Obama can 'go to China'

— If Barack Obama wins the presidency, it will be because white Americans who seek redemption for their country's dismal racial history find it in his candidacy.

The catch is that he has to convince them that he, too, wants to put race behind us. To win, he has to continue to benefit from the desire for racial forgiveness while also transcending the question of race. Race is what the Obama candidacy has always been about, but it remains a viable candidacy for white voters only to the extent that it appears to be about anything but race.

For Obama to successfully present himself as a candidate whose blackness is incidental to his other virtues, he must first differentiate himself from the race hucksters who have preceded him like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, not to mention his own theological mentor, Jeremiah Wright.

Along these lines, the nature of the damage done to Obama by the Wright controversy has been widely misunderstood. Wright has hurt Obama not so much because doubts can be raised about what he knew about Wright and when he knew it, but because Wright reminds all those white Americans whose votes Obama will need in November of the various pathologies pervading black America and of the continuing liberal tendency to blame them on white Americans.

Wright pulls Obama back into a world where race not only counts, but counts to such an extent as to drive everything else out of the picture, including the virtues of Obama that should be incidental to race.

To win the presidency, he will haveto attract more than simply the votes of blacks, eggheads and college groupies. He will have to win a huge chunk of the middle-class white vote. Which means he must win the votes of precisely those Americans who his mentor and all too many other black radicals believe are capable of inventing AIDS to kill off black people.

However desirous they are of racial redemption, most white Americans don't consider themselves racists and are alienated by any racial narrative that reflexively casts them in the role of villains.

In short, to appeal to such voters, Obama cannot be perceived as even casually brushing up alongside the racist demagoguery of a Wright or a Louis Farrakhan. That it is difficult in America for an ambitious and talented young black man to build a political career without trucking with such people is more an indictment of the dismal status of America's post-Martin Luther King Jr. black leadership than evidence of a racist America.

In the end, and to truly live up to his claim to unite Americans of all classes and colors, Obama needs to take a position that puts him starkly at odds with an increasingly corrupt black civil rights establishment. He needs to find his own Sister Souljah moment.

The one and perhaps only way to do that would be for him to repudiatethe idea of racial preferences.

The racial preference system represents, of course, a once-noble civil rights movement gone wrong, a toxic byproduct of black separatism and white liberal guilt that brought the racial progress of the 1960s to a grinding halt by subverting its essential principles. But experience also suggests that it can't be taken apart by white conservatives like John McCain or even black conservatives like Clarence Thomas or Ward Connerly, to whom the term "Uncle Tom" unfairly but firmly attaches.

Just as it was once said that only a staunch anti-communist like Richard Nixon could "go to China" without fear of being called soft on communism, only a black liberal like Obama can put a stake through the heart of racial preferences without fear of being called racist.

Racial preferences are profoundly repellent to white Americans, and even to a fair number of their black would-be beneficiaries, precisely because they contradict the central message of Obama's candidacy: that he is qualified to be president because of the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

Being the intelligent man that he is, Obama undoubtedly knows that racial preferences are morally wrong and injurious to the kind of unity he claims to stand for. If he is anywhere nearly as politically adroit as he appears to be, he should know that repudiating them would likely put him in the White House.

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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.

Editorial, Pages 102 on 05/18/2008

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