Letters to the Editor
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Joan Walsh is proud to sit at the black table. Even if everyone there leaves.
Salon Fan, people return to Salon is similar to the reason they rubberneck at car wrecks. There's a certain fascination to see how much farther Walsh will link the fortunes of the site with her racial obsessions. And despite Walsh's distancing language (very similar to Clinton's "as far as I know"), it is definitely her own obsession with Obama.
Walsh is always challenging us to "discuss" race relations in America, but she never uses anything Clinton says on race as the springboard. It's always some little thing Obama (or his wife) said, and for a very long time, it was Obama's background or simply his looks. At the same time, Walsh spends almost no time discussing Obama's policy initiatives that do not touch on race. At one point she even ran newreel clips from the sixties of black men getting beaten, chiding him for not being more like a sixties racial activitist.
I don't know much about Walsh, but it's hard not to engage in dime-store psychology (and only fair, because that's what she's doing to us). In college, a time she refers to in her column today, there were two kind of white girls that had black boyfriends. There were those who happened to have. Those girls genuinely liked their men, which relaxed the issue of the racial divide. Actually liking someone has a lot of power.
And then there those girls who seem compelled to have to have a black boyfriend, for whom the skin tone rather than the person seemed to matter most. Like Walsh, this second set of white girls had constant complaints about their men, constantly harped on racial slights perceived or otherwise, reduced the relationship to black-white.
Obama bugs Walsh, just bugs her. It's interesting, if uncomfortable, to watch. Walsh wants to be the white girl bravely sitting at the black table. But Obama is the black kid who sits at all the tables. She wants to get him back to the black table so she can sit with him, and give him a piece of her mind on race relations.
Like, why doesn't he have a white girlfriend?