Post-Racial Harmony—Two Recent Cases
02/25/2008
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A singer-songwriter in Canada, son of a mixed marriage himself, finds that his teenage son, in his "dramatic and perilous journey to come to grips with his mixed-race identity," is bringing home dangerous black friends from the ghetto, who are (a) threatening, and (b) getting shot on a regular basis. Read Every parent's nightmare, By Dan Hill, Macleans Magazine, February 14 2008. In the 1970's Dan Hill had tried to adopt an "apolitical, what's-all-this-race-stuff-got-to-do-with-me-anyway attitude" but found that race wouldn't go away.

An ambitious politician in Chicago, son of a white liberal and a polygamist from Kenya, in his own "dramatic and perilous journey to come to grips with his mixed-race identity," finds himself hobnobbing with...lethal and murderous, white liberals. That would be Barack Obama, and the liberals in question are Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, whom Obama visited in 1995.[Obama once visited '60s radicals, By Ben Smith, Politico.com, Feb 22, 2008] Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist who had an interview appear in the New York Times, with the headline No Regrets for a Love of Explosives, published on September 11, 2001.

Here's what Peter Brimelow had to say about them, writing from New York for the London Times in 1989:

Hayden claims to have been shocked when he heard Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen faction, exalt the Manson cult's murders of actress Sharon Tate and others as an example of what must be done to bourgeois society right down to pushing a fork into a victim's stomach. Collier and Horowitz point out that this famous incident actually occurred at the 'Michigan War Council', the meeting at which the Weathermen prepared themselves for going underground to begin 'military action'. And Hayden gave a rousing speech.
It is easily forgotten that people died because of the New Left and not just in Indo-China. Hayden was much closer to the edge than he admits. Years later, back above ground and living legally, Dohrn's common-law husband gave Collier and Horowitz a summary of their lives which may be equally appropriate for Hayden: 'Guilty as hell, free as a bird America is a great country.'

Obama is supposed to be another exemplar of post-racial, post-partisan politics—and if you'll believe that, you'll believe anything. In the February, 1963 issue of Commentary Norman Podhoretz wrote a famous essay called My Negro Problem And Ours, [PDF] in which he despaired of ever solving the racial problems of America, and suggested that the only thing that would make them go away was intermarriage. "I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone ..." he suggested. But it doesn't seem to be working out that way.

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