Kathleen Parker Forgets Key Rule of Journalism

When you’re in a hole, don’t keep digging.

Kathleen has a sad because she’s gotten pissed off e-mails from “self-identifying African Americans” politely, and some not so politely, disagreeing with her recent declaration that Obama is our first female president.

Kathleen explains.

Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. It’s a column, not a dissertation. And my thesis, bouncing off the notion that Bill Clinton was the first black president, is serious only insofar as you really think Clinton is black.

Yes, because the purpose of having a column is so that I can say anything I want without the benefit of fact checking or backing up my opinions. And can’t you guys take a joke?

Kathleen keeps digging.

But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

As my Post colleague Jonathan Capehart wrote on the PostPartisan blog—and explained to me in a telephone conversation—black men are held to a different standard than whites. They are practiced in keeping their emotions under wraps. They can’t “go off,” as some have urged Obama to do in response to the gulf oil spill.

I hadn’t thought of it this way, but I take Jonathan and others at their word that it’s a fact of life for African American men.

Oh, Kathleen. Kathleen has no race. As a member of the (for now) dominant (in this country) white race, she, therefore, is of NO race in particular and therefore sees the world in a crystalline pure state unencumbured by the cloudy and distorted Lens of Race. And, as a person of no race she therefore cannot summon the imagination to, so to speak, walk a mile in the shoes of the possessors of race. So it’s not her fault, LAY OFF ALREADY.

But there’s more.

You’ll have to take me at my word when I say that I don’t view Obama exclusively as a black man—no matter what he said on his census form. Not only is he half-white, but also he has managed to transcend skin color, at least from where I sit.

As a sidebar, there’s another reason I don’t see him as only black. He is my cousin. I had intended to save this nugget for a future column, but now seems as good a time as any to brag.

I learned of this surprising family link when a cousin conducting genealogical research contacted me recently: “And by the way, did you know you’re kin to Barack?”
Apparently, we are descended of brothers whose parents—Johann Pieter Straub and Anna Maria Barbara Hoffman—emigrated from Germany to the colonies about 1733. According to the family grid, Obama and I seem to be eighth cousins once removed.

See, assholes? He’s family. Family. You can say whatever you want about family, even call your half-black cousin a girlie man when it suits you. So given that opening, let’s now let Kathleen return to that topic.

Consider: In the days leading up to the president’s Oval Office address about the gulf crisis, there was a lot of talk about the “style” of Obama’s response. On MSNBC, Donny Deutsch argued that he “just doesn’t emote.”

Many people seemed to have a hankering for one particular emotion: Not the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” kind but the “Take-BP-Behind-the-Woodshed-and-Make-Them-Pay” kind. They wanted an action figure in the hyper-masculine mode, not George W. Bush but the Terminator.

In fits and starts, Obama had given it to them. He wanted to know “whose ass to kick,” he told us. He wanted them to “plug the damn hole.” Press secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that in discussions with Obama he, indeed, had “seen rage from him.”

Then the president gave his Oval Office speech. And the collective reaction was, “That’s it?! Where’s the outrage?!?!”

Psst. Kathleen. Over here, behind the woodshed. You forgot to remind us just where your girlie cousin Barack channeled that outrage. A lot more effective than bellowing into a microphone is what I think.

Posted by marindenver on 07/03/10 at 11:59 AM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Barack Obama • Editorials • Our Stupid Media •

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I’ve despised this hacktastic bitch ever since she wrote about wanting to run down war protesters with her SUV.

Comment by Oblomova on 07/03/10 at 01:10 PM

As my Post colleague Jonathan Capehart wrote on the PostPartisan blog—and explained to me in a telephone conversation—black men are held to a different standard than whites.

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In a separate, private email, Jonathan literally floored me with his revelation that black people enjoy their Blackness so much that many have elected to be black all over, even underneath their clothes.

Obama has transcended race. Or, more accurately, the white parts of Obama have transcended the other bits, as evidenced by the lighter coloration of his palms and foot-soles—as though his Inner Whiteness had overthrown the remotest outposts of his body, with a Master Plan to progressively advance from the edges to the center, one offensive patch of pigment at a time.

Like many individuals of my generation, I have ruthlessly scrutinized my thoughts and actions at every turn for fugitive traces of unconscious racial prejudice. But I can confidently state without any shadings or caveats that I have never once thought of myself—or any other white person, for that matter—as “white.”

I could go on, but I won’t. Her ditzy cluelessness is too easy to imitate. It would almost be charming in a naive, childlike way, except that it isn’t.