I don’t know why I keep doing it, since it seems that the Wall Street Journal thrives on publishing racially insensitive op-ed pieces, but yesterday got annoyed again when I read John McWhorter’s op-ed piece called “Hillary and MLK“.

Hillary Clinton made the rather dumb observation that Lyndon B. Johnson had been instrumental in pushing through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which effectively outlawed racial apartheid in the United States. It represented the culmination of the rights for which Martin Luther King had fought and died. Getting the Civil Rights enacted — something that a lot of White Southerners opposed — required a politician with LBJ’s great skills and understanding of how Washington’s political machinery worked.

Hillary’s point was that she could be the Civil Rights Movement’s next LBJ — the sympathetic white president who has the legislative skill and experience to push through difficult civil rights legislation. Community activists (which is what Obama has been throughout much of his life) are essentially the poor man’s lobbyists, but there are many better paid, more influential lobbyists, and that’s a large part of the reason that blacks have not made so many significant political advances since the Civil Rights Era. They don’t have enough political influence.

The President of the United States is the most powerful and influential person in the US (in the world?), and having him (or her) on your side will do a lot to help you win difficult political battles.

So why do I say it was a dumb comment? Hillary was 100% right in her observation, but it was probably not the best comment to make when you need to convince black voters that they should vote for you instead of the first viable black presidential candidate. It’s precisely because everyone knows that the President of the United States is the most powerful person on the planet that many blacks are drawn to support Obama — he’ll probably “feel their pain” better than Hillary can. For him, it’s not just a moral obligation, or the right thing to do. It’s personal.

Hillary’s comment was therefore substantively correct, but politically stupid.

So when I read McWhorter’s piece, I wasn’t annoyed by his premise: That Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she is a civil rights warrior, and no matter how dumb the comment, she is probably not the biggest threat to the black community.

But I was annoyed by his tone. He remarks that blacks are paranoid and lack self-confidence, and that’s the reason why the black community took Hillary’s comment so personally. He writes:

“But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone’s life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn’t give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?

There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego. . . .

Well, politics is rarely pretty, but in this case the price is too high. For one, misinterpretation of statements in this vein makes black people look disinclined to process detail and context — in other words, dim. It only gives that much more fodder to views on black intelligence like those uttered by James Watson.“

But wait a second. I’m black and I agreed with the logic behind Hillary Clinton’s comment. And . . . surprise! He’s black too, and he agreed with Hillary’s comment. So why are all black people all of a sudden too insecure, too dumb and prone to proving James Watson’s theory that blacks are genetically inferior? Has he spoken to any black people before writing his op-ed? Or did he just listen to a few loud- mouth political activists like Al Sharpton who certainly do not speak for me and my black friends?

I remember when I was at Yale College, a conservative friend of mine tried to convince me to join her political group. Her rationale was that I was the kind of black guy that her conservative party would love to embrace. I’m sure that Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas were lured by similar entreaties — that they were the “smart ones” among the race of gifted dancers and athletes. I’m not saying that she was necessarily racist. Just that she was looking for a black poster child to show that her view of the world was colorblind. The logic there is a little twisted, isn’t it?

But forget about black people for a second. Which interest group in America isn’t overly sensitive? Aren’t all politics based on a volatile mix of lobbying for substantive rights and interests, whining and posturing? Isn’t that the American way in an era of political correctness? Gay groups got Isaiah Washington fired from “Grey’s Anatomy” for saying the word “faggot” on national television. The Jewish community has an advocacy group whose primary purpose is to scrutinize public statements that might be viewed as anti-Semitic, or in some cases, anti-Israel. Cuban-Americans fight vigorously against any measure that might even remotely reinforce support for Fidel Castro, to the point that it is pretty much illegal for Americans to travel to (or spend money in) Cuba.

And it’s not just minority groups that play this game. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has an entire television station devoted to fighting against the “left-wing” media, showing that even powerful white men get into the whole whining and word-parsing game.

Are all these groups also “dim”? Or is it only “dim” when black people do it?

I think it’s fairly disgusting when a black man feels like his only way to advance personally is at the cost of other blacks . . . like he wants to show the white world (and the Wall Street Journal’s target readers) that he is the genetic defect among his genetically inferior black brothers and sisters . . . the rest of us are idiots, but he’s been graced with the gift of keen insight. He probably wouldn’t have gotten published in the Wall Street Journal if he’d written the “obvious” piece noting that some black political leaders and Hillary Clinton were acting stupidly in this situation, so he chose to flavor his article and increase his chances of getting published by insinuating that this episode might prove to some that blacks as a race are genetically inferior.

All I can say is: “n***a, please”.