Are you like me? Aren't you getting sick and tired of the Obama campaign's state of perpetual outrage over supposedly racist comments--comments that invariably turn out not to be racist at all when you actually look at them?
Geraldine Ferraro may be wrong when she claims that Barack Obama is benefitting in this campaign because of his race, but she has the god-given right to be wrong. Nothing she said was racist. She's just trying to discuss something she believes she is seeing. If you want to respond to her, then why not say why she's wrong? Isn't that more constructive than some woeful lament that boils down to the thinly-veiled (or unveiled) assertion that she's a demon who must be burned?
I'll tell you one damn thing: decreeing that white people can never try to talk honestly and openly, and without fear, about matters of race is NOT the way to achieve racial harmony and justice. There seems to be this idea emerging in this country--and this is not a new thing to this campaign, it has already been emerging over the past few years--that nobody can say anything about race except to hold our hands over our hearts on MLK day and intone pious platitudes about the Civil Rights movement. Anything else is "playing the race card," whatever the hell that means.
I'm not into that. Everything should be talked about. Good ideas drive out bad ideas. It's not 1965 any more, and we need to have a dynamic and ongoing conversation in this country about racial justice, about what has changed and what hasn't changed, about the goals we want to achieve, the means to achieve them, markers to test achievement, and how we are to know when or whether the job is done. The conversation should recognize that everybody has a stake in the outcome and a role to play in the process--even old white ladies who may not always be right about everything.
As long as we are setting up the standard that we have to try to understand and solve problems of race in the dark, because they're off-limits for discussion, we will never solve those problems.
Why doesn't Obama talk about race? Why isn't Obama proud to be running as a black candidate the way Hillary is proud to be running as a woman? I'm personally proud that both of them are running and doing well, and I damn sure don't see why I can't talk about it.
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