{"id":24291,"date":"2007-01-22T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T06:05:33","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-19T06:05:33","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T06:05:33","slug":"salon_barack_obama_is_not_black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2007\/01\/22\/salon_barack_obama_is_not_black\/","title":{"rendered":"Salon: Barack Obama Is Not Black"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

RUSH: I want to give you some excerpts from this piece at Salon.com<\/a> by Deborah J. Dickerson: “Colorblind: Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race — if he were actually black.” She starts by saying: “I am confident that I have held out longer than any other pundit to weigh in on both the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and the question of whether race will trump gender as America looks toward election 2008.” It doesn\u2019t matter. The 2008 is the Guilt Election. Make no mistake about it. “I had irritably avoided columnizing on these crucial topics … for several, somewhat unorthodox, reasons. First, because the Clinton-Obama stand-off has been more than well-covered — and in an overly simplistic, insubstantial, annoyingly celebritized way. (Horrors, Obama smokes! But isn\u2019t he hot in his swim trunks?) I was waiting for the discussion to get serious and, at last, it has. <\/line><\/a>“Finally, we\u2019re asking the tough questions; instead of just crowing that he\u2019s raised $20 million, we\u2019re starting to wonder where it came from and what will be asked for in return for that much sugar. Why is the supposedly eco-friendly New Age senator supporting coal, however liquefied, as a way to wean ourselves off foreign oil?” By the way, make a note. This is beginning to irritate me, the Democrats and reducing our dependence on foreign oil and the domestic policies they enact are going to ensure that our dependence on foreign oil will only increase. Anyway, “I had also held off from writing about Obama because the tsunami of attention and adulation this son of a Kenyan goat herder has had to navigate is just too much, too soon. One would think learning to be a senator might keep a person occupied for a while.” Anyway… “For me, it was a trick question in a game I refused to play. <\/line>“Since the issue was always framed as a battle between gender and race (read: non-whiteness — the question is moot when all the players are white), I didn\u2019t have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn\u2019t black. ‘Black,\u2019 in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent … are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can\u2019t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won\u2019t bother to make the distinction. They\u2019re both ‘black\u2019 as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term. We know a great deal about black people. <\/line><\/p>\n

“We know next to nothing about immigrants of African descent… Whites, on the other hand…” and this is the key. “Whites, on the other hand, are engaged in a paroxysm of self-congratulation; [Barack] is the equivalent of [your] ‘black friend.\u2019 Swooning over nice, safe Obama means you aren\u2019t a racist. I honestly can\u2019t look without feeling pity, and indeed mercy, at whites\u2019 need for absolution. Well, Deborah, it\u2019s all about collective guilt permeating our society. “For all our sakes, it seemed (again) best not to point out the obvious: You\u2019re not embracing a black man, a descendant of slaves. You\u2019re replacing the black man with an immigrant of recent African descent of whom you can approve without feeling either guilty or frightened. If he were Ronald Washington from Detroit, even with the same r?sum?, he wouldn\u2019t be getting this kind of love. <\/line>Washington would have to earn it, not just show promise of it, and even then whites would remain wary…. Since [Obama] had no part in our racial history, he is free of it. And once he\u2019s opened the door to even an awkward embrace of candidates of color for the highest offices, the door will stay open. A side door, but an open door. Yet until Obama survives the scourging he\u2019s about to receive from Hillary Clinton (God help him if he really did lie about his Muslim background) and the electoral process, no candidate of color will ever be taken seriously,” until he survives this. “Clinton isn\u2019t about to leave the stage in the name of racial progress, and the pundit class has only just begun to take apart the senator\u2019s record, associates and bank accounts. Still, this is progress. A non-black on the down low about his non-blackness is about to get what blacks have always asked for: to be judged on his merits. So let\u2019s all just pretend that we\u2019ve really overcome.” <\/line>Well! Obviously there\u2019s some disquietness out there among some in the media that Obama is getting all this adulation and praise for having crossed the barrier when he has not. It\u2019s her words that I just read to you. He\u2019s not black. I haven\u2019t been writing about first black candidate, because he\u2019s not black. Which, again, I swear I\u2019m losing my ability to know. Obama is not black, but Bill Clinton was “the first black president,” and at the same time, Clarence Thomas and Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell and Condoleezza Rice are not black, and now Salon says Obama isn\u2019t black. So you see, black is just like feminism in a sense. It\u2019s not about skin color or sex; it\u2019s about liberalism and how best to advance it. That\u2019s why Obama isn\u2019t black. He doesn\u2019t fit the template, just doesn\u2019t fit. <\/line><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: I want to give you some excerpts from this piece at Salon.com by Deborah J. Dickerson: “Colorblind: Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race — if he were actually black.” She starts by saying: “I am confident that I have held out longer than any other pundit to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nSalon: Barack Obama Is Not Black - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2007\/01\/22\/salon_barack_obama_is_not_black\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Salon: Barack Obama Is Not Black - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: I want to give you some excerpts from this piece at Salon.com by Deborah J. 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