Albus an Ater Homo: Who Is This Caesar, and Who Are We Who Made Him?

The election of Barack Obama, who is half African (if you haven’t heard), to the late American republic’s presidency is supposed to have demonstrated to the satisfaction of educated, “enlightened” white Americans everywhere that our society is no longer “racist”. In fact, it demonstrated nothing of the kind. Rather, it sounded the charge for a whole new kind of racism—not bigotry, but true racism—while luxuriously, very expensively providing therapy for the soft bigotry of white liberals.

If race is so hellfire important in these matters, then let us reiterate the obvious, to begin with: Obama’s genetic material is only half African. He is NOT Jesse Jackson or Alan Keyes. His peculiar facial features indeed emphasize his multi-racial origin. This is neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. We are ALL multi-racial if we trace our line back far enough (just as every one of us possesses an ancestor who was enslaved at some point over the last ten thousand years). But for liberals, bearing the Atlas-like (or Christ-like) burden of The Sins of the World—not THEIR sins, but those of all those millions than whom they are better—Obama’s half-blackness is reassuring. They can look at him and see The Other while their subconscious mind whispers , “He’s so like us, really!” Of course, Obama also enjoys the varnish of an Ivy League education, making him more like the liberal intelligentsia than the stupid truck-driving rednecks so detested among that elite (and who continue to vote mostly Democrat to this day).

Nothing very new there. Liberals have sought to put their superior intellect, sensitivity, and moral acumen on display for decades now by launching costly “reparations” with other people’s blood and treasure and by advancing token representatives of The Victim in an insufferably condescending manner. What alarms me far more—and what I read as something new under the sun—is how much, and how openly, many black people have started hating white people since the election. Criticism of the president is “racist”, criticism of his policies is “racist”, criticism of his leaving our borders exposed is “racist”, criticism of his ceding our position of strength in the world is “racist”… any utterance which objects to impending chaos is “racist”. On every front, our government is embarking upon programs analogous to the sneak at the poker game who hits the light switch and kicks the table over, raking in all he can on hands and knees as the other players duke it out blindly overhead. Certain disaffected members of our society seem to have heard all those loose coins rolling around in the darkness. Anyone who wants to turn the lights back on is a “racist”.

To be fair, this situation has also been simmering away for some little while, though it was Obama’s long arm that finally doused the lights. I was told by students last fall that I mustn’t pronounce “gangster” as “gangsta”—that it gives angry young black males a free ticket (I almost wrote carte blanche) to molest me or kill me, since this is THEIR word, from whose uttering my skin color categorically precludes me. Similar rules seem to govern the use of the “n” word. Black “comics” like Dave Chapelle and Cat Williams can salt their monologues with it until not a single sentence remains untainted… and it’s funny. But only black people may laugh—and most certainly only black people may actually say the horrid syllables. Why? Williams appears to have explained (according to my confused teenager, who laughs with the innocence of a foolish child) that the word reminds whites of what they have done to blacks, hence making it an “empowering” word rather than a “put-down”. Merde de taureau—it does nothing of the sort. It marks Williams and those gullible numbskulls like him as electoral cannon fodder. Like the insistent defense of the Spanish language in our midst, it persuades vast numbers of adults who do little of their own thinking that they should act and vote en masse on the basis of some preposterously superficial characteristic such as they skin’s shade or their accent. A few paces farther along this road, and skin color or a “z” at the end of a name will be the first selection criterion of the major parties as they sift through candidates. By all means, let us have a black-speak, a Spanish-speak, a white-speak… isn’t that just what Dr. King was dreaming of?

If you grew up in Texas, as I did, then you know what it is to be typed by the Eastern Seaboard Elite as BOTH a stupid drawling racist redneck AND a stupid drawling stumble-footed cowboy. I read ten languages, most of which I taught myself… but in the academic job market, I have always been and will always be terminally southern and western, an irredeemable white male oppressor, insular, vulgar, and cerebrally damaged. I think I know a thing or two, therefore, about never being able to see the light of day under a heap of crude stereotypes shoveled steadily upon one.

Illustration: I remember a sequence in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Baseball­—lauded to the heavens, of course, as the greatest thing of its kind ever filmed—where a northeastern “scholar”, nestled in a sumptuous armchair and framed by shelf upon shelf of thick volumes, sniffs over his sweater-vest that Ty Cobb was more of a liability than an asset to the game. All of this, naturally, came in reference to Cobb’s racial attitudes—in specific reference, indeed, to his leaping into the stands and beating a spectator who called him a “n-----“. Nothing was made of the fact that the Detroit fan, not Cobb, had used the slur word as a vilification, and very little was made of the fact that Cobb’s teammates subsequently went on strike to protest his suspension, since they, too, thought the taunt worthy of a thrashing. Even less was made of the clear fact that Cobb was a very troubled person, the son of a domineering father who was shot (accidentally or otherwise) by his mother in attempting to sneak through a window after a late-night foray. Naturally, Burns could not have been expected to unearth Cobb’s comment to Bill Rigney about Willie Mays: “He could have played with us.” All that mattered was that Cobb was a Georgia redneck. Bigoted northern boys are “complicated” or “tormented”: bigoted southern boys are stupid rednecks.

It is a challenge for me sometimes not to loathe “Yankees”… but then, I know the general shortcomings of my neighbors far better than Easterners do, and I should be distressed to have to choose my company only from among other Texans. The truth is that people, taken in any cross-section, are a pretty rum lot. We don’t need to “celebrate our diversity”—what an abysmally empty, inane phrase, and may God save the remnants of my sanity! We need to locate our common humanity, and cling to it. In common humanity—universal moral imperatives—is rooted tolerance of difference; harmony and community are not advanced by letting Difference scream itself hoarse in our face and then daring us to repeat a single word of an incomprehensible rave. To paraphrase Catullus on the subject of Caesar, I don’t know whether Obama’s black or white: I don’t care to court his favor.