Eugene Robinson writes:
I hear from African-Americans who are excited about Obama’s candidacy but who suspect that somehow, when push comes to shove, “they” won’t let him win. It’s unclear who “they” might be – white voters, the “power structure,” the alignment of the stars – and it’s unclear how “they” are going to thwart Obama’s ambition. The point is that, somehow, he’ll be denied.
This kind of thinking is really pathological in a country where legal discrimination in favor of blacks is often mandated by law and practiced voluntarily by large corporations. It is also depressingly ignorant of the basic facts: there are thousands and thousands of black elected officials in the United States, including Senators and Congressman, as well as blacks and other minorities in high places in both the Democratic and Republican administrations. If racism is the cause of black political failure, one might be surprised to learn the states with the highest number of black elected officials are the Deep Southern states of Mississippi (with 892) and Alabama (756).
The widespread fatalism and alienation of black Americans does not derive, in my opinion, from life experience or recent history, so much as an artificial campaign of propaganda. This propaganda includes an exaggerated focus on the last vestiges of racism in a country in which racism has largely disappeared. And this drumbeat of criticism by liberal and black Americans is important because it is the dominant explanation for persistent black underachievement in the wake of the reforms of the civil rights era. The tragic failure of so many black Americans to achieve after the end of official racism is unsettling and calls for study and concern. But the hackneyed fobbing off of responsibility on white elites is convenient (but also a dead end) because it does not require blacks themselves, as a community, to look in the mirror and see the Gangsta’ Rap, thuggish sports heroes, low educational achievements, high rates of illegitimacy, high rates of crime and violence, financial mismanagement, and other predictors of failure that have nothing to do with white racism.
It is important to postulate “institutional racism” and shadowy conspiracies because the alternative explanations do not yield simple solutions and do not shift responsibility to “The Man” who is supposedly keeping the brothers down. There may be reasons not to vote for Obama–not least that he is a liberal masquerading as a moderate–but I don’t think his race will have much effect one way or the other.
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