Barack Obama needs to stop acting so fucking black. White people hate that shit.
That’s the central thesis of Camille Paglia’s latest article, in which Obama’s “folksy come-on” (read: failing to speak with the meticulously precise locution that he should - or, in the more common parlance, not being “well-spoken” enough) is utterly grating to her ears.
A major gaffe this summer has been that, in trying to act more casual and folksy to appeal to working-class white voters, Obama has resorted to a cringe-making use of inner-city black intonations and jokey phrasings—exactly the wrong tactic.
This is her example, I swear to God:
An aggressive, on-point Obama mocking his Republican opponents’ fixation on a wholly accurate statement he made about energy conservation. You know, straight niggerish shit. He drops some Gs at the end of words, and we know how the Negroes love Gs, original and otherwise. Makes sense that he’s keeping them all for himself, away from whitey’s prying linguistic ears.
Avowed Obama supporter Paglia then goes on to detail her Very Serious Concerns with the Obama mystique:
One of the major doubts those very voters have about him is to what extent he is an agent for the 1960s black power radicalism espoused by his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It does seem to be the case that Obama, raised in multicultural and tourist-oriented Hawaii, lacks direct experience of any working-class enclave aside from the black one.
So…very…much…wrong. Hawaii has a middle class. It’s one of the United States of America. He went to school on a scholarship while living with his white grandparents in a small two-bedroom apartment. What’s becoming obvious here is that Paglia is operating under the assumption that any and all things a black man does which fail to jibe with her experience of suburban white America automatically make him some shuck and jive hustler (wannabe or otherwise) who owes her and those who share in her whiteness…something. Like a way of being the authentic black buck they know he is, but in a nonthreatening way demonstrating his education and polish. Perhaps he could freestyle the next act of Hamlet in full iambic pentameter, who the fuck knows?
Of course, it’s not enough that Obama is a thoroughly dishonest and fake person based on her nonexistent knowledge of who he is and where he comes from, he’s also running his campaign incorrectly.