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NO HE CAN'T!
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A BLACK WOMEN EDUCATOR
SPEAKS OUT ON OBAMA’S ELECTION |
by Dr. Anne Wortham, Guest Editorialist
to The Insider
ellow Americans: Please know: I am black; I
grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack
Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president.
Most importantly, I am not
race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that
I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not
require a black president to love the ideal of America.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Anne Wortham, a native of Jackson,
Tennessee, is Associate Professor of Sociology at
Illinois State University where she has taught since
1991. Tenured since 1994, she teaches courses in
History of Sociological Thought and Social
Stratification; her scholarship interests are the
sociology of culture, the history of ideas, and
American political culture. She holds a B.S. degree
from Tuskegee University and PhD from Boston
College. Prior to entering graduate school in 1977,
she was a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1963-1965, and
for the next twelve years worked as an editorial
researcher for such media organizations as Esquire
magazine, NBC News’ "Huntley-Brinkley Report," ABC
Radio News, and King Features Syndicate.
Dr. Wortham has taught at Wellesley
College, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of
Government, where she was a John M. Olin Foundation
Faculty Fellow, and Washington and Lee University.
She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Hoover
Institution at Stanford University.
She is author of The Other Side of
Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race
Consciousness (1981) and numerous articles on civil
rights policy, multiculturalism and Afrocentrism in
education, the politics of victimhood, the melting
pot ideal, and American culture. She has contributed
to several anthologies, including American
Sociological Association Presidential Volume on
Public Policy 1990 (1993), Opposing Viewpoints:
Interracial America, Character and Identity:
Sociological Foundations of Literary and Historical
Perspectives (2000). The transcript of her two-hour
conversation with Bill Moyers in his 1988 public
television documentary series, "A World of Ideas,"
has been published in his book, A World of Ideas.
Dr. Wortham is currently developing
an anthology of her essays on individualism,
conducting research for a monograph on the social
and cultural factors that explain acts of
reconciliation among Civil War combatants at
Appomattox, and completing a monograph on Booker T.
Washington’s contribution to the cultural refinement
movement of late nineteenth-century America.
Her biography has been selected to
appear in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Higher
Education, and Who’s Who Of American Women.
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I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel
no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with
joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions
and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I
know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival, -
all that I know about the history of the United States of
America, all that I know about American race relations, and all
that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to
deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to
America.
Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my
certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the
road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would
have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the
success of a human life.
I would have to evade your rejection of the
slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine
depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94
percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man
because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play
the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared
"progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look
like them.
I would have to wipe my mind clean of all
that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught
Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration, -
political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard
University’s Kennedy School of Government.
I would have to believe that "fairness" is
the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who
asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new
service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have
to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes
from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can
will it into existence by the use of government force. I would
have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the
masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the
generators of wealth.
Finally, Americans, I would have to erase
from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying,
cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting
"Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all
the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists,
editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that
capitalism is dead - and no one, including especially Alan
Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular
version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to
replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything
remotely equivalent to capitalism.
So you have made history, Americans. You and
your children have elected a black man to the office of the
president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world.
The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and that
Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very
happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last
gotten their Kennedy look-a-like.
The self-righteous welfare statists in the
suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected
a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural
radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast
yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an
individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man
who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do
Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly
traded your freedom and mine, - what little there is left, - for
the chance to feel good.
There is nothing in me that can share your
happy obliviousness.
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Editor’s Note: On February 18th of this
year, Eric Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general and
a recent appointee of President Obama, the "Great Uniter" took
the opportunity of a speech to Justice Department employees to
lambast America as a "nation of cowards" for not speaking out
more on issues of race.
Holder added, "if we are to make progress in
this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and
tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about
the racial matters that continue to divide us."
Perhaps it should be pointed out to Mr.
Holder that the hypersensitivity that exists in this country on
the issue of race is not a result of cowardice — but extreme
caution brought on by members of his own political party more or
less continuously playing the "race card" whenever they feel it
can bring them political advantage or whenever they can use it
to counter any argument critical of their agenda that even
remotely concerns blacks.
Just this week, according to an AP report,
"U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., was especially critical of
southern Republican governors who might reject stimulus funds,
calling such a move "slap in the face of African-Americans." In
other words - if you disagree with the socialist stimulus bill
you are a racist; you are against blacks.
You see, Eric, implying racism is always
easier than having to work up a good counter-argument.
Nevertheless, we accept Eric Holder’s
challenge. We will try hard not to be cowardly and as a first
step we publish Dr. Anne Wortham’s excellent and controversial
essay illustrating a black female educator’s very different
perspective on the Obama election. Those who would cry racism as
a result of us daring to publish an article critical of
President Obama may send their complaints direct to Eric Holder.
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