Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Monday, August 04, 2008 3:06:23 PM
The issue of race in American politics is most divisive among those who are least able to advance beyond its cynical clutches. For the past three decades our public education system has assured our children that we're inherently racist, that, in contrast to the vision of the Rev. Martin Luther King, skin color matters, specifically, that it tells us something important about a person's values and character.
There's an important difference between stating that racism exists--which it surely dues--and adamantly insisting that a person's skin color or ethnicity ought not matter. In an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal, Juan Williams of Fox News, provides the historical analyses and contemporary polling that demonstrates, for anyone not aware of it, that racial prejudice remains a problem in America.
What he fails to discuss is that the left has built a labyrinthine industry on race and ethnicity, which is predicated on the specious notion that we're an innately racist nation, and that the altar of diversity and multiculturalism is itself responsible for erecting walls of division among the races. Indeed, by insidiously working its way into our educational system, our workplace, and even our homes, and by inculcating us with its gospel of guilt, liberalism has succeeded in perpetuating our racial disharmonies rather than dispelling them.
The racial quota system, whether in academia or in corporate America, makes a perversion of real equal opportunity with its unjust demands that entrance requirements and hiring practices ensure that colleges and workplaces 'look like America' in its racial complexion. The result is that academic standards and hiring criteria have been gamed to fit the mandate, which means minorities are insulted by having a special--read, lower--set of standards. The list of inequities is as endless as is its message is vile, which is that minorities can't compete with Caucasians unless the system is rigged in their favor.
If Williams and those of good faith were truly concerned with minority politics, they would begin by insisting that we exclude race from the list of characteristics of political candidates, that Mr. Obama's values, his recommended policies, and his vision for America are and ought to be distinct from his race. Indeed, when we fail to treat him as we would anyone else, be he of Caucasian or Asian descent, we play into the divisive fiction that race matters, that it tells us something about character, when, in fact, it doesn't and it can't.
But when Williams talks about "white votes" and "black votes," and argues that Obama must tout the values of mainstream "whites" to capture the "independent white vote," he's merely acquitting the left's myth that an integral part of a person's values is his race. That's not only unhelpful, it's a reminder of exactly how little we've progressed since Dr. King's fiery speeches in which he said he dreamed of the day when people judged one another not on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.