I hate the world a lot

by Ike Hettit, an honest liberal

Name:

I don't understand why we can't all just get along and hold hands and sing songs. If we treat everyone with respect and share everything, everything should be fine. What's the problem here?

Friday, February 23, 2007

Looking at 2008: Barack and a Hard Place

My last piece wasn’t meant to argue that we shouldn’t vote for Obama. I’m a raging liberal. I like blacks better than whites. I like Hispanics and Asians better than whites. I even kind of don’t hate Jews. So of course I’m pulling for Obama — he’s blacker than the white males. Half-black, while not as good as black, is still better than white.

But this brings up an interesting dilemma. Experience and ability don’t matter here. So barring those factors, which candidate should true and honest liberals support in 2008, the half-black man or the white woman? Obviously, a black woman would be perfect, unless it were Condoleezza Rice (she’s a Republican and therefore must have fake pigmentation). But we don’t have that luxury.

The best way to solve this problem is to figure out which group — women or blacks — has been shafted more throughout history. Whichever candidate is part of that group gets the support of the honest liberal.

I don’t want to get into detail about the advanced math that I used to figure this out, but it has become clear to me, after much struggle and analysis, that women have been shafted far more than blacks.

Yes, blacks were royally screwed during the slavery era. But women have been subjugated since the dawn of time. We’re only now evening the playing field. Trailblazing policies like lower physical standards for female police officers and firefighters not only right the wrongs of the pigheaded male mind, but they weaken our fascist law enforcers so that fewer criminal suspects are caught and beaten for no reason.

So it seems Hillary wins, right? Not so fast! There is one factor that prevents anyone of conscience from supporting Hillary: her vote for the Iraq war. Before we support her, Hillary has to renounce her initial, vociferous support and vote for the “liberation” of Iraq. Until then, it’s Obama all the way.

It will be tough for Hillary to renounce her war vote, because many will ask her how she can honestly go back on a vote in favor of the possibility for human rights in Iraq. The best way for her to do this is to play dumb, just like John Edwards. She needs to convince us that she was duped into thinking that it was noble to vote in favor of fighting in Iraq for women’s rights, gay rights, freedoms of the press and speech, and a government elected by the people. He was fooled, she was fooled, we were all fooled. The stupider she shows herself to be, the better a liberal presidential candidate she is.

Labels: , , , ,

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Black?: Barack's Lack

I hate to ruin this love-in we’re all enjoying, but Barack Obama isn’t black.

First, Obama, unlike ideal black leaders like Louis Farakhan and Al Sharpton, doesn’t loathe and distrust white people. Where’s the anger? Where’s the indignation? Luckily, he’s a Democrat. If he were a Republican, Obama would be less black than even Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Second, he’s only half-black. His mother was white. And as the Spike Lee faction will remind you every chance they get, half is definitely not full. Need an example? Take former Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash. He’s half-black. And instead of being into rap or soul or funk or R&B, he’s into hard rock and plays a guitar. And when Slash was still in Guns n’ Roses, singer Axl Rose wrote the epithet “nigger” into a song and Slash didn’t quit the band. (Note: This doesn’t mean that the white side is more powerful. It simply means that, like the Dark Side of the Force, the white side is evil, more seductive, and can keep one from making the right decision.)

Some might argue that Jimmy Hendricks and Lenny Kravitz suggest that even “full” blacks can indeed be into rock without it diminishing their blackness. I’d argue that they’re the exceptions that prove the rule, but I don’t have to. They aren’t exceptions: Hendricks had a British accent, so he can’t really be black, and Kravitz is a Jewish name. You can’t be black if you have a Jewish last name. Just ask Farakhan.

Third, and most importantly, the black heritage Obama does have is faux. Even though he has lived his whole life with dark skin, and even though that would put him in the same psychological mindset as anyone else with darker-than-white skin, Barack Obama can’t possibly understand what it means to be black. He’s not black in the ways that count.

For your blackness to be black, you have to be a descendant of a West-African slave. If you’re a descendant of an African who wasn’t a slave, you’re simply an American of African descent. If you’re an African who moved to the States, you’re an African who moved to the States. If you’re from the Caribbean, I have no idea what you are.

But unless a distant relative of yours was whipped by a cracker-ass cracker, you’re not black, regardless of the size of your penis. As Debra Dickerson suggests in her piece that courageously points out Obama’s fake blackness, Obama is only “ ‘black’ as a matter of skin color and DNA”. Case closed.

The ideal, of course, is for everyone to live as One, with as few arbitrary divisions as possible, with humanity holding hands and sharing everything. But it remains important for minorities to create sub-divisions among themselves so that, for example, true blacks can ostracize fake blacks. This way, true blacks get a feel for what it was like for whites when they ostracized blacks. The more racial distinctions we make among ourselves, the closer we are to dropping racial distinctions and living as One.

Slowly, the world is starting to realize that your pigmentation doesn’t determine your worth as a human being. Now we must convince the world that your pigmentation doesn’t determine the color of your skin, either.

Labels: , , , , , , ,