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Opinion: Sowell vs. Punk

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Thomas Sowell excoriates Barack Obama in a column that says the candidate’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright indicates deeper problems. According to Sowell, a passage from the book Dreams From My Father, in which the author discusses his college-era comrades, reveals that Obama’s fondness for racial exremists goes way back:

These friends included ‘Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets’ -- in Obama’s own words -- as well as the ‘more politically active black students.’ He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator. Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things.

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For Sowell, this proves Obama ‘was trying to become a convert to blackness’ and seeking ‘a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world.’

I have no beef with Sowell’s judgment on Obama’s fondness for ‘members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.’ But his citation here indicates a misunderstanding of popular culture that is glaring even for a 78-year-old economist.

To wit: If you were looking to find your own blackness, in Obama’s day or (to a slightly lesser extent) now, you might possibly cozy up to Marxist professors. There’s a very outside chance you might associate with structural feminists. But you would not go anywhere near punk rock performance poets.

Punk was many things, but it was first and foremost white-kid music. I neither praise nor condemn punk for that. It just is — or was: These days, we have Afro-Punk, and we have black punkers willing to speak about the genre’s racial divides. But back then, it was vanishingly rare to find any color but untanned-pale in punk rock. Indeed, the hints of white supremacy that always circled around Siouxsie and the Banshees and New Order should be the tipoff. When Obama claims alliances with punkers, he is doing the exact opposite of what Sowell accuses him of: He’s indicating his willingness to make friends across racial and cultural lines.

I don’t think Obama should be praised for that, as I always find something vain and self-regarding in bragging about your disreputable friends. But a decent respect for the truth demands that we point this out. During the candidate’s misspent youth, the only hint of black identity you were likely to find in the punk universe was Sy Richardson’s bravura performance in Repo Man.

Update: Interesting discussion of the history of black punk in the comments. Thanks to everybody who contributed.

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