"Magic Negro"?

You have to wonder if the following montage of headlines is worth it to Barack Obama to become Hillary Clinton's vice president:

Obama's kin owned slaves - A genealogical report finds two slave owners among the candidate's U.S. ancestors (on his white mother's side of the family, natch)

Is Obama the new 'black'? - Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?

That's what New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch asked last month, and his answer was decidedly "no." No, Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness not just as a racial (shared biology) identity but as an ethnic (shared historical experience) one. And isn't that what the switch of terms from "black" to "African American" was all about?...

What Crouch is arguing is that what the majority of black Americans share is their ancestors' experience as human chattel, brought to these shores in the grips of chains. Slavery and segregation not only forged a rigid racial line between black and white but created a shared ethnic experience. For Crouch, the fact that Obama's father — whom Obama met only once — was a black Kenyan who came to the U.S. to study at Harvard and the University of Hawaii removes him from the traditional black American narrative.

Author and essayist Debra Dickerson agrees. She believes that much of Obama's popularity among whites stems from the fact that his family wasn't part of the slave experience and therefore elicits no feelings of historical guilt. "The swooning from white people is a paroxysm of self-congratulation," she said.

Slavery ended in this country 145 years ago. Segregation ended 43 years ago. But the oppression of black Americans continues to this day, in the form of this self- (and left-wing-) imposed racialist pathology that cannot let go of the distant past, which is about as relevant to today's black Americans as the Norman conquest of England is to their white countrymen. You can't go forward unless you first stop looking back, and when it comes to race this is ideological sacrilege to the far Left. Why, if blacks starting doing that, we might actually become a colorblind society in which the content of one's character matters more than the color of one's skin, and black voters might start thinking for themselves instead of believing vicious anti-Republican/anti-conservative lies, and the Democrats might lose their monolothic hold on them and the national political viablity that goes with it. And we certainly can't have THAT.

"Historical guilt". In other words, collective guilt. No, worse than that - racial guilt. Whites "swoon" over Barack Obama because all whites are racists because some whites inflicted slavery on some blacks in centuries past. But Obama isn't "really black" because his ancestors were genuinely "African" and not "African-American," never slaves but rather....well, never slaves, anyway. At least not in the sense of being owned by white people. And because he's, you know, an "oreo". Or "zebra". His blood done be pluted by honky cracker genes.

Oh, come on, don't you look at me like that; I'm just getting into the spirit of how the Left - which absolutely, positively is NOT RACIST - is talking about this guy. That chatter is dominated by a subtle but consistent theme:

TIME: Is Obama Black Enough?

LA Times: Some wonder: Is Obama black enough?

Knoxville News-Sentinel: Is Obama 'black enough' if his roots don't include slavery?

Could there be a more patently, blatantly, blanketly racist question than this? Can you imagine what would happen to any conservative who spoke in anything like this terminology?

How, aside from being biracial, is Barack Obama "not black enough"? It's got to be more than just that he's not descended from slaves. Could it be that he's well-spoken, charismatic, and fully educated? That he's achieved a great deal at a young age in the field of "public service"? That any such black man has forfeited his "blackness" because he has left behind his dictated victimhood and attained success through his own efforts (aka "gone white)?

I said stop looking at me like that - I'm not the one saying that Barack Obama "isn't black enough". The claim is nonsensical racist doggerel to me, but to liberals it appears to be an article of faith. And since libs can get away with saying ANYthing, that would explain this next quote, in which David Ehrenstein of the L.A. Times gives this crypto-Klan rhetoric an astonishing and appalling label:

As ever carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro."

"Magic Negro". "Magic Negro". If Ann Coulter were to use that phrase, nobody would ever find her dismembered remains. No Republican would go near it - not out of "historical guilt," but because his/her political career would be over. The very same Left that has impunity to toss off such racial epithets would fall upon that hapless pachyderm and strip every last speck of PR meat from his/her bones in a self-righteous feeding frenzy of hypermoralistic indignation. Because s/he, by using such a term, would have "revealed his/her inherent racism," but a lib doing the exact same thing is...well, doing the exact same thing, only it's okay for them.

Me, I figure Barack Obama is "black enough" based on his hyper-NeoBolshevik voting record. That shows that he's good at doing as he's told (Obeisance is a trait lefties highly value in their minority "constituents"). However, he's also a naif to national politics, and is only running for president so garishly prematurely because of his unique political gifts and the handsome quasi-mahogany finish in which they're encased. Evidently even the latter isn't enough for those who should be his staunchest supporters.

But it will be enough to get him on the '08 Donk ticket with Mrs. Clinton, who will need all the "Negro magic" she can get.