Colorblind or Just Blind?
- 05.09.2008 - 4:34 PMAs Abe noted earlier, today Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post lacerates Hillary Clinton for her statement in USA Today that Barack Obama’s coalition among “hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Clinton is, according to Robinson, playing the race card again. And he writes this:
How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.
Come again? Democrats believe in a “colorblind America”? If that’s the case, then how would Robinson explain why the Democratic Party has been leading the charge for race-based quotas and set-asides over the years? That they promote justices who want to take race into account in their judicial rulings? Just how is it that liberals count by race and reward points by race and reduce as many issues as they can to race–yet insist all the while that they believe in a colorblind society? And while we’re at it: how does Robinson explain the fact that “civil rights” activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who over the years have done so much to create, exploit, and fuel racial tensions in this nation (including Sharpton’s despicable role in the Tawana Brawley case), find a comfortable home in the Democratic Party?
One may agree or disagree with using race as a consideration in, say, college admissions. Reasonable people can debate what role, if any, race should play in such matters. (I side with Professor Alexander Bickel, who in The Morality of Consent wrote, “[A] racial quota derogates the human dignity and individuality of all to whom it is applied; it is invidious in principle as well as in practice… The history of the racial quota is a history of subjugation, not beneficence…. a quota is a divider of society, a creator of castes, and it is all the worse for its racial base, especially in a society desperately striving for an equality that will make race irrelevant.”) But whatever those who advocate such positions are promoting, it is not a colorblind America. It is, in fact, the very opposite. And surely Eugene Robinson must, on some level, know it. How silly of him to claim what is so clearly not true.
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May 9th, 2008 at 11:00 PM
Thank you for the most lucid analysis I’ve seen on the hypocrisy of the Left on the race issue. The Right is where one finds the like of Lincoln, and Ward Connerly, fighting for equality and a color-blind culture, holding us to faithful pursuit of our ideals. If there is racism still present in our country it exists explicitly in the Democratic Party, where blacks have been exploited and degraded.
May 10th, 2008 at 3:45 AM
Silly is as silly does. Robinson is campaigning for Obama, after all. What is he supposed to do? Tell the truth about his fatuous candidate? The race card is the only trump Obama has. This primary has been about race since day one, and Robinson is just displaying the lack of principles that all of Obama’s reasonably informed supporters share.