Dinesh D’Souza is among the early practitioners of using his ethnicity as an alibi for abhorrent racial views, although Michelle Malkin‘s Defense of Interment has to rate as the all time classic of the genre. Basically the idea is that if someone who isn’t white says something racist, then it can’t actually be racist. The argument is then sanitized for use by white conservatives who can use the originator to deflect accusations of racism. The thing is, you’re not supposed to be quote so obvious about it. Dave Weigel:
“I’m a native of Mumbai, India,” D’Souza writes in the new book, “so I grew up in a different part of the world, as Obama did. I’m nonwhite, as he is. He had a white mom and grew up in an inter-racial family.” (In 1995, he wrote: “I feel especially qualified to address the subject of multiculturalism because I am a kind of walking embodiment of it. I was born in Bombay, India in 1961.”) This is the literary equivalent of putting on eyeglasses so a bully won’t hit you.
It’s more like the right-wing equivalent of “black people can’t be racist.”
