I have to admit, I was really amused by this article about the racist explosion among some quarters in Europe:
In Austria, Obama’s win prompted a harsh, on-air reaction from a well-known journalist, Klaus Emmerich. “I think the Americans are still racists and they must be very badly off to so spectacularly — and that has to be said, no doubt — send a black man with a black, very good-looking and clever woman to the White House,” he said Wednesday during a show on public television network ORF.
I mean there’s so much to unravel there I don’t even know where to begin.
Then there’s this:
Some racist comments have come from people who have expressed such views before. “Africa Conquers the White House,” read a headline on the Web site of the National Democratic Party of Germany, a political party that sympathizes with neo-Nazi groups. In an accompanying article, Jürgen Gansel, a party leader and an elected lawmaker in the German state of Saxony, blamed Obama’s victory on “the American alliance of Jews and Negroes.”
Is it wrong that not only do I kind of agree with the idea of an American alliance of “Jews and Negroes”, but that, being half-Jew and half-Negro I’m personally delighted by the concept?
–A. Serwer
