Aren't We All a Little Black?

In the Words of FQB
"Do I have to pick Caucasian? Or can I just choose any mountain range that I have a strong affinty for. O.K., I'm Poconoian."

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. My internet connection has been a little hinky and as you can see by the strange double post I have been having a little trouble with the whole blogging experience.

Today there was an interesting post on Reason.com's Hit & Run. It was entitled "Barak Obama doesn't care about the Black People." Scroll down a bit to find it.

In it it details how Al Sharpton won't blindly embrace Barak Obama just because he is black (or is he?). He is quoted as asking "what's his embrace of our agenda." While I agree people should never just blindly vote for a cantidate just because of their skin color (or party affiliattion) it seems odd that Sharpton is the person who is best able to define what the black agend consists of. This type of mind-set reminds me of a segment I saw on the Colbert Report (02/08).

This whole argument just higlights how rediculus the idea of one "black culture" has become. Check out Debra Dickerson's bizaar reasoning behind her assertion that Obama is not black.
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_report/index.jhtml

It seems to me that those blacks that claim to decsend from slaves are racist against the more newly arrived black immigrants. Is it because these new immigrants spend less time wallowing in self pity? Whether Sharpton won't support Obama because of his ethnicity or because of his policies matters little. Sharpton wants to believe that he represents the "true African-Americans", you know the ones that politicians should pander to, and becomes defensive when a person with a "different cultural experience" threatens to move black issues past the age-old policies of laying on the guilt trip and begging for hand outs. Surely Obama's success represents a chance for African-Americans (of which Obama is truly one of having been born in America to parents from Kenya) finally acheive that long elusive dream. More power to them and hopefully men like Sharpton will finally become the fringe of African-American culture instead of its leading figure. [A prtion of this text is a copy-and-past from a post I left on the Reason.com comment page.]

Hopefully, black voters (by this I mean all black voters, not just the ones included in Sharpton and Dickerson's narrow defininitons) will go to the polls and vote for the person they most want to be the the nation's President. If they do this in large enough numbers then perhaps their feelings of disenfranchisement will be well and truly put to rest.