Blackness becomes meaningless

Kathleen Parker:

In the politics of race, black and white isn't so black-and-white anymore.

Rather than a matter of skin tone and pigmentation, race has become a question of blackness and whiteness -- a calculation of attitude, experience and cultural identity.

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Our first hint that the race card had found a new game was when Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "our first black president."

"Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

At the risk of contradicting Morrison, but for the sax, those are white-trash tropes. Toss in a banjo and you've got Deliverance.

Nevertheless, Morrison's title stuck and Clinton subsequently was hailed as "First Black President" at the 2001 Congressional Black Caucus Annual Awards Dinner.

But if Clinton was the first black president, what would Barack Obama be?

As a matter of DNA, Obama is obviously blacker than Clinton, despite being a very-distant cousin of Dick Cheney. But, born to a white mother and a Kenyan father -- raised in Hawaii and Indonesia -- Obama doesn't quite fit the profile of black-in-America.

It didn't help when civil rights leader and former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young said recently that Bill Clinton is "every bit as black as Barack."

Joking, he added, "He's probably gone with more black women than Barack."

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When Bill Clinton can be considered black, but questions are raised about Obama's or Bill Cosby's blackness, the term has become redefined to mean something other than skin pigment and DNA. The redefinition is part of the corruption of the civil rights movement. Rush Limbaugh has renamed the NAACP the NAALCP because the group only supports liberal blacks. The term "down with the struggle" is used to define those who support the liberal agenda and the victimhood tropes of the old leadership. It has become a shakedown scheme that plays on white guilt rather than an organization that is trying to lift up blacks. Where is the effort of the NAACP to save the black family? Where is their effort to support school choice?