This is a follow up to jhecht's recommended diary on race, Colin Powell's endorsement, and the miscreants Buchanan and Limbaugh.
Just a brief recap.
Yesterday Limbaugh mocked the idea that the Powell endorsement wasn’t about race:
I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with.
[More after the jump . . .]
Buchanan made almost identical comments on MSNBC:
look, would Colin Powell be endorsing Obama if he were a white liberal Democrat?
And then there was George Will’s opinion (unsupported by, ahem, social science data):
it seems to me if we had the tools to measure we'd find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he's black for every one he loses because he's black because so much of this country is so eager, a, to feel good about itself by doing this
How can Buchanan, Will and Limbaugh get away with these specious statements? Because, my friends, conservatives think they alone make political decisions without relying on race.
"Race????" (They will ask you.) "What is that???? I don’t even see race" (they will tell you).
They don't see that they, themselves, are "raced."
They see themselves as "without race." Non-racial. It’s the others, the colored people, the bi-and-multi-racial folks, who’ve got the "race" in this race.
These privileged white pundits (PWPs) can ignore race, they think, because in being white "race" just doesn't come up. There's white, and then there's "nonwhite."
They see themselves as the standard. The norm. Everything else deviates from the standard/norm. Everyone else who deviates from the standard/norm "uses race," but they don't.
They don't get it.
PWPs don't see that their race has conferred upon them -- and daily confers upon them -- innumerable advantages. (See Peggy McIntosh's classic article for a list of these privileges.)
Among the biggest of these privileges is:
If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
Here's a question for Limbaugh, Buchanan and Will. If Gen. Colin Powell declares that there was no "racial issue" involved in his endorsement of Barack Obama, will you believe him???
I thought not.
Signed,
(white person who recognizes that she is both raced and privileged)