When I deleted what I'd written though I forgot to thank MP for the thoughtful reply, which served as a reminder that I'd meant to read the book after CGE recommended it.
For now, I'd like to point out that obama's rhetoric is so irritating here. What he's really trying to do is to get the reader to buy that he believes these things, that is is both someone who is a "traditionalist" (as described in May's The Atlantic Monthly, an article about Cosby by Ta-Nehisi Coates (who's father was a Panther), but also someone with a "sociological imagination." But he doesn't speak of himself. Instead, he persuades you by saying it about black people.
He won't say, "I believe the following...." or "I argue the following... " which is, of course, readily recognized as an argument -- and a debatableone.
Instead, he has it both ways and casts it as a _cultural_ thing. He describes what he presents as something all black Users believe -- and being black, so do he. So he never has to say that he believes it, but push it as something everyone understands because of the experience of being black.
Why? What does he gain by this rhetorical strategy? Obviously, he gains by positioning this as something everyone gets, it's not just him, the wisdom of crowds -- and so shouldn't be argued with or questioned. it's common wisdom, everyone knows it. And it appeals wonderfully to the Liberal Imagination?
And the reason I saw this immediately was because my experience tells me Obama is wrong about what black people believe. You can't make such a generalization.
But you don't even have to go empiricist here. Rather, you simply have to consider how absurd the statement is,
"wow! Funny how that works. Black folks have magically escaped individualist ideology! Can ya believe? Unlike every non-black student sitting in an intro-sociology class, Black folks get it right off the bat.... They are neither atomistic individualists or structuralist sociologists who erase agency for all that structure. It's an amazin' thang."
Amazing because it's absurd.
And it's an absurd claim when you have any number of scholars, writers, intellectuals, commentators, cultural critics pointing out such things as internalized racism.
It's a marvelous piece of rhetorical persuasion, I'll give him that, but it's how he manages to straddle two positions without ever transcending them -- Aufhebung! -- just leaving them there to split open later.
Michael Pollak wrote:
> Do you correspond with Reed Doug? I'd love to read his response to MP.
>
> At 08:26 PM 5/7/2008, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>>But he also continues:
>>
>><quote>
>>
>>What you won't hear, though, are blacks using such terms as "predator" in
>>describing a young gang member, or "underclass" in describing mothers on
>>welfare -- language that divides the world between those who are worth of
>>our concern and those who are not.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)