Steve Sailer, a racial-purity advocate of the subtle-like-a-brick variety, has an Obama smear piece running in the American Conservative. From it, we are evidently to conclude that Obama may (or may not) decide to follow his heart (rather than his head) and give full rein to his racial identity conflicts and sell-out white people:
A racial group is a large extended family, and Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.
For the few willing to read all 442 pages, he offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger. It’s a bitter counterweight to the sunny hopes so widely invested in his candidacy as the man whose election as president would somehow help America finally “transcend race.”
Actually, no. That’s not what Obama’s book is primarily about, and contrary to Sailer’s rather smug intimation that he is one of the few who could actually get through it, Polimom has also read Dreams From My Father. I found it to be a fast, gripping read that described, primarily, two things:
A young person’s journey to understand — and place — himself in the context of our society, and that same young man’s arrival at the destination most of us (though not all) usually reach: the discovery that reality rarely matches one’s idealized childhood gods. Obama’s personal journey is unique only in that it exposed him to our country’s complex, layered societal dicta in a way that very few are.
Mr. Sailer not only chooses to miss the point of the book, he spends over 4,000 words in the doing. Furthermore, his article is full of misrepresentations and innuendo.
For instance:
In Obama’s eighth grade class picture, at least seven and perhaps as many as ten of the 21 students are non-white. Brian Charlton of the AP threw some cold water on Obama’s adolescent alienation fantasies: “He was known as Barry Obama, and with his dark complexion and mini-Afro, he was one of the few blacks at the privileged Hawaiian school overlooking the Pacific. Yet that hardly made him stand out. Diversity was the norm at the Punahou School, one of the state’s top private schools.” His classmates say he was a popular and cheerful figure, the opposite of the tortured personality described in Dreams, in which he rationalizes his teenage drug use as “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .”
When Barack was in high school in the later 1970s, no whites held Hawaii’s top elected jobs as U.S. senator or governor. Indeed, as his father pointed out in a 1963 newspaper interview, whites were sometimes the victims of discrimination in Hawaii. Obama also fails to note the charming local custom of calling the last day of school “Kill Haole Day.”
Like Obama, many Hawaiian residents are the products of mixed marriages: in 1956-57, interracial marriage rates ranged from 22.0 percent for professionals to 43.5 percent for farm workers. There’s not much of a one-drop-of-blood rule for defining racial membership in Hawaii that mandated that Obama call himself black and only black.
However, such helpful elucidation, from both Charlton and Sailer, doesn’t change the kids in that picture.
This extremely diverse group includes exactly one who looks like Obama… yet Sailer smoothly, conveniently sails right past that.
It is, however, in his conclusion that the man who recently wrote at VDare that Barack Obama is a “wigger” finally hits his stride:
In his head, Obama surely knows that his becoming the world’s biggest man would be bad for the work ethic of Kenyans, some of whom would assume America would support them. But in his heart, none of that matters.
For Americans wondering about his fitness to be president, his latest Kenyan trip symbolizes the inner duality beneath his dapper exterior. He possesses one of the finest minds of any politician, but his personal passions routinely war against his acknowledging unwelcome truths, even to himself.
Whether his head or heart would prove stronger in the White House remains unknown, perhaps even to Barack Obama.
Sailer thus hopes to leave the (white) reader concerned that Barack Obama might ultimately succumb to his heart and betray the foolish, guilt-laden whites who blindly, mistakenly, fell for his smooth glibness — or, as Matthew Yglesias describes it:
We’re seriously supposed to worry that if Obama becomes president his “heart” may prove stronger than his “head” and he’ll sell us all down the river to become a corrupt East African big man? Really? We also learn that Obama is “nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race” — i.e., Barack hates white people.
Just so.
* * * * *
Via memeorandum, there are others writing about Sailer’s article, including Andrew Sullivan (who found it “provocative”), and Michael van der Galien, who notices some of those less-than-subtle undertones.
Having found your site via Sailer’s and Sullivan’s, I would hope you would read these two articles, which were mentioned on Sailer’s site previously, before being so dismissive of the racial angle to Obama’s story:
Story 1
Story 2
Sorry, one of the links doesn’t seem to work.
One more time.
Strange, it goes to the site but doesn’t go to the story. Here is the link. Just cut and paste it together:
http://
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23383304-details/A+drunk+and+a+bigot+-+what+
the+US+Presidental+hopeful+HASN%27T+said+about+his+father…/article.do
Note: I’ve repaired the link in the prior comment. -Polimom
johnson — Thank you for the links.
Before commenting in response, I have a question: have you read Dreams From My Father?
No, I have not. I plan on checking it out shortly as soon as I have the time. Attending a university, I have trouble finding a much time for non-academic reading. Sailer has mentioned that Obama’s book is well-written though it has a “difficult prose style” which may make it less accessible to media types looking for something quick and easy. He seemed to be pretty impressed overall and I think he believes Obama’s books are worth checking out. As much as you might think Sailer is hard on Obama, I think Sailer finds him quite fascinating.
I don’t want to give you the impression I particularly dislike Obama either. I think he is certainly a talented politician and speaker. I also certainly think he may have went through much more inner conflict than he let on over the years. I’m generally conservative, but I would much prefer Obama to Clinton if we have to have another Democratic president.
I think you misrepresent Sailer. Sailer is not a Jared-Taylor-style white separatist. He believes there are real cognitive differences between races and I think he is correct. I don’t think we will witness the day when African-American will be as successful as Ashkenazic Jews, for example. But Sailer also believes white separatism is unrealistic given western civilization’s acceptance of romantic love. Sailer advocates something called “citizenism.” Citizenism basically holds that Americans should, as a nation, put their own interests ahead of those of would-be immigrants. I’ve never heard Sailer advocate that whites should not marry non-whites.
In any event, are Obama’s books as good as I hear? What am I missing?
Wow. Johnson’s comments are the clearest cut case of damning with praise I’ve seen in a while.
johnson —
We clearly have a different view of Mr. Sailer. I appreciate your candor, though.
Re: your links — the reason I wondered whether you’d read the book is that the second of them (the one that’s most overtly attacking Obama), in spite of all its breathless “discoveries”, actually contained nothing that was not easily discerned from the book itself. The only bit of “new” info, in fact, was that Obama Sr. had lost both his legs. (If it was in Dreams From My Father, it didn’t make an impression on me.)
I agree with you, though, that Sailer is fascinated by Obama. Many people are — including me, I suppose, although I’m more captivated by the impact his personal history, and person, are having on racial conversations in this country.
But where you seem to see Sailer being hard on him, I see thinly veiled innuendo — more insidious, and less honest than a frontal attack.
As far as whether the two books are good? or what you’re missing? Certainly that’s subjective. Personally, I found “Dreams” far more interesting. Neither of them are difficult prose, though, in my view.
Sailer has written explicitly that he thinks people should marry whom they love regardless of race. Your “racial-purity advocate” bit then is just a smear.
Jim — you’re right. I simplified far too much, and the terminology I used is misleading.
I disagree profoundly with Sailer’s basic foundational premise: that race (i.e. racially-specific DNA) determines intelligence, or otherwise reliably and scientifically defines a group — and that policy should reflect this. Since I view intergenerational cultural / social / anthropological norms as the driving forces, I have a great deal of trouble with his writing. The moralistic guidance he thinks the “lesser” groups need, in particular, grates on me.
This article on Obama, though, ticked me off specifically because of Sailer’s continual injection of “…and then he might…” and “…what if he…” innuendo. Effectively, he implies that Obama will somehow be unable to resist being drawn into the culture of his paternal African family — to play the “Big Man” — to the detriment of Americans.
He additionally plays on the underlying American racial tensions by suggesting that Obama rejects his white family, or that Obama fails to see the flaws in his father. That does not come through from the book at all.
“…I view intergenerational cultural / social / anthropological norms as the driving forces…” Doesn’t this imply you think blacks as group *do* have lower average intelligence, you only disagree with the cause being DNA? Be honest with yourself man. Follow your thoughts through.
Meanwhile, your smear is traveling ’round the world.
No, it doesn’t.
Jim, I’ve met far too many stupid white people to hit your crack pipe.
And I’m amused by your concern for Sailer’s reputation. Relatively speaking, I was downright complimentary.
You wrote that you disagree with Sailer that “race determines intelligence” but instead “view intergenerational cultural social anthropological norms as the driving forces.” Driving forces of what?
Your comment about having met stupid white people: do you understand the meaning of average?