Replies

It was in answer to a private communication. I got permission from both parties to publish the contents. I considered it to be that important. I don’t know of anyone else who is making this crucial case.

I include the message Dr. Keyes was responding to below:

From: xxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2008 11:40 AM
To: alan keyes
Subject: Obama is black

I wondered if you planned (or already have done so) to write about the first “African-American” to be elected president. I think we need your perspective.

I saw a quote from Condi Rice saying she felt very emotional as a result of this event. The idea that the U.S.A would elect a black man president overwhelmed her and, apparently, millions of others. And I expect there is a great deal of good in this, as there was when State Senator Mee Moua won her first election (first Hmong elected to a legislature). But in both cases, the candidates stood on the left fringe, or even past the left fringe.

In any event, I hope to read your comments on this.

Thanks for keeping on with the fight. Have we reached a tipping point?

God bless you, my friend.

xxxx xxxxx

xxxx,
Barak Obama is black like me only in the sense that we both have dark skin- I.e., a purely physical characteristic. To expect me to identify with him on that basis would require that I validate the concept of race ( i.e., grouping people based on physical characteristics). I have written and said over the years that I reject this concept, and that the only way to overcome racism is to reject the concept of race.

Because human beings are not stones, but persons, our communities are not the result of merely physical characteristics. The very idea of race in this sense is a modern lie tied to the dogma of evolution. I believe that human communities reflect the moral nature of our humanity. They are formed therefore by adherence to common moral principles, as that adherence is developed and reflected in the course of shared historical experience. Understood in this proper sense, Obama and I are not part of the same ethnic group. My heritage includes the experience of slavery, the moral sensibility to injustice and to the importance of respecting the premises of human dignity and freedom. Obama looks back to a heritage that probably includes forbears who were part of the Afro-Islamic groups of Africans who were active in the slave trade. By itself that might be of only superficial importance, but his views on the fundamental moral issues of the day (like the taking of innocent human life) mean that he rejects the premise of God-given moral equality for all men that I hold to be the true soul of the black American identity. The notion that I should take special pride in the election of such a man simply because of his skin color implies that I put the false and humanly contrived category of race above the category of common moral principle that is the true basis for human community. I do not and never will.

The tragic irony is that people whose feelings and reactions are shaped by racial solidarity implicitly validate the concepts that were the basis for racist views and discrimination. They implicitly reject the hope that Martin Luther King expressed that someday people would be judged for the content of their character not the color of their skins. As they do so, they destroy the moral substance that is the true and righteous legacy of the black American heritage in order to revel in the triumph of the very racism that was used to justify the enslavement of my ancestors. This is a desperately sad self-contradiction. I will be no part of it.

This quiet validation of the premise of racism is far from being a good thing . It betrays the suffering and nobility of all those black Americans who fought for justice not only for themselves, but for all, by appealing to the truth of the ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence. This betrayal tips the scales of history back in the direction of regimes based on inequality, elitism and oppressive abuses of power.

I have by the way made these points many times, starting with the Senate race in Illinois.

Godspeed,
Alan