Reverse Racism

My daughter (the hippie-chick-one) has an Obama bumper sticker planted on her car. I can be happy about one part of that and slightly less happy about another aspect of the bumper-sticker politicking.

I’d like to think that she is truly as color-blind as anyone can be – considering she spent her formative years in the south where rebel flags are flown without shame (a house less than a mile from me now, still has one flying from the front porch!) An aside – I’ve actually begun praying for the man who lives there. I saw him sitting on his porch one morning and he didn’t look happy. I can’t imagine carrying so much anger or hate that you’d want to fly a rebel flag. So I simply ask God to bless him when I pass his house.

I was NOT raised in a racism-free home. I don’t think my father had any overt animosity towards African-Americans; he was raised during a time when they “knew their place”. My mother would occasionally use the “N” word. My father preferred the term “colored.” Somehow I came away from that upbringing with about as neutral a feeling as I guess is possible.

We raised our children with the idea that race was not an issue. I know it is and can be but we didn’t know how else to teach them except that, color doesn’t matter.
So bless her, I’d like to think at least part of my daughter’s blithely accepting Obama as a candidate is based on that.

I wonder how many other well-meaning liberals will be doing the same thing in a form of reverse racism. They will look past his politics, his lack of high-level experience and vote for him simply because he is black. Thinking that somehow this symbolic gesture will undo generations of racism and racial guilt and show everybody how open and progressive they really are. “I voted for a black man. See what an open-minded person I am!”

In much the same way as pollsters often find out – people say one thing about their votes but often do something else. I think this whole thing will balance or cancel itself out; i.e. some people will say they voted for Obama but really won’t or can’t and others will say they voted for the other guy but when they punched their very own little hanging chad, it was for Obama.

As for me I’m undecided. Not in the way you might think though. As long as Obama maintains certain positions, I could not bring myself to vote for him. But on the other hand, I'm not ready to pull the lever or punch the chad for McCain. I think he is going to lose and in the process may hurt the GOP for a long time.