Ringside Politics With A Punch

Perhaps President Obama’s defeat in 2012 would be the strongest sign America was post-racial. It certainly would be that the white Left might have transcended race.

Me, I got it from the get-go, what with the incessant effusive eruptions over the now-president’s oratory. By any meaningful measure, Obama’s speechifying was being obviously and thoroughly over-estimated. It typically vacillates between the shallow and mundane. See Keith Olbermann’s favorite political movie, “Face in the Crowd,” on the depth of candidates invoking change—as close to empty as shallow can be. A sample of the mundane comes from the president’s presentation before the Olympic Committee in Copenhagen. Evidently the members were to select Chicago because, among other trenchant reasons, the city celebrates humanity’s differences and commonalities. I’m not sure that platitude would place in a junior high, What America Means to Me essay contest.

The Left had an early chance to get it when Obama’s inaugural address sent fissures through his oracular edifice. The many breathless plans to memorialize the speech in marble or print it alongside Lincoln’s best subsided quickly. Even the complete zealots must have felt that “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America” and “I am here to say our challenges are real” would not measure up to the first president from Illinois. Nonetheless, the cracks went unnoticed.

The gasp in Oslo at the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize—part “You must be kidding,” part “What the hell?”—told me people are starting to get that many are overboard over our president. A chief reason he makes the white Left weak in the knees and soft in the head is a condition I call “afrophilia,” the default white adoration of anything black. Afrophilia first infected the body politic with the ‘60s Radical Chic crush on the Black Panthers. But in the 1990s it reached pandemic proportions among the Che Chic, the foundation of Obama’s white Left support.

More offensive than oppressive, afrophilia is far overshadowed by hateful racist attitudes of whites towards blacks. Even so, this paternalistic racism should be exposed. As surely as virulent racism does, it keeps whites from passing the racial final exam James Baldwin believed America never could—taking black people as people.

African Americans are familiar with afrophilia. The reporter Juan Williams says he knows what it’s like to be patronized by whites. In the film The Black List, Chris Rock notes that white treatment of black people is “off one way or the other.” The short stories in Langston Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks skewer afrophilia. But to understand best how it fuels the Caucasian worship of the president—an idolatry I dub “Obamatry”—I let Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “The ‘Pet Negro’ System” guide me. Its core ideas go far in explaining the racism in Obamatry, though the author had other points to make with her piece.

PROPOSITION

That Our President is the White Left’s Pet Negro

Exhibit A:

Hurston writes, “Now it says here, ‘And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and to cherish, and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight.’” The near-Messianic qualities attached by the white Left to Obama fit this description perfectly. The immediate over-valuing of his speeches in only one example. Historian Michael Bechloss gushed that Barack by far had the highest I.Q. of any president, but without knowing the number. Arianna Huffington pronounced as “genius” the president’s view that every country was exceptional, not just America. Can the improved Hamlet be long in coming?

The wrath of the Barackolytes, the obedient practitioners of Obamatry, when their Lord is criticized offers further evidence that Barack is perfect in his followers’ sight. Hissing, damning Lefties shamefully trying to silence those who do not believe beset the contemporary political landscape, as many a holiday table can testify. To the Barackolytes, criticizing the president is blasphemy, not democratic discourse; sacrilege, not argument. “It’s a good thing my mother isn’t here. She would shoot you,” a friend responded to a criticism I made.

For He is perfect in their sight.  

Exhibit B:

Senator Joseph Biden’s judgment that Barack was our first clean, articulate black presidential candidate. Now, I have shaken hands with both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson: I did not have to wash afterwards; a gay man at Fashion Week would have envied their hygiene. Biden also has shaken their hands, not incidentally. Further, no one finds either reverend inarticulate. Wrong, phony, insufferable—these charges came early and come often, surely. But unable to clearly and powerfully make their points? Surely not.

God love him. As only Shoot From the Lip can, Joe was telling the embarrassing truth without knowing. Hurston explains, through the white character Colonel Cary and his Pet Negro, John Harper. John is different from all other blacks, the exemption among his race. Literally. “He [Colonel Cary] likes John and so considers him as white inside as anyone else.” Race is complicated—our first black president (Clinton) was white; our first black president is white. Regardless of the wrinkles, to those yet unable to see black people as people, a white black pet serves just fine.  

Exhibit C:

Thank you Jeanine Garafolo on the Tea Partyers. Calling the president’s critics racist is another classic symptom of the Pet Negro afrophilia behind white Obamatry, As Hurston writes: “…many friends of the Negro up North actually take offense if you don’t tell them a tale of suffering and horror…launch into atrocities amidst murmurs of sympathy.” Otherwise, one is apt to “…get an injured, and sometimes a malicious, look.” Blacks must be the victim the white Left needs for its role as defender. Every owner is a protector, after all. Treating African Americans otherwise—as fallible equals subject to criticism, for example—means giving up the pet project.

Q.E.D. Our president is the white Left’s Pet Negro,

Pets are not people too. Obama’s defeat in 2012 could be a sign America finally is post-racial; enough of his white supporters are afrophiliacs. They would have passed Baldwin’s test. As lagniappe, Obama would have fulfilled his promise of ushering in a post-racial nation. Barackolytes need not worry over such a fate for their idol: the president should embrace trading defeat for this outcome; after all, he often calls for self-sacrifice.