Bag and Baggage 0
Bill Maxwell comments on cultural baggage and double standards at the St. Petersburg Times. A nugget:
I do not know of another group in this country whose history is viewed so cavalierly as being disposable.
Paradoxically, many white Southerners, even while channeling the defeated “Forget, Hell!” baggage of their slave-owning forebears, lead the drumbeat in telling the offspring of slaves to “move on” and forget all those generations of being human chattel.
Southerners, along with many Republicans nationwide, are not alone in rejecting black traits and patterns . . . .
He goes on to limp to what I find a weak, though not necessarily invalid, conclusion, arguing that President Obama’s victory in the presidential election resulted from his not showing signs of “black cultural baggage.”
I say “weak” because his discussion does not take into account the significant portion of the population which clearly rejects President Obama solely because he is not-white, those who cannot get past his not-white-ness to notice what he actually believes, says, and does.
See this column by Dick Polman; Polman was discussing voters’ willful ignorance, not race, but racial bigotry clearly forms part of the backdrop to the incidents he describes.
