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Social Issues Tue May 26 2009
Trust Fund Babies Want To Teach You a Race Course
Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, for many reasons, are distasteful to the left as well as the right. Not the least of which was their role in destroying the class-based coalition on the left in the 1960s and introducing the era of rich white kids competing for radical chic points in academia. Now they're trying to waste our time with their views on race, with a book annoyingly titled Race Course: Against White Supremacy. Don't get me wrong; being brown, I also am "against white supremacy." I'd just rather not attend any "race course" taught by a guy whose daddy was the CEO of Commonwealth Edison, and sat on the boards of Northwestern University and the Tribune Company, and who never spent a day in the clink for something anybody not benefitting from "white supremacy" would have done decades for.
As if to confirm my distaste, Bernardine Dohrn is quoted in the Sun-Times as saying this,
"Fifty-seven percent of white voters did not vote for Obama....That was the impetus for writing this book. We've got a big job to do to change those numbers."
I tried to figure out how to take those words out of context--that maybe she wasn't being fairly quoted. The ellipsis is only to exclude exposition from the reporter--that's the quote. Seems pretty clear. My follow-up questions for Bernardine Dohrn would have been along the lines of, what percentage of white people voting for Mr. Obama would have been acceptable to them? Forty-nine percent? Fifty percent plus one? Seventy five percent? What percentage of white people voted against John Kerry? What percentage of white people voted against Bob Dole in 1996? Didn't Mr Obama win the election? Do she and Mr Ayers believe that only white supremacy kept him from winning 400 electoral votes?
Obviously his race was a factor for lots of voters, including a lot of racist voters. But it was obviously not a major factor, given his lopsided victory over possibly the whitest guy in America, the Arizonan Scotch-Irish husband of a liquor magnate heiress. But radical chic has nothing to do with material reality, it has to do with impressing your friends at cocktail and cheese parties in Hyde Park.
