So as I’m watching the pundits on MSNBC’s Morning Joe talk show pontificate about why Senator Joe Biden is a great choice as Vice President for Senator Barack Obama’s campaign, I was disturbed by commentary that Obama is not cut from the same “hard working, middle-class mainstream values and experience” cloth as Senator Biden. Host Joe Scarborough even had the gall to say that Obama was “passed around from one privileged situation to another…” and that Biden is a “fighter, a scrapper…”

So being on welfare and working as community organizer on the Southside of Chicago does not fit into the classic “All-American narrative” huh? This is typical dominant culture arrogance, and a smack in the face to working and middle-class people in the inner-cities, especially persons of color. And it appears that Obama can’t win on appealing to some White voters middle-class sensibilities – because he’s too “intellectual?”

Dominant culture still likes to see Black men in well-defined roles; either you’re a religious leader, an athlete or entertainer or manual laborer. Unique, cerebral, self-assured brothers need not apply.

Oh, I forgot, in the world of politics, African-Americans are just a “special interest group,” so our experience and views are marginal and belong on the periphery. Pay attention to the political code words people.