Jewish Atheist

Two posts in a row on Obama. But he is a complex and many-faceted character. He is above all the ultimate Affirmative Action achievement. As Geraldine Ferraro said, to her everlasting regret (such are the ways of political correctness), if he were white he’d never have gotten this far; he would be IMHO an obscure Illinois Senator, perhaps a tool of the Combine, dutifully delivering Black votes to his bosses in Chicago and Springfield.

But he sits in the White House, even though he is literally but not culturally African-American, inasmuch as the term is ambiguous. Like Italian-American, it can refer to, say, a Moroccan or Kenyan who becomes American — or to the descendants of such people.

What it really means

But we all know that the far more common meaning is the (as far as I can tell) latest of the long train of names that have attached to a particular ethnicity — Africans 400 years ago, but long since become something else: African-Americans. More on that momentarily.

Obama belongs to the first group. But he gets credit for the second. As I said, complex.

Part of the reason why he got to the White House is, as Harry Reid once said privately (Chicago Tribune, 1/10/10), because he’s “light-skinned” and “speaks with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” For uttering these truths, Reid now apologizes publicly.

PC strikes again.

I wish Reid had had the courage to stick by his assessment. But the iron rule of political correctness requires that he grovel.

Let the truth be spoken here. The ethnicity in question, defined as #2 above, itself values light skin. “Grocery bag brown” is how I once heard it. Once I was in a roomful of affluent Blacks, and very few were darker than grocery bag brown.

Code-switching

“No Negro dialect, unless he wants to” is simply a statement of the way a speaker adapts to his audience. Linguists call it “code-switching” — variation in language performance according to audience and other factors. My doctoral dissertation was a study of it (in Hawaiian English). If you compared Obama’a spontaneous Q&A with all-Black (or young) versus all-white adult audiences, you would hear slight variations in lexicon and vocabulary, with participial -ing’s replaced by -in (I heard messin’ with). Why wouldn’t Obama code-switch? We all do.

My college honors thesis was about code-switching in Black literary dialect. It was then that I read James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and others, to see how authors represented Black speech (and to understand the full depths of racism in America).

Every politician sounds different back home than when in Washington. Yet some regional and social accents have prestige or stigma. We wouldn’t elect a person with a British accent, though it has prestige. Reid implicitly recognizes the fact that no one with a strong Black accent (pronouncing final “th” as “f”, for example, or using multiple negatives) could get to the White House. No one with a TRACE of that accent could be elected President. White America would not stand for a Jesse-Jackson-sounding Black in the White House. Yet we had Andrew Young and other capable leaders with the right coloration and with no accent. Maybe the tide of Affirmative Action had to crest. Still, it’s helpful to Obama, when in front of young/Black audiences, to code-switch a little.

“Negroes”

Reid made an error within an error. They’re not Negroes anymore, Harry. We’re way past the point where Lenny Bruce had to instruct LBJ that it’s “KNEE-grows,” not “Nigras,” because the latter created too much suspense as to whether the complete utterance would be that most grievous of racial slurs (I have no idea why: like Lenny, I believe it’s just a word)…or the minimally acceptable “Nigras.”

That was after darkies and colored…but before Blacks, African-Americans, and, full circle, people of color. But how much color? Does it include Eskimos? And is it anti-albino, thus racist?

Does a group decide what to call itself? Who cares? The mere fact that it insists that it IS a favored group, so special that it must segregate itself, with group members marrying their own cousins and inbreeding relentlessly (don’t get me started on allergies and other “Jew diseases”)…is harmful. Also, the more its members think about such things, the less they will notice our common humanity. So the least the good Senator could have done was to acknowledge Obama’s linguistic adeptness (a skill totally beyond Bush) by referring to the supposed ethnic group by its self-chosen name. Blacks seem to need a new label each time they make a major social advance.

Humanity

But back to the common humanity. As I will continue to repeat to and beyond the point of exhaustion, we human beings are almost identical genetically. To make such a big deal out of tiny physical distinctions, then to hang on to all kinds of value judgments on the in-group and the out-group…results in discrimination, intolerance, inbreeding, and lots of death and suffering.

This nation’s smugness on putting a person of minimal competence with the right pigmentation (but no Negro dialect) in the White House makes me want to vomit. I am not impressed. The one thing our political process will never produce is a Chief Executive who will put religion in its proper place (e.g., by revoking the tax-exempt status of churches) and who truly respects the Constitution.

Sorry to diss a whole field, but Constitutional law, aside from legitimate applications to new situations, seems like a con game that makes the document say whatever the government-expanders want it to say . Otherwise, we wouldn’t have the Department of Education, the IRS, and many other harmful, expensive government agencies. We wouldn’t have a gargantuan national debt or world empire. But Americans, as one astute lawyer friend pointed out, seem to want a lot more government that the Consitution allows.

We will never, at least not in my lifetime, have a leader who puts religion in its proper place and respects the Constitution. And as Cronkite used to say, that’s the way it is. The best we can hope for is light skin and no Negro dialect.