Defining Racism Down

I can't remember another time in my life when there's been as many allegations of racism in American politics.

In the case of Barack Obama, it's now the case that any criticism of the black Illinois Sentator is considered racist.

It's true. On Monday, in response to Amy Chozick's Wall Street Journal article on the potential electoral drawbacks of Obama's skinniness, Slate's Timothy Noah attacked the piece as appealing to racial biases with a subliminally oppressive racial subtext:

In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Now, we've had a lot of misunderstood satire this season, so perhaps Noah was poking around for fun.

Except he wasn't:

It might be argued that body weight differs from certain other physical characteristics (apart from skin color) in that it has never been associated with racial caricature. Chozick wasn't asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama's hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn't matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds ... In the future, the press would be wise to avoid discussing how ordinary Americans will respond to the size of Obama's ears, the thickness of Obama's eyebrows, and so on.

That's pretty unreal, no?

Peter Kirsanow, at the National Review, rightly criticizes this hyper-sensitivity as absurd:

The tendency of Obama supporters to see racist impulses behind every criticism of their candidate has evolved into absurdity.

Kirsanow enumerates "twenty-five reasons why you may be racist," which includes:

If you wonder why Obama was hanging around William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn you ... may be a racist.

But see the whole list.

The real racist attacks we've seen so far have been among Obama's Democratic primary opponents (like Bill Clinton who suggested Obama's was a candidate of exclusive appeal to blacks) and Obama supporters, like Jesse Jackson (who used lynching terminology to criticize Obama's talk of personal responsibility in the black community).

And believe me, I know a racist attack when I see one. If critics of Obama were attacking him with Jim Crow-era racial slurs, for example, by threatening him and ordering him to "go sit in the corner and lick your nuts boy" or by slurring him as a "mongrel, mixed-breed mutt," well, that would be correctly identified as retrograde bigotry of the worst sort, Klan-style extremist intimidation and white supremacy.

But the left's beyond that. Any single criticsm of Obama will trigger allegations of racism. It's like Juan Williams said in his recent essay: "The race issue is clearly not going away."