Posted by
Michael on Friday, January 18, 2008 4:16:00 PM
Hitchens' recent column in the Wall Street Journal is similiar to his Slate piece on Barack Obama and race but
is more all-incomposing, bringing in Rudy Giuliani's Italianism and the
fact that his name ends in a vowel as well as Hillary Clinton's gender
in order to illustrate how nonsensical the entire notion of identity
politics is.
Take away paragraphs:
What
are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous
legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this
legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African
country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from
the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively
about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?
Far
from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us
anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have
effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of
categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or
subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it
with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost
infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who
believes that there are human races."
Hitchens really is brilliant.