We Have Come a Long Way or Have We?

This past Election Day who were more racist, white men or black men? Why was it more acceptable for blacks to pick a president based on race than it was for whites? Ninety five percent of black voters voted for Obama while only 55 percent of whites voted for McCain. Race appears to have mattered more for blacks than it did whites. Have we really come a long way? Or was it race politics as usual?

If race truly didn’t matter no one would have called a son of a black African and a white mother black. That was the first way race was used in this past election. Obama is not the descendant of American slaves. He is as white as he is black. Culturally, he shares more with white Americans. Raised by his white relatives he attended Ivory League schools. He is as WASP as the power brokers who supported his nomination over Hilary Clinton who won the majority of Democratic votes in the primaries. I wonder what would have happened if Obama’s chief opponent for the nomination had been a white man?

Only after the election did Obama speak the truth. When answering the question about what kind of dog he was going to get for his daughters, Obama referred to himself as a “mutt.” Like my own children he is an European African American who does not share the same heritage as the descendants of American slaves who suffered a few hundred years of oppression.