Content of Their Character

As you all know, I am black in the eyes of the State of Maryland, which gives me a bully pulpit from which to write this piece today.

This morning, the black actress Stacey Dash was on TV, and mentioned in the course of her interview that she had gotten some brutal treatment in 2012 when she came out in favor of the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.  This meant, of course, that she was not voting for her comparably-skin-colored option, the reigning president (Barack Obama).

The story is simple; she tweeted out her decision to support Romney during the campaign, and was promptly bashed by a host of black "leaders", including no less than the black-oriented magazine Ebony.  The trendsetters there at Ebony wrote "Her conservative, clueless political slant sparked controversy time after time this year, making Dash notoriously trendy for all the wrong reasons."  The term "clueless" was, for those like me who would not otherwise have known, a play on the name of a movie she was in.

Her crime, of course, was that of not voting in knee-jerk, lock-step (or maybe goose-step) alignment with the way black people are supposed to vote.  Certainly the Washington Post feels that way, having earlier this week castigated the voting map of the Commonwealth of Virginia for having only one "majority-black" district, which one can only infer as supporting the notions that black voters only vote for black candidates, and that solely by the nature of common skin color, two Virginians of the same race should expect to vote alike.

What is scary is the firestorm of criticism attempting to shout Miss Dash off the national stage.  Obviously she wasn't wrong in her views; Obama's incompetence, lack of leadership, lack of a spine and international cluelessness are out there for all to see.  You'd have to wonder why anyone outside his family voted for him.

But no; it is as if she is not allowed to think differently from the herd, and anyone who does must be immediately shouted down into silence, lest they corrupt others into, well, thinking for themselves.  Yet only by thinking for oneself can one truly follow the words of Martin Luther King, to judge people not "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Miss Dash, who appeared from the interview to have voted for Obama in 2008 (please don't hold me to that), clearly saw four years of Obama's "character" as evidenced by his incompetence as a leader, his unwillingness to work with -- or even talk to -- people who weren't in lock-step with his thinking, his "I'm the smartest guy in the room" attitude, and his indifference to whether ideas have worked in the past; and she decided that he was not the right choice.  Romney, on the other hand, who had a successful man's appreciation for what works and what doesn't, and a history of working with people who disagreed with him, was in her mind a better choice.

Content of one's character; that was her decision.  Unfortunately, Stacey Dash lives in the one community that is a long way from following the guidance of the individual who gave his life helping to lead it out of its abyss by promoting recognition of character.  OK, black America is not the only one; there's always Hollywood.  And, for that matter, ISIS.  They're not big fans of the supremacy of character either.

And I mention Ebony and ISIS in the same piece with deliberate intent.  Neither can handle infidelity to their beliefs very well.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton