The conceit in the US media right now, namely that the election of Obama is a victory for "postracialism" and thus for the USA as a whole, is 100% pure twaddle. First of all, Obama himself is extremely conscious of his ethnicity. This is made evident by 1) the fact that, although his ancestry is just as much north-west European as African, he seems to think of himself solely as Black; and 2) (among other episodes) the surreal overreaction of his camp to that advertisement by the McCain campaign that featured two well-known celebrity bimbos; he and his brownshirts damned the spot as "racist," even though it made no allusion whatsoever to race. The belief that our country can take pride in itself for having elected someone who's partly Black seems, however, to be held even by some persons who ought to know better, i.e., those who despise Obama but feel that his win proves that the USA is not racist. Many voters evidently cast their ballots for the candidate from Hell because they, similarly, expected such an outcome to exorcise the spectre of racism, and therefore, for instance, to put an end to racial quotas, by demonstrating that a member of a minority can attain our most important office—even though those who defend ethnic preferences in business, education, &c., had already said that these preferences will still be "necessary" should Obama be elected. It won't surprise me if the effect of his looming failure of a presidency is not to allay but to arouse race-hatred, for what better argument will there be for racists to use than the fact that our carefully-instilled feeling of guilt over slavery, Jim Crowism, &c. helped put a thing like Obama into the White House?
The very fact that some commentators hail the beginning of a new "postracial" era refutes their own argument that the Obama presidency will make the United States of America truly united; after all, if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of a color-blind country had come true, the President-elect's bi-racial character would not be newsworthy. Similarly, his Caucasoid mother's side of the family doesn't seem to count, and hardly ever receives mention (even by Obama himself; see the above paragraph). Further refutation is provided by the electoral statistics. Obama won only 43% of the White vote, yet his support among Blacks was almost universal; would such polarization be the case were the USA not obsessed with race?
What seems lost on almost everyone is that the public's "diversity" fixation and "postracial" delusion apparently outweighed other considerations, such as I mentioned in the third paragraph of Viewing the Iceberg from the Deck of the Titanic. How does it speak well of our land that we've elected as president a political nightmare who happens to be half Black, when the mere fact that he is half Black was a major factor in the decision?
