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Racial triumphalism is socially retrogressive

Jul 11, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
“You are a Barack Obama supporter,” my friend told me. “But in the SN online edition one guy in the comments field wrote the opposite. He said that you liked nothing black.”

“You mean that area where people anonymously write stuff?” I asked. “I never pay attention to that. Mostly cranks hang out there, masked people with a grudge getting a chance to post weird things they couldn’t normally get into print.

“There are also those simple people who think we are discussing the rather obvious idea of whether Senator Obama is a black man. They can’t read between the lines.

“In fact, this debate is about how some racialists are attempting to misuse the senator’s mixed racial heritage to promote black triumphalism. To me, any kind of racial triumphalism is socially retrogressive,” I said.

“Well, you know some people cannot see past their skin colour,” my friend advised. “In the SN, people are boasting about Obama’s race.

Almost none of them will discuss his policies; they don’t care to examine that. What do you think that SN cartoon was about? It didn’t endorse Obama’s ability to lead the free world; it gloated about his race.”

“My guess is that is why I am under attack,” I said. “I want to move Obama beyond race and they want to keep him there to serve their own narrow-minded purposes.

There will always be a few misguided people who see everything by skin colour,” I added. “They’ve got nothing else going for them. But these days especially, they don’t count for much.

Obama is more than just a black man. Racial triumphalism is beneath the guy. See how he disowned the black ethnocentric Rev. Wright and resigned from his Church because of race-based statements?

He can’t be held responsible for foolish or bigoted people. Black racists are doing the senator no favours; they are the bane of his campaign.”

And truthfully, I am beginning to worry. Obama, my candidate of choice, cannot win the presidential election without the White, Jewish or Hispanic vote and if stupid racialists continue to bang the drums of triumphalism, his opponents will waste no time linking him to them.

They will use these racial reprobates to paint a picture of the man that is the complete opposite of who he is. And the world will lose a kind of leader it so desperately needs right now.
Justin de Freitas

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