"Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same.
What are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?"
First, when did Obama ever once even intimate that we should vote for him because of, or because we can look beyond, the hue of his skin? Honestly, I would really like to see it. Obama is interesting and unique specifically because he is making race a non-issue (or at least tried to until Hillarah made it one).Second--though quite obviously regrettably--pigmentation can, and does, matter. Prejudices and social norms don't disappear with a stroke of a pen, or a few books, or a DNA sequencing over the course of a few decades when faced with combating thousands of years of human society. And that skin color is part of who the man is--like it or not, Hitchens. It is not part of who he is innately, of course, but part of his life experiences in how society treated him every goddamm day of his life. To not be happy (or at least interested) that he is, quite realistically, on the verge of becoming the very symbol of America's mainstream is a trifle bit unfair of a request.
