Why minority demands can NEVER be appeased

Jonathan L. writes:

I was reminded of your article, “How the liberal advance of minorities and women makes society more and more guilty in its own eyes,” while watching the NFL playoffs last weekend, as announcer after announcer touted the fact that with a Chicago or Indianapolis victory the Superbowl would see its first black head coach. In your original example you cease with the election of a female vice-president, naturally leaving the door open to the question of whether things would not finally be “square” once the first female president was elected. Assuming Hillary Clinton becomes the first female president, the answer would be an emphatic “No!” Hillary Clinton owes her entire political career to her husband’s presidency, and feminists would instantly point out that America is no better than those Third World countries (Pakistan, the Philippines, etc.) that nepotistically elect the daughters or wives of prominent male politicians to head-of-state. Things would not be “square” until America elected a female President whose career was independent of any man’s, at which point the bar would again be raised with the demand for a two-term female president, etc.

Similarly, electing Barak Obama would merely raise the question of whether America would ever be ready for an “authentically” black president, meaning one who takes an adversarial stance toward whites, or at least is not too friendly with them as Obama so clearly is. Rumblings along this line are already being heard:

Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who has followed Obama’s political ascent, said that he may be forced to choose: “You can be elected president as a black person only if you signal at some level that you are independent from black people”—a move she said would be “guaranteed” to make black people angry. “He is going to have to figure out whether there is a way not to alienate and anger a black base that almost by definition is going to be disappointed,” she said. Already, that balancing act is causing some strains. Some of Obama’s longtime black supporters in Illinois are grumbling about the largely white crowd of advisers who now surround Obama as he gears up his national campaign. “Who does he represent? That is what people are worried about,” said Lorenzo Martin, publisher of the Chicago Standard newspapers, a chain of black-oriented weeklies that circulate in the southern suburbs. “When you look and see who is surrounding him, you are not going to see too many brothers. What you see is the liberal left.”

It will be funny but also a little heart-rending to see the fallout once this is fully understood and truly egalitarian liberals realize to their horror that empowering minorities who are “really just like the rest of us” isn’t enough and that the true test of one’s political virtue is willingness to submit to minorities who ARE different, and even somewhat hostile to you.

LA replies:

Excellent analysis. I would just add this. Because of the racial facts of life and the inherent psychology of egalitarianism, the dynamic you and I have described can only come to end, or never have taken place at all, in a society in which whites are acknowledged as the dominant group, for example in the pre-1960s America which was implicitly or explicitly understood by everyone to be basically a “white man’s country.” In a multiracial society in which liberal equality is the ruling idea, the anti-white dynamic will NEVER end.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 27, 2007 01:07 PM | Send