Posts of the Day

Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Chris Matthews “I forgot Obama was black” snafu:

The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance–you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don’t know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white.

I’m put back in the mind of the The Wire, when Slim Charles tells Avon that it really doesn’t matter that our wars are based on a lie. Once we’re fighting, we fight on that lie until the end. I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on Obama’s relationship to blackness, because they know so little about black people. It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you.

And here’s Matt Steinglass on why liberals are not in a good mood:

At this point, a certain number of those reasonable, mature, grown-up younger people who’ve backed the Democrats this far are going to start reassessing their understanding of political reality. If you give up your purism in the interests of pragmatic accomplishment, and spend 10 or 20 years working towards that pragmatic accomplishment, and you get this close to that pragmatic accomplishment only to have the people who could make it a reality drop the thing and back away because they’re scared to do it…you start to think maybe those people aren’t actually going to get you any pragmatic accomplishments. Ever. You start re-evaluating your feelings about Naomi Klein. You start wondering whether you might perhaps accomplish more by pulling a black mask over your face, picking up a baseball bat, and charging into the AHIP building yelling “here’s your public option” and smashing shit up trying to nudge the Overton window a bit further left.