The myth of white racism

Editor: Is Obama in the position of Jackie Robinson, needing only tolerance from bigoted whites in order for his genius to prevail? Such was the implication, intended or not, of a Dan Haley column in the Denver Post 8/26, with which I sharply disagreed. Below, my colleague Ken Davenport deflates a far more blatant version of the same fallacy, this one from Jacob Weisberg. Of related interest is John Dendahl's post earlier this week (scroll down on our home page) flagging an important National Review piece about the darkly race-colored glasses with which the "real" Barack Obama views America and the world, according to his own autobiography.

Ken Davenport writes:

The Wall Street Journal highlights in its editorial today a quote I've read often over the past few days. It's from a piece by Jacob Weisberg that appears in the current Newsweek -- that supposed "mainstream" newsmagazine. Weisberg says this about the possibility that Obama might lose the election against John McCain:

Only some "crazy irrationality over race" could prevent Mr. Obama from winning the White House. If he does win, America will have reached post-prejudice Nirvana. "If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth," Mr. Weisberg continued. "To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn't just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation's historical decline." Wow. Vote for Barack, or America is as irredeemable as many foreigners believe.

Wow is right. According to this narrative, a common one among Obama supporters, the sole reason that Obama might lose is because he's black -- and the fact that he's black should be a primary reason to vote for him in the first place. It makes little logical sense, of course -- to say on the one hand that he's the victim of prejudice and then to say that prejudice is a perfectly good -- even necessary -- justification to elect him. But so goes the emotion-powered politics of the left.

We know, of course, that racism is being practiced in this campaign -- but it isn't white racism. Its black racism, aided and abetted by a core of guilt-ridden whites like Jacob Weisberg. Blacks voted for Barack Obama 90:10 over Hillary Clinton in the primaries not because they had analyzed the Obama platform and policies and preferred them over those of Hillary Clinton, but because of the color of his skin. Period.

Obama is, in fact, largely where he is today because he is black, not in spite of it -- though as Geraldine Ferraro found out, you can't say that out loud even in today's America. So sensitive are we to even the suggestion of race that we simply can't be honest about it. And neither can Jacob Weisberg -- who suggests that America is so backward still that if Obama loses, it will be a sign of our nation's "historical decline". Oh, please.

I believe that white racism in this country is largely a myth. Yes, I admit that it still exists in the deep south to some extent, but not to the degree that the left says it does. As the Journal points out:

Virginia elected a black Governor two decades ago, and Illinois has had two black Senators. America has had two black Secretaries of State, and major corporations are run by black CEOs. No other Western democracy has done as well at opening up political, business and other arenas to minorities.

The truth is that white racism is part of an Obama narrative that is designed both to mobilize whites into casting "guilt votes" to prove our "progressiveness" as a culture, and to inculcate Obama from criticisms of all kinds and on all issues. Part of the lasting bitterness of the Hillary Clinton supporters is that every time Clinton tried to hammer Obama on policy, his supporters subtly trotted out the race card to blunt her attacks. Now that McCain is attacking Obama on taxes, energy policy and national security, you can bet that they will again be trotting out the "racism" charge against McCain in an effort to intimidate him.

It won't work, because McCain -- like an increasing number of Americans -- understands that the stakes are simply too high in this election to avoid a serious evaluation of Barack Obama on the merits. McCain knows he hasn't a racist bone in his body, and he will not be falsely bullied into changing his campaign to one of softballs and cream puffs, though the left will try and force him into just such a move. He will persist in hammering Obama on the issues and on his (lack of) experience, and will be justly rewarded for it -- because Americans instinctively know that this country is not "racist to the core". A racist nation would hardly nominate a black man for the nomination of the Democrat Party, would it?

Perhaps Jacob Weisberg should take off his own shroud of guilt and consider this: Is it not possible that if Obama loses in November it will be because he is simply not qualified to be President of the United States?

Barack's great deception

In 1995, Barack Obama published an autobiography that has sold like hotcakes and helped make him and his wife quite wealthy people. Titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama's book got rave reviews, just like the national address he delivered in defense of his 20 years following the spiritual leadership of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I wrote at FamilySecurityMatters.com about the Wright speech when it was delivered back in March. Now a writer with the pseudonym Michael Gledhill has written a devastating comparison of the Barack Hussein Obama appearing in Dreams and the one now appearing regularly on your TV screen and about to be officially the Democratic Party's candidate for president. It is titled "Who Is Barack Obama?" and can be found in the September 1 print issue of National Review and at this link.

Numerous analysts of Obama's writing and speechifying have noted the same strength and weakness: well-formed rhetoric pleasing to the eye or ear but lacking substance. Dreams is full of substance -- but little or none that a patriot would recognize as suitable background for a U.S. senator, let alone for someone aspiring to lead our country as its president.

Just like his wife Michelle, the Barack Obama of Dreams was a bitterly race-conscious person with a high dislike for the United States. Or in the concluding words of Michael Gledhill, "Dreams from My Father reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight – a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization."

I am reminded of the supreme irony of the demeaning remarks Obama recently leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas. In contrast to Thomas's, Obama's youth (as well, by the way, as that of his America-hating pastor Wright) was Easy Street. As an intellectual and patriot, neither Obama nor Wright could carry Thomas's briefcase.

Change we can shudder at

In watching a biography of Obama on Fox News, I was struck by the mindset the man has. He has no economic training, no desire to be part of the “establishment”. More likely, he wants to be the Hugo Chavez of America. Though he pays lip service to “bringing people together”, what I can read between the lines is hatred of “the rich” and of “white people”, the two groups somehow melded, in the same way many see all black people as poor. His having an epiphany at a Jeremiah Wright church service is the case in point. Rev. Wright’s views are well known.

The logic (perhaps subconscious) of Obama's call for a “Civilian National Security Force” becomes clear: it will become an officially sanctioned armed mob of the have-nots to prey on the haves. The same thing happened in South Africa when the blacks took over there. They called it “affirmative shopping”.

To Obama, with little economic understanding, the economy is a fixed pie, and it’s time for black people to seize a bigger slice. In Obama’s eyes, this is “justice”, defined as “equality”: equality NOT equal opportunity! All one has to do is look at Venezuela to see where Obama might take the United States.

The tragedy of course is that it will push the country toward chaos and poverty. The economy is NOT a fixed pie but an elastic one. The capital flight and contraction in the economy will bring massive unemployment and an unprecedented economic downturn, shortages and lines for basic necessities.

True to the Venezuelan model, Obama could then blame “greedy businessmen” for the situation, holding kangaroo courts, making examples, etc., blaming everything and everyone except himself and his policies.

Ironies in Jackson puff piece

"I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." So said Dr. King on the day before he was murdered in 1968. The quote appears in a photo caption with today's long, largely uncritical piece on Jesse Jackson in the Rocky. Jackson is seen next to King in that picture. M. E. Sprengelmeyer does a pretty good job of recapping Jackson's epic gaffe from this June when his raging jealousy and resentment of Barack Obama burst out in a comment (unknowingly recorded) about wanting to "cut his nuts off." But the article would be better journalism had it given us those four exact words, instead of the delicate euphemism the writer substituted.

Sprengelmeyer also fails to acknowledge the dark side of Jackson's 40-year career as a race-guilt hustler, with all the vast personal enrichment, prestige, and sexual license which are now uncomfortably contrasted with Obama's moral uplift speeches -- and which face extinction if America elects a black President.

That's the real source of Jesse Jackson's hot-mic indiscretion. Unlike MLK, he's worried about plenty, and he fears one man very much. Hence the castration fantasy. CNN's question to viewers a few weeks ago, quoted by Sprengelmeyer, "Has Jesse Jackson become irrelevant?", is in process of coming true with Obama's nomination, and will take hold with cold finality on Nov. 5 if Obama wins.

Another irony in this fawning three-page spread on Jesse the Great cropped up in the sidebar on lessons he allegedly learned from patching up a welfare-reform dispute with Bill Clinton at DNC 1996: "Set aside differences while the television cameras are on, deal with internal squabbles later." Bet he was wishing he'd taken his own advice on the Fox set, after the firestorm broke earlier this summer.

Racial demons still torment us

It is a faint memory now, but at the height of the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, advocates contended for a color-blind society. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King persuasively wrote that all persons should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Yet we are as race-conscious as we have ever been, if not more so. In fact, Americans have made great progress toward this humane vision of political community. Racial minorities are well-represented in all walks of life, in the arts, the professions and the workplace. But this change has been accompanied by a persistent demand for entitlements as distinguished from rights, which burdens white people with guilt and tarnishes the achievements of non-white people with preference.

A friend of mine who grew up in northern Florida and encountered ugly racial discrimination wrote 20 years ago that Americans were dominated by race in ways supposed to be extirpated by the success of civil rights legislation. The reason, he said, was that the idea of equality of opportunity had been hijacked by equality of condition. This unfortunate state of affairs has not passed.

Whether it is presidential politics or the most personal experiences of everyday life, race trumps everything. Americans are justly proud of the pending nomination of the first presidential candidate of African descent. It would seem to give the lie to those who write off Americans as irredeemably racist. Democratic voters and activists have freely consented to elevating Sen. Barack Obama to our highest office, and public opinion polls indicate that he has more than an even chance of being elected.

Yet Obama has already given the lie to our people’s hopefulness by emphasizing his race. Recently he voiced his concerns about the Republican campaign that will be waged against him. “We know the strategy,” he said. Republicans planned to make people afraid of him. They’d say “he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Republicans have long and rightly feared that this was precisely the tack that Obama would take in his quest for national leadership. Despite all of Obama’s talk of “change” and “unity” and “bipartisanship,” he is indistinguishable from the Democratic liberals who, with the exception of the triangulating Bill Clinton, went down to defeat, from George McGovern to John Kerry. He needs race to distract the largely centrist American electorate from his unelectable political leanings.

Those who now swoon for Obama, whatever their race or ethnicity, are captivated by the thought of electing our first black president, indifferent if not oblivious, to the fact that, just as we cannot justify electing someone to office just because he or she is white, neither can we countenance voting for Obama just because he is black.

Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz has remarked on the Obama phenomenon in the course of concluding, as the headline for her column last week read, “American politics aren’t ‘post-racial’” She devoted most of her piece, however, to an incident at Purdue University that will strike most of us as bizarre. But in the current political climate, it is all too illustrative.

A student was “caught” last year reading a book entitled “Notre Dame v. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan,” a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s. Keith Sampson, a student employed by Purdue’s janitorial staff, was charged with reading a book during his lunch break with a title that offended black employees and students. It did not matter that the book told a story about people opposed to racism, which book Sampson had checked out of the university library.

One would think that the old admonition not to judge a book by its cover literally would be applicable to this case, but one would be wrong. Several layers of union and college officialdom took umbrage before the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education took up the student’s case and thus embarrassed all those seeking to prosecute Mr. Sampson for his “thought crime.” The resultant publicity forced University Chancellor Charles R. Bantz to issue an apologetic letter transforming the nature of the charge from one of reading a book to “harassing” other college personnel, which doubtless convinced nobody.

It’s as if we have all been forced to return to childhood, wherein distinctions between fact and fantasy have dissolved, and people are accused of whatever we believe or wish they were guilty of, so that the accusers can enjoy the satisfaction of being “little goody two shoes” above all reproach.

Unfortunately, the incident at Purdue is not isolated nor localized but has become typical and national. We, the benefactors of the civil rights revolution, should be placing its principles into practice by making decisions based on the merits of the case and the character of individuals. In countless instances across America, that is exactly what we are doing. But in our most powerful institutions we are failing miserably.