The Big Black Elephant in the Room

Taki's Magazine

VEBATIM POST

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The spooky spirits of Halloween season find us a mere year away from the next presidential election, and our rotting republic faces a scenario unthinkable a generation ago: Both the Republican and Democratic nominees may be black.

A recent Rasmussen Reports telephone survey showed Herman Cain edging Barack Obama 43-41 percent in a hypothetical matchup. Cain is crushing his Republican competitors on Gallup’s “Positive Intensity Score” among voters. Suddenly, the GOP has a big black elephant in the room. (I chose that metaphor instead of “800-pound gorilla” to prove I’m not racist.)

Since America is now a post-racial society where racists and anti-racists share a need to, you know, not compulsively make everything on Earth and its mother racial, we are now free to focus on each candidate’s policies rather than their skin color.

SIKE!

Americans dimly know that Obama’s about “Hope and Change” and Cain’s about some “9-9-9” thing, but the main topic has, as if violently uprooted from the ground and ripped sideways by nature’s hurricane forces, been shunted off to deciding which of these brothas is “authentically” black and which one is fakin’ it. Since elections are now waged and won on television, this is a reality show: America’s Next Blackest President or maybe Who Is the Blackest One of All? In a nation where it’s impossible to be too black but highly likely that at any given time, any given black person may not be quite black enough, next year may become a ratings bonanza, an intra-black race-baiting extravaganza—The Great Blackoff of 2012.

“Most black professionals who make a profession of being black are alarmed, ashamed, and disgusted with Cain.”

So who’s blacker?

In matters of pigmentation, of CMYK and grayscale values, it’s nolo contendere—Herman Cain is by far the blacker man. He obliterates Obama when it comes to the Brown Paper Bag Test. I’ve seen estimates that claim Obama is 50 percent white, over forty percent Kenyan Arab, and barely six percent black African. If that’s true, he’s not even a mulatto…he’s more like a mulittlo. This is all likely due to the fact that baby Herman’s fetus was the zero-admixture product of parents whose hues were likely as dark as roasted coffee beans, whereas Mr. Obama’s coal-burnin’ mama had skin as light as the fairest summer marshmallow.

In matters of acculturation, Cain was born in the Jim Crow South and once snuck a drink from a whites-only water fountain to see what it tasted like (the same). To counter accusations that he’s an “Oreo,” he refers to himself instead as “black-walnut ice cream.” His accent is naturally Southern Black Sharecropper, so he never needs to “turn up the black” in his inflection as Obama is wont to do. I suspect that if one were to stand near the man, one might even catch a faint whiff of turnip greens.

Whoopsy-daisy—almost forgot!—unlike Obama, Herman Cain is descended from black American slaves. Obama’s wife Michelle is also descended from slaves, so when the Obamas are having sex, there is at least a little slave blood involved, but let’s make it clear that Barack’s ancestors never rode with that there chain gang.

Cain doesn’t hesitate to make things racial and has aimed his fangs straight at Obama’s far paler jugular. He has said that Obama has “never been a part of the black experience in America,” that the establishment is “doubly scared that a real black man might run against Barack Obama,” and that Obama is not a “strong black man” in the MLK mold.

Oh no he di’int!

Whereas Obama reserves most of his cultural scorn for his white half, Cain cops an enjoyably disdainful tone toward mainstream black culture in the best tradition of Bill Cosby. He accuses blacks of being “brainwashed” by Democrats, says he “left the Democratic plantation a long time ago,” and asserts that he doesn’t “believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way.”

Most black professionals who make a profession of being black are alarmed, ashamed, and disgusted with Cain. Princeton Professor Cornel West’s huge mule teeth say that Cain needs to “get off the symbolic crack pipe” and admit that racism is still a huge problem in America. Elfin filmmaker Spike Lee Tweeted “NEGRO PLEASE” in response to Cain’s suggestion that Secret Service agents refer to him with the codename CORNBREAD. A caramelly hi-yella who goes by the single name of Touré suggested in TIME magazine that Cain might be the “Most Unctuous Black Man Alive.” Antique singer Harry Belafonte snorted that Cain “knows very little” and is but a “bad apple” in the nation’s Bountiful Basket o’ Blacks.

Amid the mayo-colored pundits who make a living demanding that blacks always have a strong communal racial identity while insisting that whites never have it, Bill Maher called Cain “stupid” while Rachel Maddow laughed. Gaseous MSNBC boar hog Ed Schultz suggested Cain’s existence performs a “disservice to his race” and that The Hermanator is a cunningly insincere shill who is only trying to tell “white Republicans who don’t like black folks…what they want to hear.”

Ed, if you were to die tomorrow, there’s not a black person on Earth who’d cry.

To these eternally dispensable people who make a living denouncing stereotypes, Herman Cain will never be anything more than a stereotype—a shuffling, shuck-and-jiving, self-loathing, whitey-appeasing, house-Negro, race-minstrel, Uncle Tom organ-grinder monkey-mascot sellout.

I’ve never been able to peek inside Herman Cain’s heart, so I’ll never know whether he’s motivated by agonized waves of racial self-hatred or whether he simply can’t be bothered to be lectured about precisely how he chooses to be black.

But when it comes to things such as skin color and having grown up in a segregated black environment, Herman Cain is a thousand Southern swamps blacker than Barack Obama.

The reason Cain catches so much hell from the anti-white blacks and the pro-black whites is because he doesn’t think like a black person is expected to think. His critics believe race is entirely a social construct, and despite his tar-colored skin, he simply doesn’t fit their model of what constitutes “black.” He may be black by birth and black by experience, but unlike Obama, he will never be “black” in the head.