also, i think you get it a little wrong about what's at stake. it's not about the blow against racism / sexism their candidacies represent, it's part of it. but not the whole thing. The attachment to teflobama's candidacy is about the messiah stereotype shoved at us from birthday on the teevee and in the moovees.
that special black man who has wisdom. no matter what his status in life, he has a specialness about him that ultimately saves the day or gives some white main character clues as to how to live a moral life or how to find their inner truth or whatever you. (Comeon, everybody, you can name these characters: The guy in the Matrix; the black cop in Lethal Weapon; Driving Miss Daisy, on and on. I'm brain dead right now, help me out here!)
i think there is an abiding belief in the black (or ethnic) Other who can rescue whites from their soulless, corrupt lives. This goes back to standpoint theory and its deep hold on the left.
at one time, people believed that you had to look for the most oppressed group to find the people who would lead the revolutionary vanguard. (iv'e yammered about this before).
there set in motion this search: first for people of color in the u.s., then for third world people (think: Triple Jeopardy lit of the late 60s); then people looked for lesbian women of color. then lesbian women of color recognized status differences between educated/not;blue collar/white;between light skinned and not; between urban/rural/suburban, between imperlist/imperialized, ad infinitum.
no one, these days, has any attachment to the notion that women have some kind of access to the truth, that women are oppressed enough that they have some special knowledge of how society operates and can, thus, help us figure out how to get out of this place.
BUT, a lot of people still buy into the idea that people of color share a common experience of oppression (see the post I forwarded from Uhuru earlier) gives blacks in the u.s. a special insight into the way oppression works. This is how people can buy into the idea that obama's embrace of change and exciting ideas, that his great speaking ability, is born, not of biological race, but of the shared experience of oppression.
he is more honest, because he's kind of outside the system. white people can never, ever be as honest as an Other outsider.
he is less attached to money because he's outside the system, he's got that shared experience of oppression that will make him more honest and this is something that white people can never have.
(relatedly: this is cahsmore's argument for why soul music because so popular. it was marketed as authentic even though highly polished by whites and it was seen as something that could only be accomplished by blacks for only the experience of oppression could create the capacity for soul music)
he is more likely to truly be different, because he's got that experience of oppression. The messiah stereotype we are fed endlessly in the moovees and teevee.
as such, you get two whammies in one: it's a blow against racism with the _right_ kinda black guy: the one who will save white people from themselves and get us in touch will an inner self or something that we can't find now because we are so corrupt, so warped by capitalism, so warped by our status as white oppressors that we can never ever find it without the guidance of the wise black man or woman who, because oppressed folks, precisely because of their oppression, have special insight.
* same phenom with rural hick white people comes up, too. * same phenom with western orientalism: exoticization of the wise asian other
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