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Tuesday, October 07, 2008
The Black
Depression
NOBODY WANTS TO LOSE THEIR STUFF. Those of us who don't find Barack Obama a compelling candidate are supposed to be the racist ones. We aren't. We're the ones who know that a bad black president would be far more damaging to the cause of racial equality than no black president. That's why most Republicans have always believed the first minority president (black/female/etc) would be a Republican. In large part because we have no affirmative action gene in our makeup; we just don't think the person in charge should be put in charge because their ancestors weren't allowed to be in charge. If that's the case it's sad but hardly a credential for leadership. Sorry.
That's the real burden of electing a minority candidate to the presidency. You have to give them a chance to succeed in office. If your deepest, truest motive for backing Obama in the 2008 election is recompense for slavery, Jim Crow, and 400 years of the short end of the stick, vote this time for McCain. Why? Because this election is a perfect storm of reasons not to elect a black president.
The financial crisis is Exhibit A. We slew our banks by mandating, through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, that they give mortgages to people who didn't qualify under historical criteria. It doesn't matter that many of those people were white. What matters is that the impetus for such an initiative was to put poor black people into homes of their own. Nobody in either party has ever cared whether or not poor white trailer trash could secure a mortgage. Maxine Waters and Barney Frank wouldn't have gone out on a limb for the poor whites who afflict every Celt-based nation on earth. What they wanted was to bring poor black people out of the shadows and install them in the American credit system, whether they could handle the responsibility or not.
Here's the tragedy. They couldn't. The result? Bad American credit to people who weren't ready for it is poised to bring down the entire global economy. It's not a failure of capitalism. It's a failure of government interfering in capitalism for well-intentioned if misguided motives of social justice.
Sadly, there will be a backlash. You tell poor people to come scam you and then when they do you get outraged? Well, yeah. You do. Especially if you're one of the ones who always plays by the rules and is now threatened by those who don't. If the economy keeps tanking, this is not going to be known as the Great Depression II. It's going to be known as The Black Depression. It will set race relations in this country back a half century or more. And it's the absolute worst time to elect a first black president. Nothing he does, or can do, will be analyzed in nonracial terms. He will be handcuffed by his race, criticized for every act of compassion and restraint, and there's absolutely no chance in the current circumstances that he will be able to govern as a "trans-racial" pioneer of some new age.
I won't labor the point. If times are going to be genuinely hard, there's no rationale for compelling a black American to be identified with hard times in perpetuity. If Obama really were as talented as a Lincoln, there would be some reason for taking the risk. But he isn't. And there isn't.
The presidency right now is a sour apple. Hand it to McCain. He's used to sour apples. Hold your fire. Elect Obama when the time is propitious for success rather than years of darkness and failure.
I know you won't listen. But there's nothing ironic about the advice offered.
