Another Imagine-the-Switch Comparison

[lisasmall]

I've already posted two of these, this one on white privilege and the other on more general issues. Here now is a third from the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof:

Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...

Kristof was writing about the on-going attempts to "otherize" Obama and McCain's willingness to exploit and enhance the Christianist Right's confusion about his religion - and how people who won't say they're voting against Obama because he's black are willing to say that they are voting against him because they think he might be, must be, a Muslim. Read the whole column here.

I want to expand on Kristof's "just imagine" scenario. Just imagine if it were the black candidate, and not the white one, whose wife had stolen drugs from a charity to support her habit; who had so many houses, he couldn't count them all; who had no fewer than thirteen cars and an airplane; who dumped his disabled wife, mother of his first child, for a rich young beauty queen.