Leonard Pitts had this to say in his column Tuesday, and he absolutely NAILS the implications of the increasing diversity of these United States:
The majority becomes the minority. And as that wave of babies moves toward adulthood, the nation moves toward a future in which it will only grow that much more difficult to “otherize” people for their dark skin and exotic names.
After all, President Martinez lies in an incubator even as we speak. President Chen has begun to toddle. President Muhammad is being toilet trained. And this idea that some of us are real Americans and some of us are Others is thereby doomed. It will probably not even work in 2012. It will definitely not work in years to come.
Oh, sure, this is likely to make some heads in the vast right-wing blogosphere explode, but really.
Naturally, this was occasioned by the latest bout of birtherism out of Arizona, which as we figured, just made the state look even more idiotic than it already looked (how did they even manage to recall Russell Pearce?). It's clear that Obama's opponents are just becoming more and more desperate.
Romney can't keep up with Mark Halperin, for heaven's sake. We have two Republican Congressional candidates who revert to virtual taking of the Fifth Amendment rather than admit they were wrong about something, or stupid about something. Donald Trump is reviving his birtherism again. It's not even that we're coming into the sillier season of summer. This is NUTS.
Pitts has more, about the whole Reverend Wright strategy (the wink-wink-nudge-nudge that was supposed to be a dog whistle, but was pitched low enough for us ALL to hear it and failed in that way), and about the trip to Hawai'i, but he frames it all in one line of a poem by Langston Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem renaissance who died 45 years ago this week:
“I, too, sing America.”
150 years after the Civil War, almost 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Right, Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele and Michelle Malkin notwithstanding (really, if LGBT people shouldn't be Republicans, should people who belong to groups that were the historic target of racism be Republicans?), just can't get over the fact that our president had
a black father.
Pitts again:
The conservatives who are still demanding a birth certificate they’ve already been provided, the ones taking applications for extremely literate African Americans, the ones operating on bad food, no sleep and a surplus of panic, would be well advised to understand this and adapt accordingly. Their former business model — appeal to the fears, anxieties and resentments of aging white voters — is literally dying.
Meantime, the future is being born, audible in every new baby’s cry. Langston Hughes would have understood that sound for what it is — America, being sung.
This is why we must reelect the President, take over the House and hold the Senate. It's why we have to recall Scott Walker. It's the possibility embodied in our motto,
Out of Many, One and only one political party really respects it.
Sorry that this might be a post-and-run diary, but I have errands to do and a lunch date, and this is too important to let wait.
8:59 AM PT: NOW I'm leaving to run errands and for a lunch date. I'll be back by probably 5:30 Eastern.
2:44 PM PT: I'm back now, and paying attention.