Obama: Nader seeking attention with talk of 'white guilt'

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said. "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson

When asked if Obama does try to "talk white," Nader replied, "Of course." He also said that Obama doesn't want to appear to be "another politically threatening African-American politician."

"He wants to appeal to white guilt," Nader said. "You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up."

Obama said Nader hadn't been paying attention because he has discussed predatory lending, housing foreclosures and similar economic issues throughout his campaign.

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Sigh.

Back when I was teaching high school, a white student asked me during a class discussion why it was socially acceptable for black comedians to make fun of white people but not the reverse. I started off explaining how white culture is synonymous with mainstream culture in the US, and it's always acceptable to make fun of mainstream culture. But I went on to explain the extraordinarily racist history of entertainment in America, especially when it comes to comedy: for decades and decades, blacks were portrayed as the butt of all kinds of offensive humor, humor that served to perpetuate very negative black stereotypes, lazy, lecherous, stupid, criminal, and on and on. I explained that, even though we've come a long way since the overt racism of nineteenth century entertainment, you can still see strands of the same stereotypes, the same humor targeting African-Americans, in today's mass media. In short, I lectured, mainstream American entertainment hasn't recovered from its historical racism. And that's why it is so taboo for white comedians to make fun of black people.

Besides, when a black comedian makes fun of white people, once it's all said and done, at the end of the day, white people still run everything in the US. It's like, so what? Make fun of white people. We are in no way threatened by that. Not so in the reverse: white comedians making fun of black people tap into pre-existing racist cultural strains, and reinforce them, thereby promoting racism.

My African-American and Hispanic students, as well as most of my white students, bought the argument. A few of my white kids, however, were outraged. One of them behaved as though she hadn't heard a word I said: "In my family we believe in equality, and it's not fair for black people to make fun of white people when we can't make fun of them!" As if my family didn't believe in equality. To these kids, it was as though history began last week.

Another of them wouldn't shut up, so we took it out in the hall: she said, "you're trying to act like you're not white!!!" She was so offended, coming as she did from a part of town with an active chapter of the Klan, that she later tried to get me fired, accusing me of telling students which drugs they should take. Fortunately, the principal didn't buy it. She was a single mother a year later. Figures.

The point is that it is impossible for me to act like I'm not white, and it was goddamned rude of her to play such a stupid-ass race card. Same here with Nader.

Obama may very well be trying to "talk white," but "white" is the language of American mainstream culture. Everybody to some extent has to "talk white" in order to succeed in mainstream America. Calling Obama out in this way is bullshit. What's worse is that implicit in Nader's words is a judgment on how Obama should express his ethnicity. That is, Nader is telling Obama how he ought to be black.

I wouldn't necessarily call such a statement racist, but, like the student who told me I was acting like I'm not white, I would call it fucking rude. Stupid, too. Everyone's an individual; everyone has an individual relationship with his or her own ethnicity. It's one thing to observe that a person is black or white, one thing to talk about how races interact with each other, one thing to look at generalities in how different groups behave, or dress, or speak, or what their values are. But it's quite another to use such observations as a straitjacketing attack.

It's wrong when people say Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn't black simply because his politics differ from those of most black people--he is black, has lived the black experience, has black skin, a black family. But he is not to be reduced simply to his ethnicity. He is an individual. It is likewise wrong to criticize Eminem and other white rappers as black wannabes: Marshall Mathers is white, yes, but his individual, personal cultural experiences have made him the man that he is, with his feet in two cultural worlds.

I mean, it's just as absurd to accuse Lebanese-American Ralph Nader of not being Arab enough, of talking white.

Nader needs to stick to what he does best: trumpeting the issues that the Democrats, who are owned by corporations, ignore. All this pointless attack on Obama does is make it more difficult for me to justify my not voting for him. Hopefully, this ill-conceived "not black enough" gambit is a one-timer. No good can come from continuing along these lines.

(Thanks to my buddy Reuben for the heads up on this.)

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