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8/28/2008
Wigderson says: Garvey may be on to something about Obama
Left-wing gadfly and former candidate for governor Ed Garvey tells us we’re all on trial. It seems Senator Barack Obama is an African American, with the corresponding skin color to match.
Bill Dixon and I joined Bishop Desmond Tutu outside the South African embassy in a march for an end to Apartheid. It was a thrill. Tutu would gently prod this country to deal with race starting with slavery. We didn't follow his advice. Wish we had but we have a chance now. We must call on the people of this country to join MLK, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and deal with the fact that Barack is black.Talk about it, write about it, refuse to accept the notion that white Americans in the 21st Century won't vote for a black American. I think Garvey may indeed be on to something. After all, to the untrained eye Senator Obama certainly looks black. And there have been so many comments about his “groundbreaking” and even “post-racial” campaign for president that, yes, yes, I believe Obama is an African American.
This would normally be thought a good thing, that an African American was able to achieve so many victories in the Democratic primaries by reaching out to white voters. Obama even won Wisconsin, Garvey’s home state. So where’s the problem? Seems the problem is a ten-year-old girl who is a fan of Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife.
Say what you will but that same ten-year-old is watching our every move. If white people tell her that Barack is better in every way but one, it may doom her generation. We are on trial. When she heard Michelle Obama she did not think of race. She made the old guy next to her feel a surge of hope. Now, what white person is going to tell a ten-year-old that Senator Obama is better (than whom? All white people? Ed Garvey? Hillary Clinton?) “in every way but one?” Certainly no Republican voter is going to offer such a critique. After all, we have a whole list of Senator Obama’s failings from his inexperience to his naiveté on foreign affairs to his ties to shady characters from Illinois. And we would explain to that ten-year-old girl that the senator is an extremely flawed candidate for president and that we happily rejected the white version (with more experience) in 1972.
We would then wonder why a ten-year-old even cares.
On the Democratic side they’re more used to the politicized child, ever since Amy Carter offered her father words of wisdom on nuclear proliferation. Garvey himself brags that the very first book his parents gave him was Hiroshima by John Hersey. My parents gave me Batman comic books.
But should this precocious child as described by Garvey become the judge, jury, and executioner, surely it is the Democratic voter in the dock. After all, they would be more inclined to believe the same as Obama. Yet election day in the Democratic primaries often led to Obama receiving less actual votes than pollsters predicted. Perhaps Democratic voters were just uncomfortable in admitting they did not want an African American president. Perhaps the party of Robert Byrd, Jim Crow and Orville Faubus hasn’t quite caught up to the 21st century. Or perhaps if the Democrats could move beyond race and nominate someone actually qualified to be president, the issue of a candidate’s skin color wouldn’t weigh so heavily on that poor child’s mind.
James Wigderson blogs regularly at Wigderson Library & Pub.
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| 2009 |
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