America's 'obsession' with the fact that Barack Obama - 'recipient of a tsunami of drool' - is black is embarrassing, writes Christopher Hitchens.
There's something pathetic and embarrassing about America's obsession with Barack Obama's race. To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say?
Senator Obama is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans, regardless of race, colour, creed, blah, blah, blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness, while his supporters - most especially the white ones - sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive.
Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an ageing and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been "our first black president".
Or perhaps not.
Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black" anyway? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president?
One can't exactly say that Obama himself panders to questions of skin colour. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race - Alan Keyes - accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves!
Obama's decision to be light- hearted - and perhaps light-skinned - about this was a milestone in itself. But are we not in danger of emulating Keyes's insane mistake every time we bang on about the senator's pigmentation? If you wanted a "black" president or vice- president so much, you could long ago have turned out en masse for Angela Davis - also the first woman to be on a national ticket - or for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. So, why didn't you? Could it have been the politics?
Last week's Obama victory in Iowa happened to be the week that the nation of Kenya - birthplace of his father - was convulsed by a political war that contained ghastly overtones of violent and sadistic tribalism. It would sound as absurd to a Kenyan to hear praise for a black candidate as it would sound to most of my European readers to hear a recommendation of a "great white hope".
A white visitor to Kenya might not be able to tell a Kikuyu from a Luo at a glance, but a Kenyan would have no such difficulty. The time is pretty much past, in the United States, when a Polish-American would not vote for a candidate with a German name or when Sharks and Jets were at daggers drawn, but this is all because (to borrow from philosopher Ernest Renan's definition of a nation) people agreed to forget a lot of things as well as to remember a number of things. So, which are we doing currently?
Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its website (http://www.tucc.org/about.htm).
Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant" - a man calling himself the Rev Dr Jeremiah A Wright jnr - this bizarre outfit describes itself as "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian", speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric", and sells creationist books.
Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Republican Party presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes. Nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.
All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Republican hopeful Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not understand the first thing about a theory of evolution by natural selection - in which he claims not to believe.
Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go quiet when Senator Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character.
The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. The sickly canonisation of Martin Luther King has led to a crude rewriting of history that obliterates the great black-and-white secularists who actually organised the march on Washington.
The white voters who subconsciously make the allowance that black folks sure love to hear their preachers are not only patronising their black brothers and sisters but also helping to empower white ministers or deacons who make the same pitch, from Jimmy Carter to Mike Huckabee.
The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, "uplift" and deceptive, optimistic wind-baggery.
Christopher Hitchens lives in Washington and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate magazine (www.slate.com), where this column originally appeared. His latest book is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve).
This article was distributed by the New York Times