U.S.: Faux noir -- the quest for the seal of authenticity

The French looking

Multimillionaire Massachusetts blue blood John Kerry, [who, by the way, served in Viet Nam] attacked just days ago by vanquished rival John Edwards as a "silver spoon," is running from his racial heritage.

"[Ex-]President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second," he told American Urban Radio Network yesterday.

What a bloody insult to blacks everywhere! A vote! a vote! I'll be called black for a vote!

The sheer bloody condescension of it! How dare he? How dare Toni Morrison insult black people by describing Clinton as "the first black president"? How dare Kerry seek this sobriquet for himself?

Why they can dare? [When I say they, I don't just mean just Morrison, Clinton, and Kerry, I mean whites and blacks of Kerry's political persuasion for whom black people are stepping stones and means to money and power, all the while being contemptuous of them.] They dare because the masses on the new plantation are unreflective and accepting of whatever is said by those who are holders of the seal of authenticity. The schools of of the new plantation purge out well-indoctrinated semi-literates whose every political thought has been fed to them by massa's teaching hand-maids. In addition, the culture -- including the church -- fosters the blind obedience to the edicts from the massas. To step off the plantation is to lose authenticity. Once authenticity is lost, one's color, the same color that John Kerry so blithely would assume as if it were a mantle he could shed at the door to his mansion in Massachusetts, is bleached white.

For the freed man, isolated and without community, there are two recourses: 1. forge a new community that transcends race and cultural differences; and, 2. accept re-programming and voluntarily put on the shackles of the plantation once more. The penalty for the first is having one's name forever uttered as though it were the vilest of epithets and being disinvited from speaking appearances. The reward for the second, is instant acceptance because one has grown and matured. Also, with the return to the plantation, one is welcomed into the community of the enslaved and once more declared to be authentic. Ah, the fantastical powers of de/authentification.

So, how did Clinton earn the right to be known as "the first black president"? Was it because of some great service he did, like Benjamin Banneker or Frederick Douglas? Was it because of the analytical power of his judicial reasoning, like SC Justice Clarence Thomas? Was it because of his staunchness in the face of racism and his adherence to the cause of all men being judged by the content of their character, like Martin Luther King? No. It was none of these.

Clinton is America's "first black president" because he

displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. [Moreover] his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution....

That sounds remarkably like a description of SCJ Thomas, his upbringing and his confirmation ordeal at the hands of liberals like Morrison, except he's from Georgia and was not a profligate like Clinton. Yet, SCJ Thomas is not accepted as authentically black because ... he's a Republican!

That Morrison deems Clinton "[b]lacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," confirms that blackness is more than a matter of pigmentation and simultaneously deprives it of any significance. Blackness, in Morrison's world view, is a social construct which has certain socio-economic and life-style prerequisites in order for the individual to be accorded the much-coveted seal of black authenticity. The racism of the white individual on whom the accolade is conferred is immaterial. For, possessing the proper leftist politics transcends both the divisive issue of race and the solidarity crerated by the shared history of the black experience in America.

Thus, in spite of Clinton's true history on matters racial:

As NewsMax.com recalled on December 22, then-Governor Clinton was among three state officials the NAACP sued in 1989 under the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. "Plaintiffs offered plenty of proof of monolithic voting along racial lines, intimidation of black voters and candidates and other official acts that made voting harder for blacks," the Arkansas Gazette reported December 6, 1989. It added: "the evidence at the trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated."

A three-judge federal panel ordered Clinton and Arkansas's then-Attorney General Steve Clark and then-Secretary of State William J. McCuen to redraw electoral districts to maximize black voting strength.

During his 12-year tenure, Governor Clinton never approved a state civil-rights law. However, he did issue birthday proclamations honoring Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. He also signed Act 116 in 1987. That statute reconfirmed that the star directly above the word "Arkansas" in the state flag "is to commemorate the Confederate States of America." Arkansas also observed Confederate Flag Day every year Clinton served. The governor's silence was consent.

Arkansas' former governor, the late Orval Eugene Faubus, attended Bill Clinton's 1979 gubernatorial inauguration, where the two pols hugged, as Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg recalls. Faubus, of course, resisted the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. He actually deployed National Guard soldiers to bar nine black students from entering. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to break that logjam and give the black teens a fighting chance to learn. Clinton once lauded that same Faubus as a "man of significant ability."

Just this fall, Clinton praised Arkansas' late Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, a notorious segregationist who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also signed the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954. Clinton called Fulbright "My mentor, a visionary, a humanitarian."

because he has the proper leftist credentials, Morrison can look past Clinton's true history on race and present him to the inhabitants of the plantation as authentically black, as "[b]lacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime," and as "the first black president."

Now, to return the the ponderous and lumbering John Effin Kerry who said, "[Ex-]President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second," one must query what must Kerry do to earn the same approbation that made the plantation masses believe that "Clinton is one of us"? Can Kerry earn the same sobriquet? It would require great effort even by Toni Morrison, to paint John Kerry as she did Clinton. For one, Kerry lacks the background; however, if a man who supported racist acts and racists was acceptable to the massas and denizens of the plantation, well, a rich white boy had better find space for his seal of authenticity amongst his chestful of medals. All he has to do is pander to the fears of those on the plantation; it worked for Clinton, and should work for Kerry. That Kerry is soliciting (he says he'd like to earn it) the seal signifies that he views the unthinking masses on the plantation as no more than numbers through whom he will be able to achieve his ambitions. You go, homes!