The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. And three, racialism must remain defined as a one-way bias.
Much of the liberal press has ridiculed Rubio and Cruz, either because their appearances and Cuban ancestry do not quite make them authentic “Latinos” or “Hispanics,” or because their conservative politics disqualify them as deserving minorities and instead make them seem ungrateful to their liberal benefactors. In this unhinged way of thinking, a quite dark Clarence Thomas, who grew up destitute in the old Jim Crow South, is not as authentic an African-American as Barack Obama, who is of half-Kenyan ancestry and was raised by his upper-middle-class white grandparents and schooled at Honolulu’s most exclusive prep school. Make Obama right-wing and Thomas left-wing, and journalists would question Obama about everything from his prep school to his name change at age ten.
...As a general rule, the more exotic the name, and the less white and less American it sounds, the more one’s career is aided. Certainly, a prep-school kid called Barry Dunham or even Barry Soetero would not have the career trajectory of Barack Hussein Obama. A Barry cannot claim to be the victim of American nativist prejudice; a Barack can.
But even nomenclature goes only so far. One can lose even specially crafted minority profiles by the wrong politics. Were Obama to have a political revelation and turn conservative, his half-black status and exotic Middle Eastern/African names would be the stuff of ridicule. He would suffer the fate of a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio and be branded as a sellout opportunist — in a way that he currently is not, despite all the time spent on tony golf courses, Martha’s Vineyard vacations, and Hawaiian junkets, and despite the Goldman Sachs campaign gifts.
...Wealthy white liberal America, the engine that drives racialization, usually does not live, go to school, or engage in leisure activities among those minorities it selects for racial advantages.
...It is fair game to slander Ted Cruz as an inauthentic Latino, while the Left believes that Barack Obama, of equally half-minority status, is a trailblazing minority candidate. The media quiz Cruz on his Spanish-speaking ability, while they would not the non-Spanish-speaking Julian Castro, the current liberal heartthrob.
...Sexist attacks on Bristol Palin are hip, but not so questions about how Chelsea Clinton somehow became worth $15 million.
The termite-ridden foundations of the racial-spoils temple are crumbling, as they have dissolved earlier in our 19th- and early-20th-century past. Soon the entire rotten edifice will collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions and illiberal prejudices.
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