Obama Art: entry 5

Larry:

Well, as (I hope) neither a nice liberal nor a nasty racist -- and those are not exhaustive alternatives! -- I'll have to say that Obama's election as President doesn't resonate with me to anything like the extent it does with members of those categories. In fact, I'll confess that I find it quite unremarkable already that "black folks", even those who have done well, or have weird names, are only human too -- meaning that they have the same capacity for right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and corruption, as non-black folks -- which again I guess sets me apart from those categories. But I'd say that if we really want a "post-racial" society then we should practice it ourselves, and that would include judging Obama in the same way and using the same standards and modes of analysis, including cultural analysis, that we would any other politician of whatever colour or name. Among a lot of other things, I think this would mean seeing a little more than cultural trivia in Lewis' article -- e.g.: "But to realize the dangers implicit in an art (or politics) that sorts its subjects into class enemies and anointed ones requires a knowledge of history that Fairey seems not to possess. "