Remember: ‘Ra-a-a-cism’ is spelled with three A’s

 
I love the reasoning.

Barack Obama is half-white, his skin a sort of café-au-lait shade. He is African-American only in one sense: his father was African, his mother was American. (He has African-American ancestry, but no African-American ancestors.) He grew up in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii. He was raised by his white grandparents, and mentored and sponsored, in college and in his political career, by white liberals. He has to do a transparent put-on of droppin’ his G’s to even unconvincingly approach ‘sounding black’.

Herman Cain was born in Georgia, of two black parents, his complexion almost shiny-black. His parents were domestic workers, and he made it through college by scholarships and his own labor, before going on to become a stupendous success in every endeavor he ever attempted. He speaks with the cadences and accents of the black people who lived and worked around me when I was growing up. Barack Obama has to resort to mimicry even to try to ‘sound black’; Herman Cain, so far as I can tell, has never so much as made the attempt to ‘sound white’.

And yet, liberals consider Herman Cain to not be ‘authentically’ black … and conservative support for Cain is supposed to be a camouflage for conservatives’ racism in opposing a black President.

Hmm. Conservatives support a black candidate who agrees with their politics, against a black office-holder who disagrees with their politics. Wait: in the Florida polls, conservatives supported a black candidate who agreed with their politics, against a roster of white candidates who weren’t sufficiently convincing that they supported conservatives’ politics.

That makes it sound as if, in a political contest, a certain set of prospective voters is throwing its support behind a candidate because of — gasp — his politics.

Oh, the horror.