It is bizarro world, and while I think some of it among the uneducated comes from a sort of strange tribalism, as many people have suggested, I think a lot of it among the educated comes from the fact that keeping blacks race-identified gives a lot of power to the “civil rights establishment,” whose cause has long since disappeared but who need to keep up that sense of race-identity in order to maintain their relevance. And this is encouraged by the white leftist groups that ride along with them.
There’s a very good article by Shelby Steele in the WSJ that discusses this today.
In that same paper, was an interview with Obama’s Secy of Education, the radical leftist Arne Duncan, who gave a talk where he told a group of conference attendees discussing the “Race to the Top Program” (a federal education give-away without even the quality and transparency requirements that Bush included in his earlier program) that they were “too white” because this doesn’t reflect public schools (actually, it does) and then went on to discuss his love of basketball, which now seems to be code for how black you are. He leaves signed basketballs at the schools he visits.
How condescending and disgusting. And yet even intelligent, young blacks are completely confused by the steady diet of the warmed-over leftist racialist garbage which the civil rights movement devolved into once the battle was won and there was no longer any reason for its political existence.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324448104578618681599902640.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop