I wasn't a fan of Christopher Hitchens before the elections and I'm even less of one now since he voted for Barack Obama, but I do think there is something to what he says here,

There is an element of the "wannabe" about all this--something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper's Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge.

There are a lot of people who voted for Obama out of white guilt or because they wanted to be "civil rights pioneers" on the cheap. Sure, they weren't around when people were being beaten in the streets by Democrat Bull Connor in the sixties and they weren't there standing next to the black school kids whom Democrat George Wallace blocked from a public school, but they courageously voted for the first black President, so that's just as good.

Really, it isn't. Back then, there was a real risk to "telling the truth to power." Today, we live in a country where racism probably doesn't merit being ranked as a top 5 problem in the life of an average black American. In other words, there's nothing bold, brave, or pioneering about voting for Obama: he's just another representative of the same old socialist policies that have been wrecking countries for decades in a new package.

PS: John Brown was a psychopathic terrorist who richly deserved to be hung and he doesn't deserve to be spoken of as some sort of great civil rights icon.