Barack Obama: Offended by Race

Barack Obama is not just fortunate to be Black. He is fortunate to be a fortunate Black man. Throughout Senator Obama’s career he has been more notable because of his success as a Black man. In November of 2004 the headlines did not read “Barack Obama is the 50th U.S. Senator from Illinois”. They read “Barack Obama is the 5th Black U.S. Senator in History”. When he became President of The Harvard Law Review he was not heralded as the 105th President but the “first Black president” of the review. Even the Illinois Senator himself said during the 2004 Democratic convention that his status is incredible, in part, because of the background of his African father. The notoriety of Barack Obama is due, once again, in part, because Barack Obama is Black.

Geraldine Ferraro is making the same assertion when she said Barack Obama’s success is due “in large measure, because he is black” Ferraro expanded upon this using herself as an example.

“Let me also say in 1984 -- and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times -- in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president"

Ferraro has an obligation to stand by the truth against those who would be dishonest by censoring a perfectly legitimate statement. Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars called her statement erroneous and instead of trying to understand what was being said offered these words from Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite (I truncate it to its most “offensive” part):

The New York Times has reported the Justice Department statistic that “an estimated 12 percent of African-American men ages 20-34 are in jail or prison…The proportion of young black men who are incarcerated has been rising in recent years, and this is the highest rate every measured.” Just for comparison, note that 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group are incarcerated.

So, let’s see, to follow Ms.Ferraro’s logic, the other 88% of African American men are being promoted to high public office? Facts dictate otherwise. There are more African American men now in prison than in college and the employment rate for African American men has dropped to just over 50%. It’s nigh on to impossible to get a job in this economy anyway, let alone when you have a prison record. Incarceration rates, unemployment and poverty are linked.

Reverend Thistlethwaite criticizes Geraldine Ferraro for being “willfully ignorant”. But Thistlethwaite ignores the fact that Obama is both half white and the son of an African immigrant. A distinction must be made from the African American born in an urban setting with disparaging conditions unto African-American parents and the African American born to a more advantageous setting.

One only has to look as far as the studies of Jennifer Eberhardt, who explains:

how this prejudice may implicitly influence policy preferences and causal attributions, even in the face of the widespread belief that discrimination is an issue of the past. Race “influences us in unsuspected and undesired ways despite our wish to be egalitarian,” according to Eberhardt. Her research has shown how “subliminal priming”-flashing images of black males too quickly for conscious recognition-increases the speed with which test subjects recognize weapons and other images related to crime. Her work on lineups and sentencing suggests that “black defendants are punished in proportion to the blackness of their physical features.”

One must even know that a study at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania finds that large numbers of black students at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities are either financially well off or have parents who were born in foreign nations. Barack Obama does not live with the same stigma as African-Americans who are the descendants of American slaves.

Thistlethwaite’s statement comes from a misunderstanding. She removes the context, that of a revered African American, the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson, or Cornel West. She removes the context, that of a Black man born of a White woman from Kansas and an African from Kenya. In doing so she lumps together every class of African-American into a simplified unit and forms an argument that is as (if not more) erroneous and willfully ignorant as the Reverend believes Ferraro’s statement to be.

A shell game is being played and not one person is acknowledging the other side of the coin. There should be equal criticizing toward those who are irked by Ferraro’s statement. Those people are guilty of sweeping race under the rug.

Addendum:
If truth should offend Barack Obama, Reverend Thistlethwaite, Nicole Belle, or anyone else of the same ilk then here are some other true “offensive” remarks they may find equally disgusting:
Barack Obama was lucky that he had virtually no candidate to oppose him in his run for the United States Senate in 2004
Barack Obama did hard drugs while he was younger and he refuses to say how much and for how long
Barack Obama was chosen to be an important African American speaker at the 2004 Democratic convention immediately after the African-American Harold Ford was chosen to speak at the 2000 convention.

Addendum 2 (Interesting Reading):
"Roots" and Race - John Harvard's Journal