There is a clear pattern emerging from the Clinton campaign, but it's not the one Hillary Clinton wished to suggest.
Hillary's recent words underline a clear pattern in the way both the Clintons have been using race in this campaign. However poorly worded, Hillary's recent words suggest the fundamental reason the Clintons have betrayed the honorific title of "first black president" once bestowed on Bill Clinton by the great American writer Toni Morrison:
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
The African-American community has clearly recognized and understood the implications of this pattern of racialized discourse, and has almost completly renounced and rejected the Clintons as a result. Results from the Indiana and North Carolina primaries this week indicate that over 90% of African-Americans voted against the Clintons.
Since the election of a Democratic President in November depends so heavily on the African-American vote, all superdelegates need to be asking, in spite of Hillary Clinton's claims to the contrary: Who really has "a much broader base to build a winning coalition on"?
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(This suggests a new formula for the production of stupidity: whiteness + power = stupidity; and the more power and privilege one has--especially when that power is in the media or politics--the more stupid many seem to get....)
And PLEASE NOTE: since "stupid white man" is a state of being rather than a skin color or gender, you do not need to be either light-skinned or in possession of an xy sex chromosome to fit the category of "stupid white men."
Inspiration for these notes on patriotism: The white media pundits and corporate media structure cannot seem to get enough of asking Obama about his relationship with Rev. Wright. Instead of focusing on the real problems and policy issues confronting this country, they would rather focus on white noise, repeating the same dumb questions over and over again:
Why don't you wear a flag pin, Mr. Obama?
Why would your wife ever suggest she had problems with the way this country has been run, Mr. Obama?
Why did you wait so long to renounce your pastor, Mr. Obama?
Why didn't you hold your hand over your heart that one time when saying the pledge of allegiance, Mr. Obama? Read More »
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
These words were written, not by Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008, but by one of the most eloquent and famous American writers of the mid-twentieth century: James Baldwin (in his 1955 collection of essays titled Notes of a Native Son). After witnessing the frenzy with which the corporate media complex manufactured a major controversy out of a few poorly-chosen words by Obama during a private fund-raiser, we're now being forced to witness the explosion of the second phase of the manufacture of the Jeremiah Wright controversy.
We've seen how the corporate media has been struggling to structure this story in ways that set Obama and Wright against each other, so that our racialized Republic’s spectator-consumers can once again be entertained by the tragic spectacle of two black men fighting against each other. As Baldwin noted in the 1950s, “One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men.” Baldwin’s words are being proven all too prophetically true once again.
But the American people, not the corporate media complex, are ultimately in charge of determining how this controversy plays itself out in the current presidential campaign. There is a clear alternative path to the one the media complex is trying to lead the American people down by manufacturing a racialized spectacle that positions Obama and Wright as combatants in a mutually destructive slug fest.
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