Sometimes, conservative principles are extolled in the most unlikely of places. Today I found it in The New Republic of all places, urging Obama supporters not to blame racism if he loses.
For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a “national conversation” on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a “level playing field,” something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.
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That Obama’s loss in the general election may have more to do with his performance than his melanin will be treated as something to acknowledge parenthetically at best. And that will be a dismissal of the very lesson Dr. King tried to teach us. [***] Yet, if we truly understand that King’s lesson was that black people are whites’ equals and not eternal poster children, then we must confront the fact that race is not the only reason Obama could lose.
The core of Conservatism is that each individual should be respected, honored, and judged as individuals – not as members of a race, not as different classes of humans, not as identities – just individual people. King may be horrified to know it (he was hardly a man of the right), but not since the Declaration of Independence has American Conservatism been captured so succinctly as it was in the “I Have a Dream” speech.
The comments on the story were predictably outraged that anyone would blame an Obama loss on anything other than race. It’s sad that so many on the left can’t see past the melanin, especially considering that far more people are voting for Obama because of his skin color than are voting against him because of it.
Let’s hope people take the advice to judge Obama on his own merits, and to do us non-Obama supporters the courtesy of trusting that our decisions are based on the same. Otherwise, win or lose, this election could be a horrible disaster for race relations instead of the transformative one it deserves to be.
The comments were pretty entertaining to read. To sum them up, it is nearly impossible for Obama to lose, given the 8 years of Bush/republicans in control and current economic/foreign policy situation, therefore, the only reason he could lose is racism. According to that logic, racism is already playing a part because Obama should be ahead in the polls by at least 15.