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China Op-Ed of the day
"Obama is a graduate from a first-class university," the editorial continued. "He is a symbol of assimilation rather than a representative of different races coming together. Obama did not break the superiority complex of white people. On the contrary, his appearance strengthened the superiority complex of white people."
The article is interesting throughout.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 17, 2008 at 08:28 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
The editorial has it right. Obama is not typical of black people in the U.S. by virtue of his social class, which means everything in the U.S. when it comes to power and privilege. One only needs to consider the median salary of any senator in Congress, their business connections, their post-congressional prospects or the alma mater of most presidents. These people enjoy wealth and social connections which put them in a network of wealth and access that few of the people they claim to represent enjoy. And Obama is on the periphery of 'blackness' in the U.S., and thus on the periphery of the under-class. He's biracial, he's lived abroad, he went to Harvard, he's a politician, and a millionaire. He's unusual. He is even unusual in most respects compared to most white people. To the extent that people are comfortable with him is the extent that he fits the mold of the social group that already enjoys power. A non-American view isn't the only source of perspicuity we can expect on this, but in the U.S., we'll likely dismiss such views and replace them with various forms of denial.
Posted by: Little at Jun 17, 2008 9:02:13 AM
I disagree that Obama did anything to impact any "superiority complex of white people".
I do agree that Obama did assimilate more than many leaders of color. I don't think complete assimilation is necessasarily a good or bad thing... I do think that America works best as a "melting pot". People are welcome to preserve some elements of their cultural, ethnic, religious, and/or gender identity... But we work best as a cohesive society with a common culture and similar views on what constitues acceptable standards of:
- decency in speech at work, at home, in clubs, in political speech, in stand-up acts
- dress code for business, pleasure, pool, broadcast TV, and naughty TV
- justice, including social justice, affirmative action, sentencing, police powers
- work ethic, meritocracy vs. safety net
- individuality as a virtue vs. collectivism and group identities
These standards need to apply to everyone. No group gets to use the N word... No group gets to call itseld "the ____ community" when the blank is an accident of birth.
The Sharptons of the world try to un-melt the pot. They want each group to stay completely separate, with its own culture detached from the broader national community. This kind of splintering is ruinous for a nation, as it was when the white folks were heading the charge.
In contrast, Obama is a perfect example of a "melting pot". He succeeded in the contests that apply to everyone, not just blacks. He made it into ivy league schools, edited law review, etc. No separate contest for his "community".
Yet Obama still retains some hallmarks of the "black community". He's been a member of a "black church", and he makes some ethnic jokes that would be forbidden to white candidates (e.g., ethnicity relating to dance ability).
Note: This whole discussion is unrelated to the reasons I am not voting for Obama.
Note 2: I do NOT assume that only blacks must melt to seem more like whites. Everyone will melt together. Hopefully, the best bits are preserved.
Posted by: Stephen W. Stanton at Jun 17, 2008 9:25:27 AM
Some of his appeal is surely that he is, as the astute Mr Biden observed, "clean". The contrast with Slick Willy is striking.
Posted by: dearieme at Jun 17, 2008 9:30:06 AM
No offense to people of chinese descent (myself included,) but considering how the average chinese person, even immigrants, look at race - they have no right to judge whether Obama is representation of the US or not.
Posted by: ChinaYo at Jun 17, 2008 9:51:09 AM
For context, it should be noted that there is still quite a bit of outright racism in China, particularly toward blacks and Japanese. There have been riots in the very near past concerning black students who dated local Chinese women.
Now certainly this is not true of all Chinese, but it's fair to say the sentiment is widespread and colors a lot of commentary about race in that country.
Posted by: cure at Jun 17, 2008 9:58:21 AM
To quote Little: Obama is not typical of black people in the U.S. by virtue of his social class, which means everything in the U.S. when it comes to power and privilege. One only needs to consider the median salary of any senator in Congress, their business connections, their post-congressional prospects or the alma mater of most presidents.
That's correct, but selectively ignores the fact that neither are white politicians typical of white people in the US, for exactly the reasons you just stated. The fact that Obama gets compared with a "typical black person," while few compare Hillary to a "typical woman" or McCain to a "typical white man," really is a racist double standard: black people are seen as members of a group, whether by similarity or (in Obama's case) by contrast, while white people are seen as individuals.
Posted by: Ari at Jun 17, 2008 10:09:47 AM
I would point out that Barack Obama is an American, born in America, and raised mostly in America. He's half white, raised by a white parent and grandparents. How has he 'assimilated' into elite white society, other than by working his way out of the middle class? If there's been any assimilation at all, I think it's been into the black community of Chicago, whose mores and traditions were never his own, nor were they those of his father.
He is distinctly lacking in the racial baggage that often comes with the politicians who rise through all-black power bases. His race is less of an issue because he never made it an issue for political gain. That's what the good people of China should understand. In order for a man with minority blood to succeed he had to have the courage to define himself as an individual, and succeed on his own terms.
But I suspect a message of triumphant individualism is not something that usually makes it's way past the copy desk at the People's Daily.
Posted by: John at Jun 17, 2008 10:32:09 AM
Ari, I think you missed the first commentator's sentence "To the extent that people are comfortable with [Barak Obama] is the extent that he fits the mold of the social group that already enjoys power." I mean, Barak Obama looks more like powerful white people than he does middle class or poor white or black people. But nobody wants to be like those people. Everybody wants to be like the powerful rich white people. So the more you look like them, the more people accept you as one of them.
Posted by: Chris M. at Jun 17, 2008 11:11:06 AM
Last years there were a post here about this subject.Every time a member of a group succed were others of the group failed. The former is no more seen as part of the group.
He is caleed like a cookie or like certain novel:
Tiger Wood , half asian
Hale Berry , half white
Clarence Thomas, called traitor
Posted by: k at Jun 17, 2008 11:42:17 AM
I think most of the commentators are missing the point here. This editorial (and article) says very little about Obama and the U.S. It does say an awful lot about about China.
Relations between the Han Chinese and most of the minorities in China are awful. But many Han Chinese take comfort in the fact other countries have race troubles too, and wish to explain it away when the U.S. appears to be making progress on such a matter.
From a small (and possiblybiased) sample size of Beijing taxi drivers (the only Chinese people in China that seem to enjoy casually talking about politics with foreigners), I found that quite a number of Chinese people appropos of nothing will make horrible racist generalizations about black people, and will expect me, as an American, to agree with them. I'm willing to bet that the Chinese language press spends quite a lot of time dwelling on race relation problems in America and other developed countries.
Posted by: green apron monkey at Jun 17, 2008 11:48:20 AM
Um... if graduating from a "first-class university" is a white thing, then it seems Asians are better at being white than whites!
Posted by: Jacqueline at Jun 17, 2008 12:15:26 PM
The mere fact of trying to force a false dilemma between 'assimilation' and 'different races coming together' highlights an important misunderstanding here. It is very difficult for a political group to survive while consisting of groups that identify much more strongly with there own group than with the whole. That has never been the idea in the United States. But Obama certainly does not represent assimilation. First of all, he wasn't culturally black to begin with. But additionally, he does retain various non-white cultural values. He is married to a culturally black woman, he plays basketball, he does not pretend to like nascar. Just b/c he is a part of the ruling class does not make him 'white'. One part of the mixing pot ideal is that people from different backgrounds would be able to be a part of that ruling elite. No surprise that in China it is incomprehensible that anyone not from the cultural majority could be a part of that ruling elite.
Posted by: mpowell at Jun 17, 2008 12:15:37 PM
Green Apron Monkey is right. The purpose of the article is not to really analyze the US, but to neutralize the impact in China if Obama is elected. Overseas, the US is synonymous with racism, and many countries who are actually far more racist than the US like to rest on their own laurels in this regard especially if they have significant minorities of their own. They tell their own people to take it because the US is far worse in comparison, and if the US treats their own people worse how can you expect them to treat their own minorities better? Instead, they should be happy that their situation is better than blacks in the US.
An Obama presidency would be a shock and greatly discredit this line. People would think the US is perhaps not as racist and discriminatory as they have been lead to believe. They would then feel like their own government was merely using this story to excuse their own discrimination (which is true). They then might challenge their own government for better treatment.
This is what China wants to avoid. If the US has progressed to the point where a black man can be elected, then China will need to account for its own treatment of its minorities.
It may seem strange that events in the US would cause this, but in many regards the US still sets the benchmark fir behavior. If we raise the bar, then other countries need to respond to it somehow.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at Jun 17, 2008 12:25:06 PM
"His race is less of an issue because he never made it an issue for political gain."
You are kidding right?
If there's anything fascinating about Obama,
its that he adopted the identity of the race of the parent that ABANDONED him
The people that contributed one half of hisa DNA, raised him, cared for him were white,
but somehow are irrelevant or worse, since he made his grandmother a speedbump on his race for power.
There's a long history of individuals with screwed up backgrounds (on the left, Clinton,
on the right, Reagan) ascending to the Oval office. The pattern continues if he is elected.
We should be very fearful of politicians. They are mercenaries, not Messiahs.
Posted by: Superheater at Jun 17, 2008 12:27:07 PM
The commenter who said that this is far more about China than Obama got it right. My sister-in-law is a famous academic in a major Chinese university, and buys the "US is irremediably racist" line completely, despite having lived in the US and seen many Americans. Once, during a discussion last year, I shocked her when I mentioned that a friend of mine was an immigrant from Nigeria; she figured that no African would ever want to go to a racist hellhole such as the US.
The CCP has made a determined effort to "deconstruct" the US from a shining example of democracy to a whateverist hellhole after the 1989 events. It's actually been quite successful, but Obama's rise has challenged a crucial pillar of this "deconstruction".
Posted by: Foobarista at Jun 17, 2008 1:07:54 PM
Hasn't the communist party line always been that capitalism is inherently racist? If you watch some of the Soviet propaganda cartoons on youtube, that seems to beone of the big isssues The editorial here is just a reassuring rationalization to the Chinese people that American are still racist.
Posted by: josh at Jun 17, 2008 2:30:45 PM
Superheater, are you seriously -- seriously -- suggesting that it's Senator Obama's choice as to which "race" he's considered? That he just went and picked black because it's politically useful and if he had instead picked white, then when he ran for the Illinois Senate and spoke at the Democratic Convention, everyone watching on TV would have said "oh look, there's a white guy"? Everyone would have just read some announcement that Mr Obama chooses to be considered white, and then magically everyone would see him that way? It's almost not worth trying to rehabilitate such willful obtuseness, but just in case, this might be a good place to start educating yourself.
What's fascinating about this thread is that half of the participants aver that it's really only the Chinese who have such screwed up ideas about race and they're simply projecting. Meanwhile, the other (presumably non-Chinese) half enthusiastically agree with the editorial. Physician, heal thyself and so on.
Posted by: sidereal at Jun 17, 2008 2:43:25 PM
What i see are people doing mental gymnastics in order to not address the Chinese point about race as mentioned in the article. Talk about deconstruction! No matter what the Chinese do or don't do regarding race on their part, there is a point in that editorial made about how the U.S. handles race.
To what extent is this accurate and how? "He is a symbol of assimilation rather than a representative of different races coming together." What would it look like if were the opposite case?
Is there a "superiority complex of white people" to this day? How do we know? How extensive or not is it?
...maybe it's more comforting to talk about the faults of the Chinese instead.
Posted by: Chris M. at Jun 17, 2008 2:45:14 PM
To be honest, I found the editorial (as described by the Washington Post) to be a propaganda piece in the way of the old joke about the Soviet Union:
In a policy discussion, the Soviet agricultural minister was asked about bread lines and the rationing policies of the USSR.
His response: "Well, in America, you lynch blacks."
It seems like the Chinese, like the Soviets before them, are throwing out the old trope of American racism in order to make the grass on the other side look a little less green.
Posted by: quanticle at Jun 17, 2008 2:51:33 PM
The piece had a vast amount of racists assumptions that, unfortunately, a good number of Americans buy into as it is. The fact that Obama is seen as "assimilation" primarily fits quite well with the idea of "post-racial" a term that's been thrown around. Obama is not seen as "black" because he does not fit everyone's natural "black" heuristic and doesn't follow "black culture" (i.e. poor, lazy, welfare-sucking, uneducated, ebonics speaking, rap-listening, drug selling and all the other negative African American heuristics).
Obama is seen as "post-racial" because he is a black man who does it the "white" way--hard work, focus on education, rise up the socioeconomic ladder through connections, etc. This is considered 'assimilation' because of the stereotypes of what a black person and a white person are normally like. When the Chinese article says he's on the "bounds" to a sense, of African American, it sounds exactly like all those politicians who talk about him being "well-spoken" and "clean."
What they're saying is: well, lookie here, he acts just like me. He's not black, he's one of us. Look at the black man trying out OUR culture.
If you don't think A WHOLE LOT of people think this way, head over to....less intelligent comment sections.
Posted by: Ap at Jun 17, 2008 3:41:06 PM
mpowell,
What? "He is married to a culturally black woman, he plays basketball, he does not pretend to like nascar."
The latter two don't appear to be markers of any sort whatsoever; I can find dozens of white people within a stone's throw that play basketball and don't like NASCAR. As to "culturally black woman", what is that, exactly? Or what is it not? Please clarify.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at Jun 17, 2008 4:09:55 PM
Chris Durnell's comment is the best, or at least, exactly what I was going to say. It is a recent trend that Americans are bombarded with government propaganda, aka Television. Stories that cover interesting issues such as the release of the "report on the U.S. intelligence community's prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq" that concludes President Bush lied to the American public about the reason to start the Iraqi war simply are not covered by any network news shows. Government propaganda is something that other countries do really well, while Americans have had the privilege of "free press". Other countries' news actually covers stories that make the US look bad. Other countries can try to continue anti-US propaganda, but their citizens will be hard pressed to listen after they see the color of the US President.
Posted by: brainwarped at Jun 17, 2008 4:12:36 PM
Recall how Shakespeare's Richard III ends with a marital alliance between the rival royal houses of White and Red that ends the War of the Roses.
Obama has positioned himself from 2004 onward as the product of a marital alliance between the rival racial houses of White and Black who will end the War of the Races.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 17, 2008 4:29:07 PM
I would say what Durnell has but with one altercation.
"This is what China wants to avoid. If the US has progressed to the point where a black man can be elected, then China will need to account for its own treatment of its minorities."
More than anything, the government will have to alter its standing. That's the biggest problem they'll have.
AS for the U.S. being racist, it is, period. There are racist Whites, racist Blacks, racist Latinos, and there are racist Asians. There's always going to be racism. Whites are in the spot light because we're a majority in the U.S. Just like Asians are majority in China. Xenophobia is not new, we've been hating and killing each other for centuries. We first have to overcome the deep pockets of racism that exists around U.S. so that it has no breeding ground. We have to overcome modern-day segregationist trends that exist in our cities and towns ghettos. This all starts with you, accept and love you neighbor regardless of "race". I never got this whole thing about "race" anyways, why say "race" or have "race" on a application? Always felt that in its self was racist, which it is.
Posted by: Gunnar W at Jun 17, 2008 5:15:25 PM
Anti-Black racism is widespread in Asia, which is interesting because there are so few Blacks there. Then again anti-Semitism was present in late 1930s Japan.
Posted by: AS at Jun 17, 2008 8:20:43 PM
