“MOST WORKING- AND middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” Senator Barack Obama bravely asserted in his March 18 speech. “Their experience is the immigrant experience–as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives . . . So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”
These were courageous words for an African-American politician to utter. They acknowledge on some level the legitimacy of resentment of affirmative action programs, placing that resentment and anger on a par with the bitter taste of discrimination in the black community.
