WHICH EPISODE OF STAR TREK IS IT WHERE THE BEINGS ARE JUST DISEMBODIED BRAINS?:

When "Skinny" Means "Black: "The Journal stumbles over racial subtext. (Timothy Noah, Aug. 4, 2008, Slate)

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.

Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." [...]

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.

Two questions: isn't the current racial caricature of black men that they're all morbidly obese from a diet existing almost exclusively of fast food?; and, why aren't we being racist when we discuss the Irishman John McCain's temper, beery background and abysmal academic performance?

Meanwhile, if these folks really care about racism in politics, they don't have to look far to find a campaign that's using it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 5, 2008 4:17 PM