Prometheus 6

McWhorter wrote:

"His victory demonstrates the main platform of my race writing. The guiding question in everything I have ever written on race is: Why do so many people exaggerate about racism?"

Oh, I don't know John. Maybe things like Hillary Clinton, a Unites States Senator and the candidate who had been the presumptive favorite to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, saying several weeks ago that she represented "hard working Americans, white Americans" and still being treated as a viable candidate while Senator Obama had to give a major speech on race because of a 30 second sound bite lifted from his minister's 10 minute sermon.

Maybe that's why folks exaggerate about racism. Maybe, just maybe, we should also complain too about hypocrisy. Yes, that's right. The hypocrisy of folks like you revising your own personal history and trying to present yourselves now as seers who predicted, or at least anticipated, Senator Obama's rise and eventual victory. Yes, you had became a believer by the time you did the Blogginhead video with Glenn Loury but admit it, John, you were still holding back a little bit weren't you brother? 

Yet every time some stupid thing happens — some comedian says a word, some sniggering blockhead hangs a little noose, some study shows that white people tend to get slightly better car loans — we are taught that racism is still mother's milk in the U.S. of A. "Always just beneath the surface."

Is the fact that white people get better car loans, mortgages, health care, education, etc, etc, etc not significant? And to say "tend . . . slightly" is intellectually dishonest. And still, doesn't his point undercut his argument? Let's say only 10% of white people get better loans, that 20million people are so? And 20million would make up about 60-70% or soe of African American population? Isn't that giving an entire group of people, or take away from an entire group of people, hundreds of millions of dollars simply because of the color of their skin? Is that not problematic.

And I don't know McWhorter's entire biography. I watched him on C-Span 2 "In Depth." I could definitely be wrong, but anytime he talks about race, I think he should offer the disclosure that his light skin and un-blackness has protected him from some racism just like the fact that when necessary, I can be un-black to protect myself from some aspects of racism. Or, at the very least since I have dredlocks, sound white over the phone.

are nor always referred to as such.