Why?
Because of my response to the following story:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34267_Disgusting_Racist_of_the_Day
Obama is black.
Get over it.
This picture is perfectly appropriate. The fact that his race contributes to its effectiveness as satire does not make it a negative statement about Obama as a black man or black people in general.
Talking about race and using race in satire is NOT an endorsement of racial hatred.
To pretend otherwise is to suggest that blacks and other racial and ethnic groups are endangered species in need of special protection from reminders of their superficial differences.
Were Obama a white man with red hair then dressing him up to look like Carrot Top or Ronald McDonald would be perfectly appropriate. This image is no less appropriate.
This response was given a -4 and my account was removed.
I've been hearing things on other blogs about Charles going down the Andrew Sullivan path. Until now I didn't give those statements much credence.
I remain baffled as to why my honest assessment would be so far beyond the pale as to warrant ostracism.
I guess maybe I'm supposed to be a racist. That is the most common accusation levied against someone who dares not toe the line and reflexively respond to anything that touches upon race with the designated genuflections and obeisance.
I refuse to pretend that being a member of a particular race makes someone special or deserving of different treatment than someone of another race. If this is what it means to be a racist then sue me.
Not only that, but I don't even believe in the idea of race in the first place. Race is a social construct, nothing more. There are of course distinctive characteristics that some people share, but the significance that is attached to these characteristics is completely arbitrary and manufactured.
Some of your lefties try to pretend that sexual differences a social construct. They claim that men and women have the same psychological make-up at birth, and that the behavioral differences that can be observed are the result of social conditioning. They are mostly mistaken when it comes to sexual differences, but that doesn't mean that the concept of groups as social constructs is invalid. It is quite valid when applied to the issue of race.
Racial distinctions and differences are nothing more than an extended version of the same principles of inheritance that are at work within a family. A person with brown eyes tends to have parents with brown eyes. A person whose ancestors hail from a certain part of the world is likely to have inherited physical features that are common among the people there.
What we call race is an accident of genetic drift resulting from geographic isolation created when homo sapiens migrated out of Africa thousands of years ago. The differences we identify as racial distinctions have no more biological significance than differences in hair or eye color. The significances we attach to skin color and other distinctions are purely a social construct, nothing more.
There is only one race, the human race.
In the future, as people in developed societies who belong to different racial groups continue to intermarry, the entire concept of race will slowly fade away. What are currently seen as racial characteristics will be seen as ordinary variations just as differences in hair or eye color are seen today. This has already happened at least once before. The reason why differences in hair and eye color are seen as ordinary among caucasians is because the population of Europe is the result of an homogenization of what were previously distinct groups. This is even more true in the US and other places where Europeans have migrated to.
The same thing will happen with what are currently seen as distinct races within the varied populations living in the US and other immigrant rich areas.
I think that Warren Beatty put it best in Bullworth when he said "Everybody's gonna keep fucking everybody till we're all the same color." Beatty is a lefty, but even lefties are right every once in a while.
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