Tavis Smiley has been one of my favorite radio personalities for a long time, if only because I love to imitate his distinctive laugh. It is too bad that he, as well as a African-American superdelegates supporting Clinton, have been ridiculed and threatened by the “unifying” candidate, Obama, and his campaign supporters.
This is one aspect of the “race” debate that has not been discussed — namely, that there can be PLURALISM within the African-American community. It should be obvious to any idiot (other than Obama) that there is no “typical Black” person just as there is no “typical White” person.
Pluralism in America does not mean that “THE (singular) voice of the [fill in the blank: Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.] community” must be heard in the political arena…. Pluralism means that we recognize that there are pluralisms within each of those communities. There is no one way of being Muslim in America, there is no one way of being Latino in America (sorry Bill Richardson!), etc. etc. Only when we are able to accept the fact of pluralism within religious, ethnic, sexual, racial and other communities will we ever get beyond the color of someone's skin and any other kind of epistemological cage the current PC discourse places them in.
What the Obamaniacs have done to the public discourse on race is actually to set it BACK. They have reintroduced "identity politics" - on the basis of race, a construct they are only re-inscribing. In this respect, they are not so different from Rev. Wright, who disparaged Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell as “sell-outs”…as if there is only one authentic “black” American identity.
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