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Give Me A Break

This flattering picture, which makes even the senator blush, has seldom been challenged by political commentators or the public. And as of mid-March 2007, no one had tried in earnest to subvert the idea that, as president, Obama could help ease America’s racial tensions because his mother was white and his father was black. But […]

This flattering picture, which makes even the senator blush, has seldom been challenged by political commentators or the public. And as of mid-March 2007, no one had tried in earnest to subvert the idea that, as president, Obama could help ease America’s racial tensions because his mother was white and his father was black.

But that’s exactly what Steve Sailer, a columnist for the anti-immigration site VDARE.com, tried to do in a piece he submitted to the American Conservative magazine, where, at the time, I was assistant editor. Using quotes from Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Sailer portrayed the senator not as a unifying figure, but as an angry black nationalist who completely rejected his white racial heritage as a young man and might do the same as president.

“[T]here is the confusing contrast,” he wrote, “between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype found in ‘Show Boat’ and ‘Imitation of Life.’ ” Sailer surmised that Obama “offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger.”

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn’t like it. TAC’s editor, who was pleased with Sailer’s work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor’s office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said—it’s edgy. It’s racist, I said—and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it.  ~Alexander Konetzki

Now I have briefly worked with Mr. Konetzki during the time he was at TAC, and I think he was and is a good editor.  I had heard about his resignation and the reason for it, which I thought was strange (especially after I read the “offensive” Sailer article), but I thought that it wasn’t a big deal.  People have strong disagreements about editorial priorities and tone and policies, and sometimes they part ways of their own accord.  While I don’t quite understand why some people go to work for a publication whose political leanings are both plain as day (had Mr. Konetzki never read a Steve Sailer piece in TAC before?) and evidently contrary to their own, I really don’t understand why they then act as if this state of affairs is both a surprise and an outrage.  Ross makes a good point about this here.  Jim Antle has fun with this here.  I understand even less why you would turn on former employers on account of this disagreement.  Resigning in protest is one thing, but public ridicule and using private conversations against your colleagues are something else all together.  Just because an association is brief does not obviate the need for at least a certain decent interval to pass before criticising your former colleagues (it’s been what, about a month?).  I don’t think any interval is long enough to make slamming your former colleagues and insinuating that they wink and nod at racist commentary an appropriate move, at least not unless you have a good deal more to back it up than does Mr. Konetzki. 

Of course, Mr. Konetzki cannot have really been entirely unaware that the great and good in establishment political circles in Washington and New York almost certainly already thought TAC was racist (among other things), partly because of its position on immigration and partly because it is vital to the great and the good to think this about anything related to Mr. Buchanan et al.  Naturally, nothing could be more untrue–not that any of this will likely matter to readers of the Monthly.  It is possible to object to Sailer’s interpretation of Obama, even to find it completely wrong, and not consider it racist.  It is possible Mr. Konetzki’s criticisms of the article would have gone over much better had he not immediately resorted to flinging a loaded charge with what seems to me to be too much ease.  Had he been more familiar with the typical and inaccurate criticisms of Sailer, he had to know that calling something that Sailer wrote racist would be guaranteed to make many conservatives ignore whatever else he had to say against the article.  If Steve Sailer sneezes, people say it is a racist sneeze; if he takes a sip of water, he must be doing it because he hates non-whites, etc.  They say this because he has the bad taste to talk about sociobiology and genetic differences as if they mattered in the real world.  In this article he then gave the ultimate offense: he suggested that the great multiculti political hope of the present moment tends to identify with one side of his background over the other.  If this is true, this is not obviously disqualifying; it may not even be an unattractive trait.  It is considered a negative only by those who think race and ethnicity are or ought to be entirely irrelevant to our entire political discourse.  Identifying with one group over another and championing their particular interests are not bad traits to my mind, but if that’s true about Obama this would directly contradict his current public image that so many people find appealing.   

In my view, Sailer’s article was actually a sympathetic portrayal of sorts (though it also clearly had its critical and polemical elements), showing that Obama is not the absurd race-unifying comic book character candidate that his admirers would have him be, but a real person who has described how he understands his identity, heritage and upbringing in very personal terms.    Mr. Konetzki claims that Mr. Sailer misrepresented some things or simply got some facts wrong.  I would say that even if Sailer is misreading something in the book, that is much more likely a case of mistaken judgement rather than a distortion of facts.  Sailer’s error here was to try to make Obama into someone interesting enough to merit all the attention the man already receives.  No one wants to know what’s actually in the empty vessel they are busily pouring their hopes into, and they don’t respond well when they hear that the contents are not what they imagined them to be.  But it is actually quite difficult to see how it is racist to highlight those aspects of Obama’s struggles with his own identity that Obama himself includes in his published works and then to draw conclusions from the story about Obama’s views.  Perhaps Mr. Sailer pushed some interpretations farther than they merited or read into the memoir more than was there, but it is extremely hard to accept that the article is racist.

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