Silly Little Country

"America's Half-Blood Prince" by Steve Sailer

This is long overdue, and I won't call it a review, rather an encouragement that others read it.
I cannot promise that my citations are in the final version: I am finally reading and citing an early pre-release but it is quite brilliant, as one would expect from Steve Sailer.
Steve is writing an exegesis of Obama's "Dreams of Race and Inheritance" (to which he makes page references).

In modern America, society encourages white males to
invest their tribalist emotions in spectator sports, and strongly
sanctions anyone so gauche as to take ethnocentric pride in
their race (unless they can qualify as a certified oppressed
ethnicity such as Irish, Jews, Armenians, or whatever).
In contrast, the public schools, academia, and the media
all endorse and inculcate feelings of race loyalty among blacks
and other minorities. For instance, a survey of 2000 high school
juniors and seniors recently discovered that the three most
famous non-Presidents in American history are now Martin
Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman, with Oprah
Winfrey in seventh, two spots ahead of Thomas Edison.
This racial disparity in how society treats tribal pride is
rationalized on various grounds: minorities are powerless victims
of racism, they need constant stoking of their racial self-esteem
or they won't do their homework, and so forth and so on. In
reality, today’s “multiculturalism” industry is a self-reinforcing
perpetual motion machine. It’s a pyramid scheme offering
pleasant sinecures for the diversicrats at the top. It sucks in
young people, fills their heads with ideas ranging from the
useless to the malign, and then gives the glibbest ones jobs
entrapping the next generation in the system.
The terribly irony of Barack Obama’s life is that he was
taught the new multiculturalist ideology by his parents, who
were so representative of the egotistical Save the World Sixties
People who now preside over our Education-Media Industrial
Complex.
There was never a truer believer in this propaganda than
young Barack. Yet, what he truly wanted deep down, even
though he could never quite admit it to himself, was for his
parents to stop saving the world, come home, and just be his
mom and dad.

We in Canada encourage the same nonsense, including the opening of an "Afrocentric" school in Toronto recently, apparently with walls covered in Swahili slogans (how many languages are there in West Africa?).

Getting his point across is not the point of most of Sen.
Obama’s verbal efforts. In this respect, Obama is the exact
opposite of his long time mentor, Rev. God Damn America.
Wright is a master at distilling his meaning down to an agitating
phrase, such as “U.S. of K.K.K.” In contrast, there are no
soundbites in Dreams. Obama’s goal is more typically to induce
in the reader or listener a trance-like state of admiration of
Obama’s nuanced thoughtfulness.
Those opportunities, and the perils they portend, have
limited Obama’s actual literary output. While the verbal quality
of his best speeches and of his 2006 campaign book, The
Audacity of Hope, are well above the norm for American
politicians, that bar is set low. His literary reputation, therefore,
must rest on his enormous 1995 memoir.
From 2004 onward, Obama remolded himself into
Oprahma, the male Oprah Winfrey, the crown prince of niceness,
denouncing divisiveness, condemning controversy, eulogizing
unity, and retelling his feel-good life story about how he, the
child of a black scholar from Kenya and a white mother from
Kansas, grew up to be editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Beneath this bland Good Obama lies a more interesting
character, one that I like far better—the Bad Obama, a close
student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of
considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity
and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh consumed by
umbrage toward his mother’s people for being more successful
than his father’s people. (Waugh, the greatest satirical novelist
of 20th Century England, could never stop feeling sorry for
himself that he was born into a merely affluent, respectable
family rather than a rich, aristocratic one. Obama’s sad “story of
race and inheritance” is more complicated, but not terribly
dissimilar.)
That’s why Dreams from My Father reads like the
Brideshead Revisited of law school application essays.
When Obama briefly surfaced in the media in 1990 as the
first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review,
Random House gave him approximately $125,000 to write a
book. Originally, he intended to author a disquisition on race
relations, but the immaturity of his theorizing discouraged him:
“Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered
theories seemed insubstantial and insecure.” He turned instead
to writing about what he finds truly fascinating: his relatives and
himself.

He meets a part-black girl named Joyce, who defines
herself as “multiracial” because her beloved parents are as
variegated as Tiger Woods‘s parents. Like Tiger, she doesn't see
any need to choose one over the other by choosing only one
racial identity:
“Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me.
Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s
not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to
131
be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person.
No—it’s black people who always have to make everything
racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones
who are telling me that I can’t be who I am….” [p. 99]
Obama mocks:
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce.
They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage
and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided
black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice,
necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way
integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority
assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way
around. [pp. 99-100]
Then he explains:
I knew I was being too hard on poor Joyce. The truth was that I
understood her, her and all the other black kids who felt the
way she did. … I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s
exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question
my own racial credentials all over again. [p. 100]

That's a small sampling; Sailer write entertainingly, and has convinced me Obama does not (and I assume that is true as the public speeches are so leaden most of the time).
A couple more sentences as I go on:

A recurrent theme in Obama’s career is Power to the People gestures and Ivy League outcomes.

He moved to Chicago to work as an ethnic activist
to help the impoverished black community wring more money
and services from the government. That government money was
wrecking the morals of the housing-project residents never
comes up in Obama’s book. Numerous white moderates assume
that a man of Obama’s superlative intelligence must be kidding
when he espouses his cast-iron liberalism on race-related
policies, but they don’t understand the emotional imperative of
racial loyalty to him.

This is deeply unfortunate and having its effects. The (un)appointment of Van Jones is a symptom of this disease.
And hey, what about black politicians before now?

When he attended Occidental in Los Angeles, Obama had
also lived under a black mayor, Tom Bradley. Obama did not find
Bradley as thrilling a figure as Washington, probably because
Bradley was so much less racially divisive. Bradley won five
terms as mayor of Los Angeles from 1973-1992, a city that was
then only about 15 percent black. He put together multiracial
coalitions and tried to govern with a minimum of ethnic fuss.
Indeed, the most interesting question about Tom Bradley is why,
since then, have there been so few Tom Bradleys—conventional
politicians who “just happen to be black.” Los Angeles Times
columnist Patt Morrison wrote on October 2, 2008:
… [Mayor Bradley] regarded himself not as a black politician
but as a politician who happened to be black. Philip Depoian
worked with Bradley for about three decades, and he told me
that Bradley's "was probably the most integrated mind-set I've
ever come across -- he never looked at anybody from an
ethnic point of view." When a student visiting City Hall in 1979
asked the mayor whether L.A. voters had gotten "a black
Gerald Ford rather than a black John Kennedy," Bradley
replied, "I'm not a black this or a black that. I'm just Tom
Bradley."
Unsurprisingly, Obama doesn’t mention Bradley’s name in
Dreams.

Sailer has read Obama's "autobiography" carefully and applies his usually interesting reading!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:02 PM