Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

If U.S. Presidential hopeful (and Democratic frontrunner) Barak Obama was a “white” male, he would just be another bright, anonymous, Harvard product. As it so happens, his father is Black and so, by American racial perceptual standards, he is Black.  

Many in the U.S. think that a male politician of mixed race represents “change” and a departure from the way Washington does business. It is the vainest, most superficial and fatuous approach to politics imaginable – Americans are voting for him primarily due to skin color (people can never point to one of his accomplishments, they just, like, sorta like him). It makes the burden of being white and privileged less intense as you seem to be voting against the politics of exclusion.  

Ironically, as an “underdog,”, Barak’s skin color makes his own social privilege and Harvard educated elitist burden also less intense.  

Barak Obama’s father’s pigment has nothing to do with what should make a good President, anymore than Obama’s half-black skin color and Kenyan roots and international living arrangements growing up (not to mention his family’s money) can inform him of Black experience. Moreover, I will even venture to say that Barak Obama’s proximity to Black culture and understanding approximates my own – or any of my white friends in Sackville or Bedford.  

You see, Barak Obama is not “black,” as far as any context of exclusion is concerned. He is not even half-excluded, or “half-black” in any social sense. He is a man whose father happens to be black, and upper class, who went to Harvard.  

Barak Obama is a Harvard product that has appeal to Whites because his skin is “different,” he makes whites feel better about themeselves as purveyors of social justice when they cheer for him and appeals to Blacks because he seems closer to their own racial experience.

But when it comes to the politics of exclusion, the real problem is Hillary Clinton’s gender, not Barak Obama’s race. Hilary Clinton does not have the social luxury of being half anything; she is all women, which comes at a political cost.  

Social anthropologists have mentioned that being sexist is harder to fight in higher social circles than being racist. Within the gender of being female there is also an unacknowledged or repressed gender inter-competitiveness that claws back women who stand out: at a primitive, crocodile level of the human brain there is an understanding that “alpha females” attract more male attention and, therefore, create less for others.

Women who stand out are a threat to many men as well as many women. Being a man, of any stripe, in the world of power politics is easier.

Hillary’s problem, sadly, is that she is all woman and Bark’s good fortune is that he is not, as Borat would say, a “vanilla face.”