Just when you thought we had hit rock bottom with the light skin vs. dark skin intra-racial debate, the National Review has begun to dig.
According to the conservative Republican publication, there are real blacks, the ebony-skinned folks who speak with broken diction and are prone to wearing big cowboy hats, and then there are fake blacks, the lighter-complexioned Ivy League educated types.
Liberals prefer to vote for the fake blacks, (such as President Obama according to the article), and would prefer to give authentic blacks (such as Herman Cain) a run for their money.
The National Review says Herman Cain is catching hell from liberals because he’s authentically black, unlike the fake black President Barack Obama.
Here’s exactly how the National Review author noted the difference:
“Yet Cain also wins greater scrutiny, not exemption, because he is black — or at least a certain sort of black. In addition to his conservatism, his voice, bearing, grammar and diction, even his showy black cowboy hat, bother liberals in much the same way that Joe Frazier was not Muhammad Ali and Clarence Thomas was not Anita Hill.
“Black authenticity, as defined by Southern mannerisms and darker complexion, amplified by conservatism or traditionalism, earns liberal unease. Rarely has anyone been so candid in confessing just that unease as were Sen. Harry Reid and Joe Biden in their backhanded praise of Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. I think Reid (“light-skinned,” “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”) and Biden (“I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”) both were trying to say at the time that Obama did not look or sound like someone analogous to Herman Cain.
“Yet most Americans are far more concerned with authenticity than with color or diction, and Cain is nothing but authentic. His speech and manner are as genuine as Barack Obama’s are forced and often phony. His everyman persona and appeal to the working classes scare the liberal elite, in much the same way that Sarah Palin’s did.”
The publication adds that Obama hasn’t had the fullness of the black experience, and that also makes him a fake black person.
“Cain is authentically African-American and of an age to remember the Jim Crow South,” notes Victor Davis Hanson. “Obama, the son of an elite Kenyan and a white graduate student, came of age as a Hawaiian prep-schooler, whose civil-rights credentials are academic.”
Apparently, President Barack Obama’s skin tone, Harvard education, and flawless diction make him a fake black person.
This isn’t the first time the president’s blackness has been called into question by a major white publication.
In 2007, Time magazine’s Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates laid bare the fact that whites view light-skinned (or biracial) and ebony-skinned blacks differently.
“Obama is biracial, and has a direct connection with Africa. He is articulate, young and handsome. He does not feel the need to yell “Reparations now!” into any available microphone,” Coates wrote. “But this is a double-edged sword. As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it’s also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man.”
If Herman Cain survives the trickle of white women who claim that he sexually harassed them decades ago, this could very well be the first time in American politics that two black men will square off for the highest office in the land.
When casting their votes, perhaps blacks need to pay close attention to the issues that most affect them, and skin tone and dialect shouldn’t be under consideration — regardless of what white America thinks.
