From black feminist Alice Walker. Pathetically, she describes him as this generation's Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela.
Although she recites, at length, her own tale of woe, Walker declines to offer any examples of Obama's accomplishments that would justify comparison to King or Mandela other than the color of his skin. Not to step on the toes of the Racial Grievance-Mongering Committee (as led by Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, et al), but Obama's growing up with a dark skin tone in no way compares to the constant threats to King's life nor the 27-year imprisonment of Mandela. Ironically, TheRoot.com characterizes her article as "[arguing] that we must build alliances not on ethnicity or gender, but on truth," when in fact she argues voting for Obama precisely because of his ethnicity.
As a white man, I refuse to accept blame for Walker's discomfort with libraries, her issues with her "white women friends in college," nor the bottles thrown at her head while working to register blacks to vote in Georgia. Her life is not Obama's and I have no need to vote for him in order to absolve myself of any of the sins visited upon her.
Walker has fallen victim to the fantasy of David Ehrenstein's "Magic Negro." She has based her expectations solely on Obama's flowing rhetoric, which stands at stark odds to his actual record. Should Obama become President, a more realistic expectation would be a brief period of self-congratulatory, ersatz racial harmony, followed by a lengthy period of bitter division caused by his pursuit of very liberal policy positions.
1 comment:
He's so pretty though!
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