Bizarre allegations of subtextual racism have been noted here before, but this one, spotted by Darleen at Protein Wisdom, is, well, stunning. A flip Wall Street Journal article by Amy Chozick on Barack Obama’s slight build has driven Slate’s Timothy Noah to heights of righteous umbrage:

…any discussion of Obama’s ‘skinniness’ and its impact on the typical American voter can’t avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Can’t it be avoided, even among sane people?

Chozick insists that she didn’t intend her playful feature about Obama’s physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. “I can’t even respond to that,” she told me. “That’s ridiculous.” […] Bob Christie, Dow Jones’ vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race… But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick’s story is “ridiculous,” and I would counter that any failure on Chozick’s part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless. […] 

When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn. […] Chozick wasn’t asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama’s hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn’t matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama’s physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that’s most on their minds.

Noah’s determination to detect some lurking racist intent is a tad convoluted and, it seems to me, positively neurotic. Notice how Noah has to insinuate what Chozick really meant, or what she would supposedly be taken to mean, even though he can’t find any of Chozick’s own words to support that insinuation: “Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door?” Those are Noah’s words, not Chozick’s, and this substitution is done repeatedly. In effect, he’s an indignant ventriloquist. It’s rather like slipping a whoopee cushion on someone’s chair and then looking shocked by the subsequent rasping noise. And, it has to be said, Obama is remarkably thin as presidential candidates go. In fact, the thinness of his neck (rather than its colour) was the thing that caught my attention when I first saw him on TV. It’s just a neck too thin for television. Whether thinness of neck has any relevance to being president, or indeed being black, I really couldn’t say.

Poking through the comments following this, I rediscovered a quote from an essay by Roger Scruton, first published in the New Criterion, February 2003. He’s talking about the Paris riots of 1968, but readers may spot some connection with the sentiment of this.

That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theatre people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theatre – the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy…

What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them?

…She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue – by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies – that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

Related: Rebellion, Foucault’s Suit, Foucault and the Ayatollah, A Romantic Hostility. (h/t, pst314)