Power and Politics - I am Not the Yellow Peril

The life and times of an Asian American activist who tells all the truth (and dishes news and analysis) but with a leftwards slant.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

White Liberal Guilt Overflows

Now that all the historic hope and change is incoming, I think it's okay to start making fun of it a bit - or at least the famous white liberals' responses to our mixed race President.

New York Mag, a magazine for younger white liberals, has a run down of things middle-aged white people at upper class white liberal periodicals did.
Then Leon Wieseltier revealed in the New Republic that the day after the election, he threw over his usual ponderous, academic, white-people hobbies in favor of doing spirited black-people things:
I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown's for fried green tomatoes.
I'm sure that you don't know anyone who tried to be black the night of or the day after all in the name of love and solidarity. Besides, as Maureen Dowd's mailman could tell you, "He's not yours. He's ours!"
Maureen Dowd was so excited when she observed blacks and whites "intermingling" in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the election that she decided to try it, too:
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president.

“Are you talking about the election?” I said brightly. “How do you feel?”
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
Yup, the first Asian American Tiger Woods POTUS.

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