VDH

Good column entitled "I No Longer Quite Believe..."

excerpt:

I no longer believe . . .

…that there will be much progress on race relations under Obama. Indeed, I fear the very opposite will occur.

Almost every major speech is predicated on his race, and his father’s always changing stance on religion. In 2011 will we still hear of his father and his family with Muslim connections?

Being non-racist is judging by race

We are told not to believe what Justice Sotomayor on several occasions said and published—this is now something called “misspeak”. What was fascinating about her Berkeley speech was not just her now serial avowal that race and gender make one a better or worse judge. Two equally frightening facts emerged. She published these views in a periodical called La Raza Law Journal (“The Race’s” Law Journal). In her text, she referenced herself as a Latina or invoked Latina/Latino, according to my count, some 38 times. (I once told a student that if she did not stop prefacing every classroom remark about classical literature with “As a Latina…” I would answer back with the preface “As a white guy…”).

A promised postracial President nominated a justice who seems not just to be race-obsessed, but race-obsessed to the degree it governs her judicial philosophy. Woe to be a member of what she called “the old boy network” when you go into her chambers against a “Latina”. By her own admission, the Latina is the wiser party, based on her superior ‘life experiences.”

No progress, no nothing?

In this new racialist world, no one would ever remember that we have not had a white male Secretary of State—the world’s most powerful diplomat—in thirteen years— since the rather mediocre Warren Christopher stepped down in January 1997. There is rarely appreciation of change and what has transpired, only more anger at what supposedly must happen in the future. To read Sotomayor’s speeches, and I have now read about 5 of them, is to be subjected to a litany of statistics—always the theme being “this many judges are Hispanic, this is our percentage of the population, presto, this is what we must have…”

We are all percentages points now

There is rarely either any complexity, or appreciation of the irony to race. With between 12-20 million illegal aliens now living in the United States—the vast majority recent arrivals from Third World countries—are we to be shamed that we do not have politicians, Supreme Court justices, and professors in the proper percentages to reflect these new populations? Think of it—someone crosses the border illegally, and immediately becomes a percentage-point argument that a distant elite with a Spanish-surname is entitled to preferential treatment? (I ignore the fact Sotomayor’s racial percentages were once used by white racialists to show that minorities were inordinately responsible for violent crime in numbers far above their presence in the general population. It is unwise to quantify every aspect of the United States by racial percentages.)

The President himself never pauses and examines the irony of a half-African, half-white prep schooled person, lecturing the world on the African-American civil rights experience—with which by heritage and chronology he has had no experience.