Tautology at the Grammies

I didn't watch the Grammies last night. In fact I haven't watched the broadcast in years as it long ago stopped being relevant to my musical tastes. However, I did flip to it occasionally just to see what might be occurring at any given moment. One particular minor item caught my attention.

I was in the midst of blogging my own thoughts about this when I suddenly realized that probably others must have noticed it too. So I Googled it and sure enough I dug up a few blog entries regarding the George Lopez comment (although the quote varies slightly from reference to reference): "How cool a country is this? The only one where a white woman and black man can run for President of the United States?" (The next part of his statement was the joke that "To ensure that nothing ever happens to them, they should appoint a Mexican vice president.")

I'm not even going to touch the fact that on the face of it he seems to be assuming one of the two will win because, let's face it, it was just an innocent attempt at humor—although I didn't find it funny, at least not for his intended punch line, which is not to say that I was offended or anything. And I didn't really take it as subtly putting forth a political agenda (nor do I even want to get into such things here which too often escalate to inflammatory dogmatic shouting matches).

It was the first part which caught my attention as being slightly amusing in its tautology, though I'm reasonably sure that Mr. Lopez probably didn't even realize quite what he was saying as he said it. Apparently it struck a few others that way as well:

TELEVISION and MOVIE watcher
Late Night Radio (see 9:32)
ItLooksLikeThis

If we assume (and I think it likely) that he meant the U.S. is the only country in the world where a woman and a black man (and perhaps even implying individuals of other cultural/ethnic backgrounds) can run for the highest elected ruling office, then I'm not even sure that he's correct. I'm no geographical or historical expert and I admit I don't have even a semi-educated clue, but I'm pretty sure that there have been rulers of other countries who were women or black men and I would guess that some of them must have been elected by some general process rather than installed by means of lineage, religion, or military coup. Of course, I guess to be completely analogous, we would have to also take into consideration which ethnicity or race is dominant in a country. For instance if a white man has ever run for or won a ruling office in a nation with a predominantly black populace, then that would sort of be relevant.

Anyway, I just have a feeling that Mr. Lopez's statement is another example of the sort of thing people might say, assuming it to be true because it sounds right to them, but I'm not so sure it is. Sure, it's great to live in a country where that's the case, possibly even one of only a few such countries. I'm just not so sure it's the only one.

I welcome any information which sheds light on the issue either way. I'm just curious now that Mr. Lopez got me thinking about it...