Race is more than a card

I’ve had a difficult time this election believing that Obama’s race is really an issue…or at least, a handicapping one. People say things like, “He’ll get assassinated” or “Pennsylvania won’t vote for him,” and I always have to wonder if they’re crazy or I am. If anything, I tend to see Obama’s race as a bonus. In his ‘race’ speech, he claimed that his candidacy was more than “a chance for wild and wide-eyed liberals to buy racial reconciliation on the cheap.” Maybe he’s right, but there’s no doubt that for a good segment of the population, that’s exactly what his candidacy represents.

Still, there’s probably far more racism out there than I’m seeing, and it probably plays a far greater role than I’m crediting. That’s why I was moved to repost this speech from the Secretary General of the AFL-CIO, given at a United Steelworkers conference.

Pretty moving stuff. Moving enough to overcome racism? Let’s hope so.

Still, I have a hard time giving the assassination issue cred. People try to kill the president all the time for a host of stupid reasons, but will anyone really say to themselves, “He’s black!” and run for their guns? Doesn’t he have to do something first?

This holy belief among liberals that Obama is at risk for premature death has already caused problems for his opponents in this election. Hillary caused a stir when she cited the RFK assassination while establishing a timeline for some newspaper editors. In any other election the comment would have been seen for what it was, but with Obama as her opponent, the comment was wildly distorted and decontextualized to the point where it sounded as if Hillary was sending coded messages to the NRA. RFK, Jr. himself noted how harmless her comment was. But don’t tell that to the Left. They’ll probably sick the Secret Service on you.

So where does this whole assassination myth come from? Clearly, it’s from the patron saint of progress, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve written before about how King, too, is subject to massive historical distortions. For a perfect example of how simplified King’s life and death have become, try searching WikiAnswers with, “Why did James Earl Ray shoot King?” Here’s what you’ll find:

“Obviously not only was James Earl Ray a racist person that believed the freedom of blacks a dangerous thing [sic]. He decided the only way to deal with the problem was to assassinate the source: Dr. Martin Luther King. However his death only served to fuel the fires, since people across the nation saw him as a martyr.”

Really? Is it that obvious? Ray couldn’t have had any other motivation for doing what he did? Never mind the fact that at the time of his death, King was an advocate for far more than racial integration. Never mind that King’s own movement had turned on him because of his anti-war advocacy. In popular history, King = civil rights, and so dead King = racism.

I’m not saying that racism wasn’t a factor. I’m sure it was. But to call it the only factor, to say that King died solely because he was black is to ignore almost all for which he fought and suffered. There were a lot of black people advocating civil rights. King went further, to a place where few leaders were willing to go. Few of them were strong enough, bold enough to say the things that King said, which, consequently, we often forget. When King compared the US to Nazi Germany, when he called his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” he pissed people off – white and black alike. And it wasn’t just because he was black. King, as he would have wished, died for more than the color of his skin; he was killed because of the content of his character.

So let’s drop this whole “Obama will get shot because he’s black” theory. Obama isn’t even campaigning on racial equality, as prior black candidates before him have. He’s not a civil rights campaigner of the 60’s generation, many of whom were killed not just for their skin color, but for their political actions. If Obama is assassinated before January, he’ll be the first political leader killed solely for the color of his skin. That’s a tough precedent to set, even for a racist nation like the US.