is the word exceptionality used to prop-up racist ideas?

 

Is it racist to indicate that Barack Obama “employed a strategy of racial exceptionalism to assuage anxieties of potential white voters” First, why use the idea of exceptioinlism? It seems that the purpose of this language is to meet out a racial separatism in order to show how black people cannot be great, unless of course they are an exception to that rule. Second what does it imply that he employed a strategy? This statement seems to be giving Obama a unique role as a black person with the need for a strategy, in order to continue making progress in politics.  For Carter and Dowe, “Obama was a racial exception for black and white voters. Still, given black voters’ staunch support of the Democratic party, there was really no way that Obama was losing the black vote . . . “   Does this mean that all Black voters vote the same way?  Is this prejudiced? Gough uses similarly raci-centric ideas to maintain that “Obama was able to maintain various constituencies by simultaneously affirming his blackness, to signal solidarity with blacks, while universalizing his blackness in order to maintain his support among whites” And is it racist to say that Obama was “negotiating the complexities of America’s racial hierarchy to appeal to Latino and Asian voters and hanging on to a substantial portion of the white electorate”???  Perhaps this was a strategy based in the realities of demographics and political terrain, but negotiating the hierarchy seems to be a mark on Obama as being somehow clever and disingenuous.  

Exceptionalism is racist in that it employs the blackness as something that now qualifies the singular black person to a special personhood, while maintaining that other blacks are not exceptional, or are less that the exceptional black person. Nbcnews.com stated that “Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing individualism and the illusion of meritocracy” in a bold move to refute black exceptionalism. I think that language needs to change and evolve or morph over time as people learn to explain what they really mean.  Old language needs to be critiqued as does present colloquial and public language. “One does not put new wine in old wineskins” Language is likened to wine in that as new or perceived realities are spoke of differently each day. We have a word, exceptionality, invented with good intentions, but used in unjust ways.

 

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