President Obama’s second term cabinet is being criticized for not being diverse enough. Clearly, for example, victims of American drone attacks would much rather get killed by a secretary of defense who was African-American or Latino than an Ivy league-educated white male.
Minority Monsters
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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In the United States, frank discussion of race is sent through he same delusion-blender as discussion on abortion, which is why neither issue ever gets resolved. Everyone in Obama’s cabinet is the exact same color: green, the same green that money is. And they’re all on the same point on the gender-spectrum: that point where power and control are what really get the juices flowing.
If you go through the old textbooks, you can see it defined as sadism. But that’s an old-fashioned term that’s fallen out of favor. I wonder what would happen if anyone who has ever been a CEO or similar level executive on any company was barred from public office.
And let’s not forget, the minority groups that the non-white-male cabinet member is a member of will, of course be thrown under the bus when it comes to actual policy. . . and if you threaten political reprisal in response, faux liberals and Serious People will screech like stuck pigs.
After all, the rightwing democrats will say, the cabinet is diverse.
Tokenism: the gift that keeps on giving.
The other issue, of course, is that racism in the United States is not over by any means, it’s just shifting to other brown people. In 20 years, I’m sure we’ll have some new group to replace all the Muslims and subcontinental Asian people that we’re being conditioned to be scared to death of right now.
The problem with the shift, however, is that you end up with the previously discriminated group having a period of lack-of-credibility. Twenty years ago, if you discriminated against a gay man, you had the opening of a good story at the bar after work. You do it now, and you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of a whole lot of court papers.
Still, gay people get discriminated against all the time. But in the public’s mind, gay discrimination is over. So when someone appoints a gay man, a lot of people have a “why do they keep bringing this shit up” reaction. The gays have equality (goes the thinking), so why is being gay still getting them special advantages?
So government will continue to appoint black people/gay people/whatever people, and leverage those distinctions. Why? Because it helps government avoid the collective population from figuring out: Hey, that gay guy, that black woman, that left-handed albino in the wheelchair? They’re all fucking assholes. They’re all prostitutes for big business and special interests. Why the fuck aren’t these people representing us?
And the reason for why they don’t represent the majority? If you’re gay and of a certain age, you understand what it’s like to be gay and hate it because people call stupid, lame things “gay.” If you’re black and of a certain age, you recall quite clearly — from a first-person perspective — when there was no such thing as “nigga” and “nigger.” It was just “nigger” and it was filled with hate every time. If you’re in a wheelchair, you still contend with every other frickin’ building having stairs. The New York subway is an ordeal if you’re in a wheelchair. The libraries, the museums, almost all the public places make you slot yourself into a little freight elevator so you can get in.
And unless you’re a saint, about a million times in your life, you’ve promised yourself that if you ever get power, you’re going to make everyone pay for every indignity. And then you start trying to isolate yourself from your own group, because you don’t want to have to pay back the debt of all that collective anger that allowed you, in part, to get to power.
As an unemployed person who is about to go down the crapper, I prefer the Secretary of Shoving People Down the Crapper to be at least one kind of Bi. It will console my dying brain as I lie freezing in the gutter while Harry Reid, John Boehner and Obama negotiate the next Democratic give-a-way for no reason.
Thanks for this well-deserved slap to the face of the self-described left who take no issue with atrocities committed by the products of their diversity projects.
Good old Glenn and the fallacy of the un-excluded middle. Just because I think we have far, far, more pressing issues to deal with then drone strikes DOES NOT mean I take “no issue” with them, in point of fact.
Ted,
I keep running into a database connection error problem. Here’s the link to fix the problem.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-error-establishing-a-database-connection-in-wordpress/
Whimsical, nonsensical again.
Despite its brevity, the meaning of my statement seems beyond your grasp and over your head.
Minorities in leadership fail to make better lives even for the minorities they claim to represent.
Clear enough for you?
Glenn — I believe you hit a nerve.
Quick sex changes and painting with various tints are in order for Mr Obama’s cabinet, so that criminal polices can be launched by a groups that better represents ethnic and gender diversity in the US….
Henri