PrintJanuary 20, 2010
The Obama Administration's Rampant Racism
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's remarks during the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama would have a good chance to be elected because he is "light-skinned" and speaks with a "Negro dialect" only by choice are ugly and insulting. But the real consequences of Obama's and Democrats' selective "forgiveness" of Reid go much deeper and are much more damaging than merely demonstrating that they hypocritically apply a political double-standard where criticism of "inartful" remarks is concerned. Taken together with the actions and comments of other Obama appointees, including especially Attorney General Eric Holder, they reveal the deep-seated racism that informs the president's every policy and pronouncement and threatens to turn the United States into a 21st-century version of pre-Civil Rights America.
The racist bias of the current administration cuts both ways. The fact that our president accepted Reid's apology as if he (Obama) were the only one damaged by Reid's remarks speaks to two things: the president's own narcissism and the fact that he agrees with the underlying racist premise that speaking with a "Negro dialect" is negative. Obama was sending a subliminal message to tens of millions of African-Americans that they weren't damaged by the implication that they're inferior and not politically marketable as national leaders because they speak differently from white massas like Harry Reid. Reid's comments were insulting to every "Negro" in America, and Reid should have apologized to all of the country's African-Americans, not just to the president.
Obama's spineless and insensitive acceptance of Reid's apology was tendered without so much as a beer summit of the kind he convened to repair the damage (to himself) caused by his racially tinged remarks ("the police acted stupidly") about Cambridge, MA police sergeant James Crowley in the Henry Louis Gates incident. Obama never did apologize to Crowley, though he invited him to beer.
The president was one of the leaders of the lynch mob that eventually succeeded in getting talk show host Don Imus fired from his post for the sin of calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's." Then-candidate Obama declared that "[Imus] didn't just cross the line, he fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America." Thank God Harry Reid wasn't guilty of that.
By appointing a racist as his Attorney General, Obama effectively cemented history's judgment of his administration's racialist policies. Eric Holder, who called Americans "cowards" because they were unwilling to engage in a public debate about "race," has proven himself to be both a coward and a racist. When it's politically convenient for him to support blacks, he'll subvert the law to do so, as he did in dismissing the prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation on election day 2008 in Philadelphia. The Justice Department had won the case by default when the defendants failed to respond to the charges, yet Holder dismissed the charges against all but one of the miscreants. The one against whom the charges remained was told not that voter intimidation was illegal, but that he had to wait until after 2012 before brandishing a nightstick at an election site again.
Holder is the Obama administration's "Bull" Connor. Where Connor called out firemen and policemen to prevent blacks from demonstrating in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Holder tacitly condoned behavior equivalent to that of Connor's brownshirts by dropping prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party when they brandished weapons and shouted insults at white voters, intimidating them in a way similar to that of Connor's thugs 45 years earlier. The difference is not in the degree of the offenses committed, but in the fact that in this case, when committed against whites, the offense doesn't lead to punishment.
Reid, Holder, and Obama all cling to deeply racist convictions, not only in branding those who disagree politically with them as racist, but also in their own attitudes toward African-Americans, whom they implicitly see as inferior to whites and "light-skinned" blacks. Their selective condemnation of "racism" by their opponents is deeply disturbing because it reveals, without their apparently being aware of it, that they themselves harbor the same racist convictions as those they excoriate for being racist.
In their cynical exploitation of blacks through accusations of racism for political gain, contemporary liberals are following in the footsteps of leftist predecessors dating back to the 1920s with the publication of communist activist Josef Pogàny's pamphlet, "American Negro Problems." In "American Negro Problems," Pogàny framed the "Negro question in America" as an issue that was best understood "in its relation to the liberation struggle of the proletariat against American imperialism." Thus was introduced into blacks' struggle for equality in this country the cynical overlay of their cause's being used to advance the agenda of the ruthless and imperialistic political movement that communism was rapidly becoming.
Ralph Ellison's main character in his masterpiece Invisible Man is indoctrinated into the ways of "the brotherhood" (a surrogate for the Communist Party). After he's delivered a particularly effective speech, he's told that "you mustn't waste your emotions on individuals, they don't count." He's chastised for speaking in terms of "race" and for his sympathy for "the old ones," whom history has passed by and who must be "pruned like dead limbs" so that the tree can sprout new growth. He's questioned about why he "always thinks in terms of race." Later, when the wife of one of the leaders of the Brotherhood asks within his hearing whether he's "black enough," it becomes clear that this fictional iteration of the Communist Party is using race cynically as an issue to advance their Marxist cause.
In his book Rules for Radicals, professional pain-in-the-ass Saul Alinsky proposes one of the most cynical, demeaning, and disgusting tactics for using blacks in an effort to help them gain civil rights when he proposes buying "one hundred seats for one of Rochester[, New York]'s symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; the people would go to the symphony hall -- with obvious consequences. Imagine the scene when the action began! ... Here you would have a combination not only of noise but also of odor, what you might call natural stink bombs. ... The law would be completely paralyzed." The reaction of the wives of the important citizens whose cultural event had been disrupted would be to say to their husbands, "John, we are not going to have our symphony season ruined by those people!''
Much like the Marxist whites whose co-opting of the civil rights impulse of the 1940s Ellison fictionalizes in Invisible Man, it is the leftists who have used and continue to use blacks unmercifully to disrupt "establishment events," and it is blacks who are rightfully insulted -- not to mention demeaned -- by the left's shameless use of them to promote not racial understanding, but the advancement of their anti-capitalist agenda.
Don't get me wrong. I think that Obama acted appropriately in accepting Reid's apology, even though he did so for the wrong reasons. The problem is that the president and his Democratic cronies don't apply their "principles" even-handedly. Reid's offense doesn't warrant his being forced to step down, and neither did Don Imus's.
It won't be long -- certainly by November of this year at the latest -- before the administration's rampant racism becomes another of the reasons American voters drum Democrats out of office in droves.
