About the difference between

Jacob Freeze — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:43:50 -0600

About the difference between race and gender issues in the current primary campaign...

Hillary Clinton's career hasn't really been centered on issues related to gender. As First Lady her main focus was health care, and her subsequent political elevation has more to do with dynastic politics than gender. This is not to say that her only or even her main qualification for the Senate or Presidency is dynastic, but if her name were Barbara Boxer, she might be in the Senate, but she probably wouldn't be running for President.

But Barack Obama has put racial identity at the center of his political career from the very beginning. He organized black voters in Chicago, he ran for the Illinois State Senate from a black district, and he belongs to an almost completely black church, which just happens to have the most politically influential black congregation in Chicago.

It's just a red herring to try to identify Obama with Jeremiah Wright's tinfoil-hat extremism. Obama is way too smart for that nonsense. But it's even worse in a way that he silently went along with Reverend Wright because the consequences of denouncing the "God damn America!" sermons would have been fatal to Obama's political ambitions in the black community in Chicago.

So Obama plays the race card whenever it suits him, and the charge of "racism" is so poisonous in the United States that the very possibility of it scares away most critics of Obama's insubstantial and opportunistic politics.

Rightly or wrongly, the charge of "sexism" isn't nearly as powerful, and a lot of people throw it around in daily life without doing much damage. A couple of weeks ago I was walking into the library at UCLA behind a boy and girl, and when the boy held the door open, the girl called him a "sexist"... but they still walked into the library and disappeared together.

It's hard to imagine anyone calling anyone else a "racist" and passing it off as lightly.

I am not claiming that gender issues are intrinsically less significant that racial issues. International trafficking in prostitution is an important issue for me, and the mistreatment of female prisoners in the brothels of eastern Europe and southeast Asia is as brutal as any other form of slavery.

De Facto Racism in the Democratic Primaries

Jacob Freeze — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:03:28 -0600

Yesterday I wrote about racially skewed voting in the Democratic primaries; specifically, Barack Obama's 92-8% majority among black voters in Pennsylvania, and similar percentages in other states.

"Racism" is the sort of word that can mean more or less whatever anyone wants it to mean, and its de facto manifestations always find a way around de jure definitions.

Diatribune - De Facto Racism in the Democratic Primaries - Comments

About the difference between

De Facto Racism in the Democratic Primaries