And what happened with Obama is that he gets this job that he’s not qualified for… OK, so [Obama is] Constitutionally qualified for but he’s not really qualified for. And guess who pays the price? All of us. Because we had such a yearning for history.
Well I have a question. Herman Cain, if he became president, he would be the first black president, when you measure it by — because he doesn’t — does he have a white mother, white father, grandparents, no, right? So Herman Cain, he could say that he’s — he’s — he’s the first, uh — he could make the claim to be the first — yeah, the first Main Street black Republican to be the president of the United States. Right? He’s historic too.
Now you may be thinking "How is this useful other than as a window into just how awful a person Laura Ingraham is?" I'll be happy to explain my theory. It goes something like this:
Ingraham's comments show the difference between racism and assumption of privilege. They're related, but they're not the same thing. One specifically involves baseless assumptions, negative stereotypes and bigoted behavior specifically involving race, the other involves that a person believes a specific group that they don't belong to should follow behaviors and be assigned criteria that they consider to be societal norms that the group in question should possess.
It's entirely possible to assume privilege about a group, to "take it upon oneself," on issues other than race (gender, sexual identity, religion or lack thereof, etc.) and it's entirely possible to be racist without assuming privilege (propagating negative stereotypes about one's own race, "self-hating" etc.)
What Ingraham's doing is very much in the category of assumption of privilege. She feels that she not only has the right to be the arbiter of the President's racial identity, that she not only has the right to define what that identity means to all other racial identity groups (and that Barack Obama's racial identity is different from Herman Cain's racial identity based solely on her opinion) but given her statements in the past she feels that she knows what is best for the black community as well, even though she's not a part of it. On top of all that, because the President is biracial (like myself) she feels that she can emphasize one race over the other when it suits her argument, and that his identity is mutable based on what she thinks at the time and from which angle she needs to attack him from. The assumption that other African-Americans need her guidance and opinion in order to formulate their own perceptions of the President's racial identity is pretty much the height of hubris.
But Ingraham's technically not being racist. She's not actually saying that being black is bad, she's just defining what she thinks being black from a Presidential historical standpoint means and should be defined as. Having said that, her assumption of privilege here is repugnant, ignorant, arrogant, unacceptable and generally makes her a truly rotten human being. I'm pretty sure most of us would find her statements to be breathtakingly terrible and that most people find what she said to be unremittingly foul on pure instinct. Her statements in fact imply a great number of negative things about the President being biracial and that not being good enough to qualify the him for historical status, that somehow it makes Herman Cain "better" in her opinion, but her statements weren't technically racism, only implied. There is a difference, and it's one that has been exploited to great effect in history.
Now here's where it gets fun: Ingraham's defenders will no doubt say that her assumption of privilege is not racism, and that anyone who does attack her as being such is overly sensitive and should be dismissed. But this means that her assumption of privilege is acceptable to society because the racism is merely implied and not overt, and therefore a matter of one's opinion and perspective. Implied attacks on minorities through the language of assumption of privilege have been used throughout American history.
It's readily and painfully recognizable to various minorities, but has over the decades has lost stigma and has even become acceptable to those who regularly assume the familiar code phrases, tired arguments, and "dog whistle" semantics because they are in the majority and get to define in society what the acceptable norms are. When couched in the haze of opinion and point-of-view, attacks on such language can be easily discounted in order to maintain that majority hold on what is acceptable and what is not, and it's done specifically to blunt criticism from minorities and to perpetuate the power in the majority. At its logical endpoint, it's also designed specifically to anger the minority group in question in order to provoke a reaction by the minority that can be dismissed by the majority in order to establish dominance by being able to control what is acceptable in society.
It's worked for a very, very, very long time. Ingraham is playing a game as old as human interaction itself.
Having said that, Laura Ingraham can kiss my biracial ass.
Madam, you are no more the arbiter of the President's racial identity and what it means to America than pile of fecal matter inside your cranium, and the poison-saturated sack of hypocrisy that constitutes your soul is not anything I would wish on my worst enemy. I am proud of being biracial. It does not make me any less pure or less worthy or less human than human, and I greatly resent the implication. I am exceedingly proud of my President because he is someone like myself, and I live in a country where someone like myself can in fact be the leader of the free world and govern a country of 310 million people, all of which are better people than you are. If you cannot find the singular joy in a society that allows that to happen, your worldview is a hopelessly broken and bleak landscape of endless recriminations that is so exceedingly and perfectly empty that you will seek to fill it with shallow, sneering, venal attacks in order to find some way, any way, to stop the relentless pain that your daily existence must entail.
My theory ends forthwith. Have a nice day.
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