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Example: [Collected via e-mail, July 2009] ANNE WORTHAMAnne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois StateUniversity and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University 'sHoover Institution. She is a member of the American SociologicalAssociation and the American Philosophical Association. She has been aJohn M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a DistinguishedAlumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity inHigher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group ofintellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer's television series, AWorld of Ideas. The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has beenpublished in his book, A World of Ideas.Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Studyof Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness istransformed into political strategies and policy issues. She haspublished numerous articles on the implications of individual rights forcivil rights policy and is currently writing a book on theories of socialand cultural marginality.Recently, she has published articles on the significance ofmulticulturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics ofvictimization and the social and political impact of politicalcorrectness. Shortly after an interview in 2004, she was awarded tenure.This article by her is something-special.Fellow Americans,Please know: I am Black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not votefor Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president.Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a Blackpresident to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worthliving. I do not require a Black president to love the ideal of America.I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is nosmile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumphin my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would haveto deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing andsurvival - all that I know about the history of the United States ofAmerica, all that I know about American race relations, and all that Iknow about Barack Obama as a politician.I would have to deny the nature of the change that Obama asserts hascome to America.Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding thatyou have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been onfor over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has novalue for the success of a human life. I would have to evade yourrejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and minedepend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the12 million Blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks likethem (that Blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they werejoined by self-declared progressive whites who voted for him because hedoesn't look like them.I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind ofpeople who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in hisadministration - political intellectuals like my former colleagues atHarvard University's Kennedy School of Government.I would have to believe that fairness is the equivalent of justice. Iwould have to believe that man who asks me to go forward in a new spiritof service, in a new service of sacrifice is speaking in my interest. Iwould have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comesfrom the bottom up, and who arrogantly believes that he can will it intoexistence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man whothinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroyingthe most productive and the generators of wealth.Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the sceneof 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicagoirrationally chanting Yes We Can! Finally, I would have to wipe allmemory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists,editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism isdead - and no one, including, and, especially Alan Greenspan, objected totheir assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalisticmentality that they want to replace with their own version ofanti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected aBlack man to the office of the president of the United States, the woundedgiant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over -and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happymen. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten theirKennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbscan feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a Black person.So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90sbourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America . Shout your gleeHarvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected,not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who,like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to — Do Something! Younow have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's GreatSociety. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - whatlittle there is left - for the chance to feel good.There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness. Origins: The above-reproduced editorial, which commonly appears under the title No He Can't, is a November 2008 piece penned by Dr. Anne Wortham, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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