I found this response to my post from last week, “Fear of a Black President.” It almost speaks for itself.
The blogger is an anti-affirmative-action advocate, and he seems to believe that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid, not just me. That’s some small consolation, even if being characterized as potentially “nuts” is still unpleasant.
It is fine (probably unavoidable at some level) to be ideologically driven, but it is disingenuous to pretend that you have reason exclusively on your side and that everyone else is simply crazy, unprofessional, and undeserving of any public platform whatsoever.
The author particularly enjoys framing his dismissive responses to my posts in disciplinary terms. The problem seems to be as much about the inanity of anthropology as it is about my own individual inadequacies as a logical thinker. This two-pronged attack emerges in several of his posts about my posts.
I can appreciate the frustration of some white voters, people who feel like my aforementioned blog entry implies that they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t (when it comes to voting for Obama). But that wasn’t the point. Most African-Americans don’t seriously subscribe to the idea that Obama’s election is a set-up. If they did, they wouldn’t be disproportionately galvanizing to vote him into office (the way they also did for Democrats Kerry and Gore). However, I do think that such peculiar suspicions demonstrate how much America’s history of racism outstrips any simplistic assumption that we can completely transcend it with the wave of our collective — and politically corrected — hand.
(And must I secretly agree with his political position simply because I’ve offered it up for interrogation? That seems to be one premise that informs his attack on my piece. He also appears to imagine himself able to decide which American opinions are worthy of serious attention in the first place.)
Here’s the post:
Just When You Thought You’d Heard It All …
… regarding America’s racist white voters and how they’ll never elect a black president, here comes Penn Prof. John L. Jackson, Jr., the Chronicle of Higher Education’s anthroblogogist (as an anthropologist he “spends a lot of time,” he modestly tells us, “listening to people talk about their hopes and dreams, their complicated pasts, and uncharted futures”) to report that the increasing likelihood Obama will be elected is making some blacks “more — not less — cynical about how race operates in contemporary America.”
Really. I promise, I’m not making this up. Jackson continues:
“Some black folks are describing the potential inauguration of this country’s first black president (no offense, Bill) as the epitome of America’s traditional version of racial prejudice and scapegoating, not its ultimate repudiation. In other words, they see it as another reason to be skeptical of America’s newfound capacity to elect a person of color to the highest office in the land.”
His, or “some black folks’,” argument, comes down to this:
“As people follow roller-coastering stock prices and feeble attempts at an adequate governmental response, it seems ironic, at least to some, that America appears most likely to pass the executive baton to its first black presidential candidate just as the country teeters on the edge of economic collapse, which (the argument goes) will allow many Americans to blame “the black guy” for all of it, especially if things continue to get worse in 2009. “See what happens when you give a black person a country to run. They turn it into a version of Africa and its failed states.”
So, America is racist if it fails to elect Obama … and racist if it does.
You’ll have to read Jackson’s article to decide for yourself whether Jackson is nuts, the “some black folks” to whom he attentively listens are nuts, or both. In his defense (and in defense of The Chronicle’s otherwise odd decision to award him a regular platform), I suppose it could be said that the views he expresses tarnish the reputation of anthropological insight only marginally more than those expressed in his other columns that we’ve encountered here, here, here, and here.
To read more, go to: http://www.discriminations.us/
