Just Walk Away From Ferraro

Just walk away. I don't care if her comments have been racist or offensive or ridiculous. There is no more dangerous narrative for Obama than the potent combination of "you are benefiting unfairly from affirmative action" and "you are playing the race card."

This repeats a pattern in modern American life that Obama has been skillful enough and lucky enough to evade so far. The pattern is that someone says something that is just racist enough to be offensive to most Black people, but just defensible enough that White people--who are feeling defensive about race already--don't think it is sufficiently proven to be racist. They identify, whether consciously or not, with the person accused of racism. They vote their identity.

I thought it was going to happen in South Carolina and it didn't, but that may only be because of the Black vote in South Carolina. It may be that in fact it partly explains Clinton's success in California and New Jersey and Massachusetts and Ohio. It doesn't matter that the MSM in this instance has concluded that the Clintons bungled those attacks--they still have an impact. There are still plenty of people out there, like Ferraro, honestly convinced that Obama played the race card.

So all the calls for Obama to fight back and be more aggressive are reasonable if your comparison is John Kerry being swiftboated, but they don't take into account that a Black man cannot risk looking emotional or irrational or militant, especially on race issues. Yes, I know those are code words, that this is an unfair double standard, and it wounds my soul to have to say this. But Black people who have succeeded in mainstream America have mostly had to learn this lesson. This country is not perfect, and sacrificing a historic campaign on the altar of racial righteousness will not make it so. Walk away.