[BretLudwig]

Obamas Black Edge
Does it help or hurt him?

By John Derbyshire

" €˜Obama Poses a Puzzle for Pollsters€� alliterates a headline in
Americas Newspaper of Record. The story under the headline goes on to
speculate about how Barack Obamas blackness will play with voters,
should the Democrats indeed ignore my sage advice of this past year and a
half and nominate Obama as their candidate instead of the ineffable,
unbeatable Al Gore.

The story doesnt seem to think there is much to go on other than the
fabled €œBradley Effect€� €” nonblack voters being more willing to tell
pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, than they are willing
actually to do so. (The Bradley Effect was called the Dinkins Effect in
Steven Levitts 2004 bestseller Freakonomics, but apparently nobody
remembers this: one more data point for my theory that hardly anybody
actually reads bestsellers.)

I beg to differ. I think there is more to be said about Obamas
blackness as a factor in peoples voting. There are positives and
negatives to it. My rough guess €” and Im the guy who proclaimed that
€œObama is toast€� when the Revm Wright scandal broke, so dont be
running down to the bookmaker with this €” my rough guess is that
net-net, its a positive. Well, lets see what weve got.

***

First the positives.

Hes black, period. At any rate €” a nod here to Jonathan Miller €”
hes black-ish. This is both a positive and a negative for Obama. Ill
get to the negatives later. Its an obvious positive in that it gets him
the enthusiastic votes of blacks and guilty white liberals.

Hes black, and so is God. Working in combination with other factors
that Ill get to, Obamas négritude will help him with a lot of
politically vague types who are neither black nor distinctively liberal,
but who have been oriented the Obama way by decades of watching Numinous
Negro types saving the world, or defying it with a supernatural level of
dignity and gravitas, in the movies and on TV: characters played by Will
Smith, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Denzel Washington, and of
course the numinousest of them all, Morgan Freeman. There is probably now
an entire demographic cohort of young Americans whose mental image of God
is Morgan Freeman.

Hes black, and its time. There is an overlapping tranche of mostly
apolitical Americans who, without having any particular feelings about, or
even knowledge about, Obama and his policies, think it would be neat to
have a black president. Possibly resignation will be in play for some part
of this tranche: €œIts time, so we may as well.€� When über-hawk Al
Haig was running for president in 1988 there was a bumper sticker you
could buy showing a picture of a mushroom cloud and the legend: Vote Haig
€” Lets get it over with. Not that many people will think of Obama as
the guy to start a nuclear war, but a lot of people might think that
having a black president is a thing we shall have to try sooner or later,
so it may as well be sooner. Lets get it over with.

Some part of this same tranche will have heard about Obamas great
popularity abroad, and will then be seized by the famous American desire
to be thought well of by other nations. Whence:

Hes black €” how the world will admire us! €œAmericans want to be
loved, the English want to be obeyed,€� observed English Americanophile
Quentin Crisp correctly. No true-born Englishman ever gave a fig about
whether or not his country was liked. Who cares what foreigners think? As
my old Dad was wont to express it from the depths of the paternal
armchair: €œForeigners? Bloody fools, for all I can see.€� No true
American ever said or thought this, nor ever could. Obamas popularity
abroad will be worth several hundred thousand votes to him.

Now the negatives.

Hes black, period. Are there white Americans who will vote against
Obama because they dont like black people? Sure there are. You know
some, and so do I. I doubt there are enough of them to swing any state;
but there is more going on here.

Hes black, and all the white media and elite snobs are swooning over
him. Human beings are tribal. We direct our big emotions at other members
of our ingroup, except when there are consequential outgroups with whom we
are in a state of acute conflict. White people voting against Barack Obama
as a way of poking a finger in the collective eye of black America, will
not be a big factor. As Ive said, I doubt it will swing any state.
Whites simply dont care that much about blacks one way or tother.
Whites dont regard blacks as consequential. White/black conflict is
often annoying and occasionally scary, but its never existentially
acute.

A much bigger factor, I believe, will be voters who reject Obama as a way
of working off resentment against other whites. White resentment of blacks
is a molehill; white resentment of media, academic, and political types €”
most of them white €” who (as people see it) cover up for minorities, is
the mountain.


Hes black, and the elites will cover for him. A few days ago there was
an incident in Hartford, Conn., that got a lot of news coverage. An
elderly man trying to cross the street was hit by a car. The car didnt
stop, and neither did others who passed the old guy lying there in the
road bleeding copiously. Nor did any of the pedestrians around go to help
him, though one went into the road to take a close look at him before
sauntering away. The whole thing was captured on a low-resolution security
camera.

When I first saw the clips, my suspicious and mean-spirited nature kicked
in. I went to my computer and looked up the demography of that Hartford
neighborhood. Uh-huh. (Thats just the broad zip code, which likely
includes some gentrified zones. Here are student stats for the nearest
public high school. Here are the same for the nearest public elementary
school.) Yet in all the TV news and talking-head coverage of the incident,
nobody bothered to tell us about neighborhood demographics. Not only did
they not bother to tell us, they pointedly refrained from telling us. The
talking heads were all: €œWhats the matter with us?€� and €œHow did
we get this way?€� and other verbal hand-wringings, while vast numbers of
white TV viewers whod already guessed the thing Id looked up, were
thinking to themselves: €œWhaddya mean, us? This isnt us, its them.
Nothing to do with us.€�

This kind of thing generates widespread resentment €” not so much against
minorities, whom white Americans think about as little as they can get away
with, but against the whites who cover up for minority misbehavior, and
pretend that it is something to do with €œus,€� a thing that only
left-liberal whites believe, or pretend to believe as a way of asserting
moral superiority over other whites. The same resentments apply to the
media €œburying€� of news stories about really horrific attacks by
blacks on whites in which racial hatred is an obvious factor: the December
2000 Wichita Massacre, the January 2007 Knoxville murders, or the current
Columbia rape case. There arent many ways that resentful whites can get
back at the media and cultural elites who browbeat and lie to them in this
way, but they can at least decline to vote for €œtheir€� candidate, even
if they dont object to the guys blackness per se, or to anything he
has said or done.

Hes black, in an exotic way. This cant be underestimated. If the
candidate was George Obama, or Barack Washington, he would be twice as
acceptable to the voting public. Cast your eye back down the list of U.S.
presidents. €œExotic€� is surely one of the last words they bring to
mind, even a tad behind €œblack.€� (There is, after all, an excellent
chance that on the one-drop rule, Barack Obama will not be our first black
president.) Our country has always had a scattering of high-achieving
exotics, but none of them ever got close to the White House. In their
presidential preferences, Americans of all parties are conservative. Other
things being equal, we prefer boring white guys.

Obamas East African origins dont help. Most black Americans take
their African descent from West Africa. The distribution of physical types
in East Africa is considerably different. (As we shall no doubt see in the
upcoming summer Olympics, where runners of West African ancestry will take
all the sprinting awards, while East Africans will sweep the long-distance
events.) There is of course a lot of overlap, but enough difference in
physical types to give Obama a tinge of strangeness. The minds of many
nonblack voters €” and perhaps some black ones, too €” will contain, at
some level well below the surface, a thought like: Hes a black guy, but
is he one of OUR black guys?

***

Net-net, I think the positives will win out here. Setting aside policy
issues and personalities, and just considering Obamas blackness by
itself, I think it will be a slight net plus. Practically no nonblack
Americans care about black Americans in the aggregate, or think about
€œblack issues€� if they can possibly avoid it, or are willing to do
anything on behalf of blacks collectively. However, great masses of
nonblacks want to be thought to be the kind of person who cares, thinks,
and does. Casting a vote for Obama will get you that, at least in your own
head €” and then, if the guy actually becomes President, vicariously, as a
citizen of a country that performed a collective act of virtue.

Cheap grace? Sure. In the matter of nonblack responses to blackness, there
is, after 40 years of trying, and adjusting, and legislating, and paying,
and failing, no other kind of grace thats marketable."


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