Not by the color of his skin but the arugula-laden contents of his recycled Whole Foods grocery bags
By Thoreau
The Onion’s latest video makes an interesting point: Is it not a weird sign of unexpected progress when an African-American candidate is portrayed as an overly-intellectual member of the elite class? We’ve reached the point where instead of fearing that the black guy will mug you, you now fear that he’ll solicit donations for PBS or ask you to attend a poetry reading. (Sorry, Jim.) When stereotyping Obama with food preferences, instead of fried chicken and watermelon we talk about free-range chicken roasted with an arugula and feta stuffing, and an appetizer of cantaloupe with proscuttio. (And the arugula and cantaloupe had better be organically grown!) Rather than assuming that he must play basketball because he’s tall and black, we assume that he must know something about polo because he went to an Ivy League school.
Not even Dr. King dared to dream of an America where white people would vote against a black guy for listening to classical music on satellite radio while driving a Prius to a golf course that uses local water-conserving grasses.
I would bring this up with one of my black colleagues, but he’s spending the summer traveling to do research, and in fall it will be impossible to get him to shut up about abstract mathematics at the wine and cheese socials. You know how those people are.
Comment by kid bitzer —
August 28, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
hmmm…i suppose you takes your consolations where you finds ‘em, and there is some consolation in this.
but couldn’t we also analyze thusly?
the republican party is a very ugly, mean, and stupid machine. it has a program for attacking democrats: label them as effete, effeminate elites.
it’s true that it also has another machine for attacking non-whites, i.e. label them n***, n***, n*** or say that they drive cadillacs and steal your jobs.
previously, it has been able to deploy these two separate attack-modules against separate targets.
this time, the leading democratic target happens to be a non-white target as well.
i don’t think it is all that surprising that the republicans still trot out the anti-democratic-slurs, even when it costs them a bit of cognitive dissonance with the anti-black slurs.
all we have discovered is which bit of ugly, stupid meanness they think they can deploy more publicly. it doesn’t mean it’s the more deeply rooted one, or the one that will win in a clash of asimovian rules for republican robots.
after all, it’s not like they’re not still chanting n***, n***, n*** through every less public, plausibly deniable channel they can.
Comment by Kip Manley —
August 28, 2008 @ 4:15 pm
No. –Highlighting his “elitist” tendencies is a twofer: you get to tag him for being presumptuous and “uppity,” and you also get to reinforce the idea that he is strange and unnatural: look! He dares not to act like our stereotypical notion of a black man. How foreign! How uppity! That he would put on such airs!
Comment by Thoreau —
August 28, 2008 @ 5:03 pm
Oh, I’ll grant the undertones and the nature of the game. Still, I’d be pretty happy if the worst thing that people said about me was that I have a Ph.D. from a top department and that for lunch I go to the Faculty Lounge and eat food from Trader Joe’s.
Comment by kid bitzer —
August 28, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
uppity physicist!
thinks he’s a messiah!
Comment by Karen —
August 28, 2008 @ 11:00 pm
I’m telling Urkobold on you, Dr. T.
Seriously and sadly, I know from my East Texas emphatically NOT Ivy League relatives that Kip Manley is correct. Among the people who think like that are my parents. I love them insanely, and their behavior is completely not racist, but somehow they never manage to get their attitudes in line with their actions. I’m glad they behave nicely — my mother actually won an award from the local NAACP for encouraging black-owned businesses when she was a loan officer — but I wish they’d start thinking like they act. /wishful-thinking-rant
Comment by Thoreau —
August 29, 2008 @ 12:29 am
kid bitzer-
You know, the attacks on Obama for being elitist didn’t start with Republicans–they started with Hillary Clinton. That’s right, the Ivy-educated wife of a former President explained that she was just an ordinary person running against a snooty, over-educated elitist.
Comment by kid bitzer —
August 29, 2008 @ 8:35 am
true indeed. but then, one of the reasons why i very much hope never to see any clintons in power again, is that bill clinton spent most of his career advancing himself by trashing the democratic brand.
‘triangulation’ was always a nice word for ‘bill pretends he’s better than the democrats, by reinforcing republican smears about other democrats’. so hrc’s behavior in that regard was nothing new.
and also does not show that the meme’s are not republican in origin.
Comment by Idi Amin's Last Meal —
August 29, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
Thoreau is not just an uppity physicist. He’s an uppity cracker ™ from The Stal. Our hometown is as blue-collar & bitter as you can get — I recall, in fact, a career city-worker I encountered the summer between junior & senior year of college, lamenting the presence of “so many” Afro-Americans* at the local park’s pool (”They have their own parks, own pools, right?” he inveighed) — & definite Hillz/Palin territory. In fact, our County Executive — a Brooks Brothers suited fancy-boy from Tosa** — has had his two County Exec campaign victory parties not in his hometown, but in The Stal, in an effort to prove his comity with the NASCAR obsessive, factory-floor treading bitters. (& surprise, surprise — it works!) So, stop eating your “brie” & “asparagus”, T. Eat Velveeta & ice-berg lettuce like a real American.
I’m Idi Amin’s Last Meal, & I approve this message.
*Like Afro-Latino/Afro-Cubano/Afro-Peruano, I opt to use the prefix to describe ancient origin.
**I, too, live in Wauwatosa. I am not ashamed. It’s walking distance to Miller Park.
As to the trademark by Uppity Cracker, it’s the name of the publisher for the music of underground rock/dance band Mindless Self Indulgence. I do not listen to MSI, though, but I like their idea.