Exciting New Political Idea: Criticizing Obama For His Failures Isn't Racist

It's incredible that this even has to be argued, but that's where we are in "post-racial" America.

Ron Christie is a Republican-leaning strategist. He's also black, which must mean he's racist against himself.

The era of ‘hope and change’ was supposed to usher in a ‘post-racial’ era. Instead it’s now the appalling norm to blame any political opposition to the president on racism.

As Americans participate in the post-Thanksgiving rite of passage known as Black Friday, I can’t help but reflect on a disturbing trend that increases with each passing day of the Obama presidency: If you disagree with the president, you must be racist.

Of course, criticism of black Republicans by liberals of all colors is nothing new. When I first started on Capitol Hill in 1991 as a young legislative aide, it didn’t take long for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to call me a “sellout to my race” and tell me to my face that black Republicans are nothing more than “Uncle Toms.” The phenomenon is all too familiar to black conservatives who dare to express views that are out of the liberal mainstream.

But the Obama administration was supposed to change all that. The promise of “hope and change” was to have ushered in a new color-blind society for America’s first “post-racial” president.

...

Today I am appalled that blaming genuine political opposition to Obama and his policies on racism has become the norm rather than the exception. It would be one thing if this sort of cheap political attack were limited to Chris Matthews and his colleagues at MSNBC, where charges of racism surface frequently. But in August, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) accused his Republican colleagues of obstructing the president’s agenda because of the color of Obama’s skin, the leader of the world’s greatest deliberative body revealed himself to be nothing more than a cheap racial huckster who will say or do anything to perpetuate a cynical untruth.

I notice an odd double-standard on the left. Suppose I were to champion giving little girls little-girl-type gifts -- dollies and the like. The left would attack me for attempting to foist upon little girls a narrow definition of what a girl (and later a woman) must be. I would be guilty, they would argue, of attempting to impose my stereotypical views of womanhood on women -- I would be denying women the full range of possibility in self-definition and basic human autonomy.

I suppose there's something to that, actually. (To the extent I actually do the things they would claim I was doing -- that is, deliberately attempting to impose a model of gender norms on a little girl, as opposed to, say, simply giving her a baby doll because she had it on her Christmas list.)

But note how quickly this notion -- of encouraging people to explore the maximum possibility-space of what they could decide they could be -- goes out the window when we speak about the possibility of a woman or minority deciding they they might be conservatively-oriented.

Note how quickly the left descends into attacking such people, claiming that conservative women aren't really women at all, that Republican-leaning blacks are "Oreos" and Uncle Toms.

And that conservative-leaning Latinos aren't really Latinos. An example of that is fresh news today, as the Mexican-American blogger SooperMexican is being accused by a Latino blog of not being Latino at all. See, because SooperMexican chooses to remain anonymous, and writes in favor of conservativism, that must mean he (or she) is actually a White Guy.

It's just impossible, you know, that someone of Mexican heritage could find value in the concept of liberty favored by the authors of the American Republic.

In all these cases, the Left is very determined to limit the amount of social freedom a woman or minority feels to discover her own true self. If that true self turns out to be traditionalist, capitalist, or skeptical about the power of Holy Government, the Left attempts to impose its own narrow definition of what a woman, black, or Mexican must be.

As to the ridiculous idea that conservatives only began opposing progressivism and socialism when it had a (half) black face, a commenter at the Daily Beast called "dadadav" sums it up well enough:

As a white latino who is conservative and make no fuss about it, I have simply taken the easier path to avoid more discussions on the issue and "please" the Liberal-left:

In 2000 I voted against Al Gore because he was the Democrat candidate, and I am not a Democrat.

In 2004 I voted against John Kerry because he was the Democrat candidate, and I am not a Democrat.

In 2008 and 2012 I voted against Barak Obama because...oh yeah, Im racist.

That's that. See? Easy.

posted by Ace at 04:44 PM

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