Down On Mrs. Clinton's Plantation

Power Line today cites some interesting comments from Shelby Steele on Hillary Clinton's recent pandering to the black community (highlights by HazZzmat):

Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton's MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill--white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton's real insult to blacks--one far uglier than her plantation metaphor--is to value them only for their sense of grievance.

Mrs. Clinton's husband was a master of this alchemy, and his presidency also illustrated its greatest advantage. Once black grievance is morphed into liberal power, it need never be honored. President Clinton notoriously felt black pain, won the black vote, and then rewarded blacks with the cold shower of welfare reform. And here, now, is Mrs. Clinton sidling up to the trough of black grievance, eyes wide in expectation, but also a tad contemptuous. It is hard to fully respect one's suckers.

This excerpt is so good that there's really no point in commenting much further, except to state that Wonker has been beating this drum for at least 30 years to no effect. It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one there. Does it really make a sound? We find it hard to imagine that the African-American community has not finally gotten completely fed up with being played for suckers since at least 1954. We suspect many of them have. But the fear of shunning, the same fear shared by artists, writers, and journalists, is apparently still far, far to strong for them to stage a revolt and move to the other side where'll they'll be more than respected and more than welcome. Social conditioning is an amazing thing, in that, more often than not, it prevents entire ethnic and interest groups from acting in their own best interests, thus perpetuating the cause of their own oppression.