfect sense to me, especially insofar as I could tell from the get-go that he was not the dude to carry forward the "black enough" vibe of your garden variety DSA-lite John Conyers/Ron Dellums/Major Owens types. When the Af-Am masses started to board the bandwagon, however disappointingly it too made perfect sense, since much of said bandwagon boarding was in response to the racist slings and arrows Obama was perceived (rightly? wrongly?) to be suffering, even though he was still largely understood by most Af-Ams to be a hyper-"socially constructed" Af-Am and nothing more. Racism directed against "fake blacks" is just as real as that directed against "real blacks" --with unpleasant consequences for the latter -- after all.
But now the flashpan shadows in Plato's cave are getting beyond the grip of the imagineers. Ostensibly Latinos and Asian-Americans are rejecting Obama because they straightforwardly regard him as as "truly black," even though many of his diehard Af-Am defenders who want to simply "give the brother a chance" discreetly or indiscreetly acknowledge that he's NOT "truly black." Just another dimension to the hologram of which many have spoken... what a long strange trip it is being. _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_jan