One of the silliest movies ever to hit the theatres is coming out this weekend.  It’s a movie based on Obama’s and Michelle’s first date.  My only interest in this movie is to see if it exceeds the box office success of Dinesh D’Souza’s recent movie, Hillary’s America.

I mention it here in contrast to an interview this week on NPR with another black pioneer and the release of a movie based on his life and career that had to be somewhat uncomfortable for the liberal interviewer.  The movie, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life, is about the first black animator at Disney Studios.  Everything about this gentleman’s life is counter to the liberal progressive meme.  No matter how the interviewer tried to spin some kind of black triumph moment from Mr. Norman, he just couldn’t.  The 81-year-old said flat out that he has never in his entire life experienced any form of racism.

How can that be?  It was the fifties, and this was a Disney studio, churning out one racist movie after another.

Maybe it’s not as unusual as the liberal black racial divide industrialists like Sharpton and J. Jackson would have us believe.

Mr. Norman knows for certain that he was hired not because he was black or because he was filling some quota or affirmative action initiative.  There was no such thing back then.

It never occurred to Norman that he couldn't apply for a job as a Disney animator.  “I think the thought just never occurred to a lot of young black talent to apply for a job in the film industry. ... We were just a bunch of young kids looking for a job.”

He worked on Jungle Book and other movies that stereotyped blacks and had no problem with it because those were the times, he said.  He worked on Fat Albert and saw it as flattery that Bill Cosby and urban blacks could create so much comedy by making fun of themselves.  As he said, to look back now on those times and judge them today is just wrong.

“I see nothing wrong with poking fun at yourself, and as a cartoonist that's what I do every day. ... There just wasn't the same sensitivity there as we have today. ... That was just the times in which we lived. I don't think we should go back and try to erase the past. This was part of our history, this is part of what happened, and so we should be able to deal with that.”

He didn’t see himself as a trailblazer.  He was just applying for a job like the half-dozen or so others hired that week, which included Asians, Latinos, and whites.  Maybe there’s a message there for other black Americans.  Maybe you should strive to be a hardworking successful person and not a hardworking successful black person.

Mr. Norman must be extraordinary to have a movie like this made in his honor.  Not because he’s a pioneering black man, but because he must be a talented and pioneering animator with a long and distinguished career.

This amazing individual should be an inspiration to everyone regardless of his skin color.  As for Obama’s first date, I’m not sure whom it’s intended to inspire.  Maybe skinny kids with big ears who think they will never find a girl.