Has the time finally come to talk about racial prejudice in the current presidential race?<\/p>\n
“Prejudice” has a specific meaning. It does not mean “holding the black man down” \u2014 though it has certainly had that effect, over our history.<\/p>\n
“Prejudice” means “to judge something in advance,” usually based in first appearances, without hearing and properly considering the evidence.<\/p>\n
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has admitted he’s more likely to cross to the other side of the street when approached by three young black men on a dark urban sidewalk than if the threesome were white. That’s prejudice — and also common sense and self-preservation, in many of our urban areas.<\/p>\n
It’s prejudice to refuse to let a black person compete in a sport or other activity — including national politics — because “Their kind never do well.” This is clearly a bunch of bull. Many people actually believed this, back in 1940. How do you think you’d fare today if you tried to field an all-white team in the NBA or in major league baseball?<\/p>\n
But prejudice can work the other way, as well. Asians and Jews have long won fewer seats in prestigious graduate programs than their actual academic achievements would merit, based on the notion that “That stuff comes easier to you people; you have to give the blacks and Hispanics \u2014 yes, and even the whites \u2014 a chance.”<\/p>\n
Of course “academics come easier” … for kids who are home studying on the weekends while their pals are out party-going. Denying that Asian Americans or Jewish Americans work hard for what they achieve — expecting them all to do well without trying very hard, while excusing other minorities their failures because “it’s just part of their street culture” — is destructive prejudice.<\/p>\n
Many is the “liberal” politician who makes excuses for the pathetic performance of Las Vegas schools, insisting the solution is more money.<\/p>\n
But Utah and Vermont do far better with less money per student, we point out.<\/p>\n
“Well, if I could trade what we have for those racially homogeneous families and neighborhoods …” they usually reply.<\/p>\n
“You mean our schools can’t be expected to do as well because blacks and Hispanics are hopeless?”<\/p>\n
“Well, no, I didn’t actually say that …”<\/p>\n
Yes they did. And those low expectations are a particularly insidious form of racial prejudice.<\/p>\n
CARTOON ARCHIVES<\/p>\n
The Review-Journal subscribes to a number of editorial syndicates, which provide us with the best editorial cartooning in the country, offered by a dozen artists scattered from Phoenix to Buffalo to Palm Beach. When the time comes to illustrate an Opinion piece for our Op-ed page, we have hundreds of recent political cartoons to sort through. Looking for a cartoon that portrays John McCain or Sarah Palin as clueless or stumble-tongued? Choose from dozens. Even Joe Biden takes an occasional hit.<\/p>\n
Looking for a cartoon even mildly critical of Sen. Barack Obama? No luck. Last summer, Pat Oliphant did offer one panel that showed the Illinois senator walking in water \u2014 though that seemed more a criticism of his followers’ expectations. Not much since then.<\/p>\n
And this is a guy who decided to accept his party’s nomination not in the convention hall, but outdoors in a football stadium, lit like Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, on a built-to-order stage set that could have held the concluding scene of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah.”<\/p>\n
The cartoonists found nothing worthy of parody, there? If John McCain had tried that, he’d have been shown as the dancing leprechaun on the toadstool from “This is Spinal Tap.”<\/p>\n
Do you really think associates as colorful as jailed felon Antoin “Tony” Rezko and unrepentant terror bomber William Ayres (in whose living room Sen. Obama kicked off his presidential campaign) and raving “God Damn America” preacher Jeremiah Wright and Obama mentors Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis and Saul “The Red” Alinsky and even collectivist African bureaucrat Barack Hussein Obama Sr. — who favored the seizure of farms owned by a racial minority and saw nothing wrong with a “100 percent tax” — would be off limits if the candidate were some rich white businessman? “Saturday Night Live” sees no possibilities for a parody of “This Is Your Life,” with each of these inconvenient characters walking onstage to a fanfare from the band during a nationally televised debate?<\/p>\n
The cartoons that moved right after Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination was particularly revealing. More than one cartoonist offered some version of the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the big statue at the Lincoln Memorial giving a “thumbs up.”<\/p>\n
Did they mean Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. would have agreed with Sen. Obama’s prescriptions on tax hikes or nationalizing health care or the banking industry? I don’t think so. These cartoons celebrated the fact that a black man had won a major party nomination for president.<\/p>\n
That’s not the color-blindness that the Rev. King yearned for. That’s racism. It presumes something good has been accomplished because we have nominated someone from a given GROUP, regardless of the freshman senator’s individual merits.<\/p>\n
A ONE-WAY STREET?<\/p>\n
The polls tell us 90 to 95 percent of America’s black voters will vote for Barack Obama. Does anyone really believe that’s because they’re in that degree of unanimous support for his positions on Iraq, on gun control or the war on drugs? Come on. To any objection raised to Mitt Romney, an awful lot of members of the LDS church would reply, “Yeah, but come on, he’s one of ours.” And that’s also heard among black folk discussing the Obama candidacy, today.<\/p>\n
If Barack Obama loses this race \u2014 and he now appears to be leading, though it will be much closer than the polls show \u2014 the groundwork is already being laid to squawk “Racism!” The groundwork is being laid to cite “The Bradley Effect,” referring to the black mayor of Los Angeles who appeared to be ahead in the polls for the governorship of California back in the 1980s back but who finally lost \u2014 the presumption being that voters who opposed him were ashamed to admit that opposition to poll-takers.<\/p>\n
If the vast majority of white Americans were racists, how would Barack Obama have captured the nomination of the Democratic Party, which is mostly white?<\/p>\n
I will vote against Barack Obama because of his politics and his lack of experience — especially his lack of realistic economic experience in the free market, running a business in the face of petty government regulators and taxmen swarming like ants — and anyone who calls me a racist for that debases our national debate, by endeavoring to practice the politics of guilt and extortion.<\/p>\n
Libertarians came close to nominating Russell Means for president in 1988. His race was properly seen as an advantage, not a handicap \u2014 though on balance, on the whole range of the issues, white guy Ron Paul proved the better candidate.<\/p>\n
I would vote for a black man who enunciated a philosophy of limited Constitutional government and free markets \u2014 for a Thomas Sowell or a Walter Williams \u2014 in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n
Of course, to the socialist practitioners of “identity politics,” those men and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and authors and commentators like Larry Elder and Star Parker aren’t “real blacks,” any more than Sarah Palin is a “real woman.”<\/p>\n
Only those who favor redistribution at gunpoint need apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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