Campbell Brown over at CNN made an excellent point recently about the perception among a vast swath of ignorant Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and the fact that such a staggering number of people view this as the primary reason to vote against him. Brown asks a simple question: Even though he's clearly not a Muslim, should it really matter if he were?
The answer, obviously, is no it shouldn't, but the reality: Yes it will. And that really says something about our country. Even though a majority of voters appear prepared to release their prejudices long enough to elect a black man as president, this nation still has a long way to go. A long, long way.
This election has been infected with blatant overtones of racism from the beginning, and it hasn't always been about black-and-white politics. Consider some recent comments from John McCain at a campaign rally, when he responded to a voter who declared she wouldn't vote for Obama because he's an Arab (never mind the fact that if he were an Arab, as opposed to an American, the Constitution would bar him from running for president in the first place):
No ma'am, no ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about. He's not, thank you.
Think about what McCain is saying here: No, is Obama not an Arab, he's a decent family man. Maybe it was subconscious, maybe it was unintentional, or maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but it sure seems like he's making a sharp distinction between Arabs and decent family men. Sure, you can say he's just practicing good politics, and that's exactly the type of distinction the people who attend his rallies would expect him to make. Fine. But then what does that say about the Republicans who attend his rallies?
As Campbell noted in her essay, it shouldn't matter which religion you practice, just as it shouldn't matter if you're black, white, Asian or an alien from Planet Gargamel (as long as you were born in America!) And although Americans might soon pass a milestone in seeing beyond Obama's skin color, clearly many are still hung up on the fact that he could be a Muslim.
The elephant in the room in this case is Sept. 11, and the Americans who were killed by Arab terrorists. The argument goes, I guess, that those hijackers were a representation of all Arab culture, and therefore all Arabs are not to be trusted. But using that logic, I could say that Timothy McVeigh -- a white, American domestic terrorist who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing -- is a representation of all white Americans. Does that mean I should vote against John McCain?
Maybe I'll do just that.
No comments:
Post a Comment