"Why African-American voters may doom Bernie Sanders’ candidacy"

[Empowerer]

65. I found a black person who disagrees with you, so your view is irrelevant . . .

This points up something I've noticed over the years. Many of these folks - even so-called liberals - are so unfamiliar with black people that they really think we're all alike and believe we are fungible with any one black person being sufficient to switch out with any other black person.

I remember noticing this after President Obama first took office and the RNC made Michael Steele its Chair. It was if they thought, Obama's black, Steele's black. Checkmate!

We see the same thing when Republicans trot out their black person of the moment, certain that black folks will get excited and jump to support them, just as we supported President Obama. They don't realize and definitely don't acknowledge that Obama is not just any ordinary guy. There's a reason that a fatherless black man named Barack Hussein Obama was able to rise to become the first African-American president of the United States - and it wasn't because he's cute. He has unique and extraordinary political skills that few people - regardless their race - can demonstrate.

But, by the same token they interestingly take the opposite tack when it comes to Obama in other respects, especially his intellect and decency. Throughout the 2008 campaign, people marveled at how SMART Obama was, how ARTICULATE (or, as Joe Biden remarked, CLEAN and articulate) he was, how decent he was, etc., as if this was something unusual. And I noticed that such observations were rarely made by black voters. That's because, in those respects, Obama wasn't that unusual to us. We all know smart, articulate, decent African-American men and women. While the President is in the upper percentile of most people, he's not some kind of bizarre aberration, at least not to us. In fact, he's not that much different in those respects than our brothers and fathers and sons and cousins. What's different is that for the first time, the rest of the world seemed to accept what we already knew about people who look like us.