Racism Review has a very direct appraisal of the racist subtext of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s otherwise garbled twaddle. In “Sara Palin: Archetypal Whiteness,” one of the argument’s is that “her place on the ticket as been described as an effort to appeal to ‘women’ voters but this characterization misses the very real way that she represents and appeals to white women and men.” With little room for doubt, “The ‘hockey moms’ and ‘Joe six-packs’ she relentlessly invokes in her speeches are cultural references to white people.” In a vein similar to what we read on “Your Nation on White Privilege,” the author makes the further argument that the ascent to prominence of ignorant, intellectual fumblers points to a system predicated on white privilege. Not only is the gloss one of suburban, down home, middle-road ignorance and provincialism, the primary appeal is to racial archetypes in a barely muted attempt to reinforce racial ratred and convert it to votes.
It is virtually impossible to imagine a black person – man or woman – with that lack of verbal ability or basic grasp of knowledge who would be considered for the vice presidency. Black people have long recognized that to get ahead in a white world they have to work twice as hard as white people. The flip side of this is the kind of half-assed performance we’ve come to expect from white people in high office in this country, people who are so arrogant that they believe that they don’t need preparation, education, and hard work to succeed. Instead, they seem to cling to the comforting fiction that they are inherently blessed with some sort of “gift” of leadership that obsolves them from the need to read, speak and think in coherent sentences. The winking, smiling hubris of the unprepared yet supremely confident Palin, combined with the images she conjures of “hockey moms” and “Joe six-pack” makes her an archetype of whiteness.
My thanks to
http://secher-nbiw.blogspot.com/
for drawing my attention to this post.
ceaseless chatter