Vincent Fiore
A post-racial president? Hardly
By Vincent Fiore
On March 18, 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a game-changing speech in Philadelphia, PA titled, "A More Perfect Union." The speech was to address specifically Reverend Jeremiah Wright's — who was Obama's pastor at the time — racist and anti-American remarks. But the speech was also to cast Obama above the polarizing specter that race and politics can create in a political campaign.
After the speech was given, the accolades for Obama were decidedly on the level of greatness. Comparisons to Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King were tossed about by the punditry, so enamored were they with this "post-racial" presidential candidate
Here is part of what then-candidate Obama said: "I can no more disown him (Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world,..."
Yet, that is what President Obama did, according to reports in regard to how he filled out his 2010 census questionnaire. Barack Obama, who is the product of a black father and white mother, omitted any mention of his mixed race.
On July 16, 2009, President Obama became enmeshed in an incident stemming from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, and Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer Sgt. James Crowley.
In brief, officer Crowley was at the home of Professor Gates to investigate a possible break in. Gates came home to confront officer Crowley, who asked Gates to "step out onto the porch" in order to speak with him. Gates replied "no, I will not," and then started yelling "why, because I am a black man in America?"
Sympathizing with his "friend" Skip Gates, President Obama on July 22, 2009 said to the nation during a press conference that was supposed to be on health care that "number 1, any of us would be pretty angry; number 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number 3 ... that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."
President Obama said these remarks on national television without-admittedly-knowing the facts about the incident. But that did not stop him reaching for the comfort zone of racial politics.
Now, in the latest episode of the "post-racial president," Obama has decided to just come out against white people in general, or so it seems when one listens to his latest campaign add released by the DNC last week. After setting up the usual villains — Wall Street, Insurance Companies and the like, Obama says "They see these elections as a chance to put their allies back in power and to undo all that we've accomplished. So this year I need your help once more. It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again."
This call-to-arms from Obama is in response to Governor Jan Brewer's signing of bill, SB 1070, Arizona's immigration law, or the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act." Essentially, the Arizona bill mirrors that of existing federal law. Among other protections within the bill, it stipulates that SB1070 "shall be implemented in a manner consistent with federal laws regulating immigration, protecting the civil rights of all persons and respecting the privileges and immunities of United States citizens."
The facts in Arizona are such that even though President Obama, while saying the bill "threaten(s) to undermine basic notions of fairness" and that it is "misguided," also stated that "Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others." Arizona simply had to do what the federal government abdicated a long time ago: The will to police its borders.
So instead of coming to terms with Arizona's needing to protect its citizens from unmitigated drug crime, killings and kidnappings, President Obama instead promised to dispatch the full weight of the Department of Justice to "examine the civil rights and other implications."
Eric Holder runs the Obama's DOJ, the same Eric Holder who, barely in office a month, gave a speech during Black History Month in 2009 and said "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."
Would this be the same nation that Eric Holder is talking about that had just finished electing its first black president with 43% of the white vote? Why would the nation's first black Attorney General say such a thing? Consider then what Holder did in May of 2009, when he and his DOJ dropped a clear-cut case of voter intimidation against white voters in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party in the 2008 presidential election. But for my money, Eric Holder doesn't scratch his nose without the permission of this president.
Throughout his campaign and now in office, Barack Obama has seized upon the opportunity to play the race card when he believed that it benefited him, and his Party. That this strategy has backfired is more a testament to the majority of people within the country coming to the realization that manufactured racial outrage by anyone-even a black president-will not and cannot be tolerated any longer.
The vast majority of Americans are not the racist and haters that this president seems to believe exist. With a progressive media only too happy to parrot whatever racial undertones the administration is selling that day, President Obama has-as the nation's first black president-done more racial harm than healing.
Americans believe that the color of one's skin is of no importance compared to the content of one's character. These words are certainly not new to Americans, or unknown. Good people believe in them.
So it is truly sad that America's first black president-whom the media dutifully reminds the country when criticism befalls him-should be acting in such a divisive and-dare I say-racist way.
Racism is not exclusive to white people, or anybody else for that matter. Yet, liberal demagogues like those in academia and most Democrats in Washington try to convey that very sentiment. It is a recipe for future disaster.
Barack Obama is creating an atmosphere of racial polarization through his misguided statements and actions. Instead of seizing the chance to truly break through any real or politically erected racial barriers that can inspire greatness in the nation, he instead opts for page one in the "politics of race" play book, and that is accuse your opponent of what it is you are really about.
© Vincent Fiore
May 2, 2010
On March 18, 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a game-changing speech in Philadelphia, PA titled, "A More Perfect Union." The speech was to address specifically Reverend Jeremiah Wright's — who was Obama's pastor at the time — racist and anti-American remarks. But the speech was also to cast Obama above the polarizing specter that race and politics can create in a political campaign.
After the speech was given, the accolades for Obama were decidedly on the level of greatness. Comparisons to Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King were tossed about by the punditry, so enamored were they with this "post-racial" presidential candidate
Here is part of what then-candidate Obama said: "I can no more disown him (Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world,..."
Yet, that is what President Obama did, according to reports in regard to how he filled out his 2010 census questionnaire. Barack Obama, who is the product of a black father and white mother, omitted any mention of his mixed race.
On July 16, 2009, President Obama became enmeshed in an incident stemming from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, and Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer Sgt. James Crowley.
In brief, officer Crowley was at the home of Professor Gates to investigate a possible break in. Gates came home to confront officer Crowley, who asked Gates to "step out onto the porch" in order to speak with him. Gates replied "no, I will not," and then started yelling "why, because I am a black man in America?"
Sympathizing with his "friend" Skip Gates, President Obama on July 22, 2009 said to the nation during a press conference that was supposed to be on health care that "number 1, any of us would be pretty angry; number 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number 3 ... that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."
President Obama said these remarks on national television without-admittedly-knowing the facts about the incident. But that did not stop him reaching for the comfort zone of racial politics.
Now, in the latest episode of the "post-racial president," Obama has decided to just come out against white people in general, or so it seems when one listens to his latest campaign add released by the DNC last week. After setting up the usual villains — Wall Street, Insurance Companies and the like, Obama says "They see these elections as a chance to put their allies back in power and to undo all that we've accomplished. So this year I need your help once more. It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again."
This call-to-arms from Obama is in response to Governor Jan Brewer's signing of bill, SB 1070, Arizona's immigration law, or the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act." Essentially, the Arizona bill mirrors that of existing federal law. Among other protections within the bill, it stipulates that SB1070 "shall be implemented in a manner consistent with federal laws regulating immigration, protecting the civil rights of all persons and respecting the privileges and immunities of United States citizens."
The facts in Arizona are such that even though President Obama, while saying the bill "threaten(s) to undermine basic notions of fairness" and that it is "misguided," also stated that "Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others." Arizona simply had to do what the federal government abdicated a long time ago: The will to police its borders.
So instead of coming to terms with Arizona's needing to protect its citizens from unmitigated drug crime, killings and kidnappings, President Obama instead promised to dispatch the full weight of the Department of Justice to "examine the civil rights and other implications."
Eric Holder runs the Obama's DOJ, the same Eric Holder who, barely in office a month, gave a speech during Black History Month in 2009 and said "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."
Would this be the same nation that Eric Holder is talking about that had just finished electing its first black president with 43% of the white vote? Why would the nation's first black Attorney General say such a thing? Consider then what Holder did in May of 2009, when he and his DOJ dropped a clear-cut case of voter intimidation against white voters in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party in the 2008 presidential election. But for my money, Eric Holder doesn't scratch his nose without the permission of this president.
Throughout his campaign and now in office, Barack Obama has seized upon the opportunity to play the race card when he believed that it benefited him, and his Party. That this strategy has backfired is more a testament to the majority of people within the country coming to the realization that manufactured racial outrage by anyone-even a black president-will not and cannot be tolerated any longer.
The vast majority of Americans are not the racist and haters that this president seems to believe exist. With a progressive media only too happy to parrot whatever racial undertones the administration is selling that day, President Obama has-as the nation's first black president-done more racial harm than healing.
Americans believe that the color of one's skin is of no importance compared to the content of one's character. These words are certainly not new to Americans, or unknown. Good people believe in them.
So it is truly sad that America's first black president-whom the media dutifully reminds the country when criticism befalls him-should be acting in such a divisive and-dare I say-racist way.
Racism is not exclusive to white people, or anybody else for that matter. Yet, liberal demagogues like those in academia and most Democrats in Washington try to convey that very sentiment. It is a recipe for future disaster.
Barack Obama is creating an atmosphere of racial polarization through his misguided statements and actions. Instead of seizing the chance to truly break through any real or politically erected racial barriers that can inspire greatness in the nation, he instead opts for page one in the "politics of race" play book, and that is accuse your opponent of what it is you are really about.
© Vincent Fiore
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