Obama as President = “No More Excuses” from Minorities?
By Loryn Wilson - Nov 5th, 2008 at 5:29 pmNice try, William Bennett, but I don’t think so. Crooks and Liars reported on his comments earlier today:
Well, I’ll tell you one thing it means, as a former Secretary of Education: You don’t take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, “The deck is stacked, I can’t do anything, there’s so much in-built this and that.” There are always problems in a big society. But we have just — if this turns out to be the case, President Obama — we have just achieved an incredible milestone. For which the rest of the world needs to have more respect for the United States than it sometimes does.
Wow, Obama is even more powerful than I thought. I guess his election just wiped out all the remaining institutional bigotry–particularly the persistent job discrimination against black men–with a magical wand. Whooda thunk?
If there is one thing I am tired of hearing, it is that Obama’s presidency is “post-racial.” So now that Obama is president, you won’t have to hear about how black men still have trouble finding a job, or how people will say that if my sister gets into an Ivy League school it is only because she is black, right?
The idea that electing a black man as president means that the problems that black people face in this country are now null and void is patronizing at best and racist at worst. We are still suffering from the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow and having a black president doesn’t change that. And for Bennett to then downplay the problems we face as mere excuses is even more insulting.
I’m pretty sure this is not the first or the last time we will hear this post-racial theme, but I can say that even in 2008, on the eve of a black presidency, that it is both absurd and offensive.
[...] Loryn Wilson at Pushback is skeptical with regard to the view that Obama’s election shows that all the problems of African-Americans have been resolved — the views of William Bennett to the contrary notwithstanding. 0 Comments | Share this post [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 8:17 pm[...] a shameless plug, I wrote a post over at Pushback about Bill Bennett claiming that whites no longer have to listen to “excuses” from [...]
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