John Samford:

I’ve noticed how the nastiest racism often comes when there is the least amount of physical difference and the greatest amount of intermarriage. Call it the “narcissism of small differences” if you like, but it’s there. Hence, you’ll have people of mixed heritage with blue eyes and blond hair talking about how much they hate white people, Saudis with facial features straight out of 1930′s Nazi cartoons against Jews making Nazi-style cartoons against Jews, and Hutus killing their Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda. Racial hatred tends to be the most intense when the cultures are nearly identical, the physical differences are minimal, and political climate in academe is monolithic.

I’ll concede that Barack Obama is black; he chooses to be black and he has married into black culture. And yet, I wish he could accept not only that he had a white mother and has a white grandmother, but that he is white just as much as he is black. When Senator Obama doesn’t seem to accept his whiteness as part of who he is, that bothers me. It has been said that familiarity breeds contempt. When I see Senator Obama’s campaign literature, I see his face with a cold hard sneer. I see contempt. That bothers me.

Based upon looks, I can’t tell the difference among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims from Bosnia; they probably can’t either. There was a time when being Serb, Croat, or Muslim didn’t mean very much in ordinary life. The Tito regime classified people and claimed to be multi-nationalistic. Imagine the horror of learning from a refugee that America’s racial classification system is far more intrusive than Yugoslavia’s racial classification system. America’s system of racial profiling has become a burden that must be shed if social progress is to be made in America. And yet, Senator Obama doesn’t want to stop racial profiling in America, certainly not in our census two years from now.

I’ve noticed how bigots will sometimes change their bigotry from one form of intolerance to another. Imagine a religion where people from all “races” come together and live in one happy family, only to feel the most virulent hatred toward all other religions. That is not a real change, merely a shift in the label of the official enemy. When a racial bigot changes his bigotry from racial intolerance to religious intolerance, he hasn’t changed who he is – he’s still a bigot. I’m reminded of Steve Dallas from the old Bloom County cartoon. Changing from a stupid conservative to a stupid liberal didn’t change who he really was. He was still a stupid jerk.