redblueamerica.com

At the home page, we've got up a few articles about how Barack Obama's race factors into the campaign. It comes on the heels of several op-eds (which you can find by following the link above) -- Anne Applebaum suggesting his race helps make a clean break with the Clinton-Bush cycle of dynastic succession, and Gloria Steinem's lament that a woman can't catch a break in the campaign.

Most interesting -- and flawed, I think -- is Ben's recommendation of the Christopher Hitchens essay this week at Slate.com. Hitch writes:

Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.

Well, yes. And no.

What Hitchens proves with this essay is that ... he's British. That's not an ad hominem attack. I'm just saying that while Hitchens is obviously a keen observer of American politics and history, he just as clearly hasn't lived in any kind of visceral way with America's original sins of slavery and Jim Crow. These kinds of things can't, and shouldn't, be analyzed purely in terms of cold-blooded logic.

He suggests that treating Obama's candidacy as a "breakthrough" means we're falling short of our American ideals. But that's ridiculous. What it means is that a great many people recognize that for a very long time -- far too long -- America did, in fact, fall short of its ideals. Obama's candidacy is to be celebrated because the promise of those ideals is realized, at least in part.

Everybody remembers Jackie Robinson. Only a few baseball diehards remember Larry Doby. If they did, it would mean that baseball had failed at integration. Don't worry about people making too much of Obama's race -- worry if they make too much of the next black candidate's.