The Obama Administration's Rampant Racism

American Thinker
January 20, 2010

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 was "light-skinned" and spoke 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're hypocritical and that they 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 a 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 and 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 about Cambridge, Mass., police sergeant James Crowley ("the police acted stupidly") in the Henry Louis Gates incident. Obama never did apologize to Crowley.

In addition, 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 "He [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, and yet, despite the fact that the case had been won, 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 in their own attitudes toward African-Americans, who they see as implicitly 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.

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. Whereas Obama uses the accusation of racism politically when it's convenient, as in Imus's case, he reveals his own racist leanings when one of Democrats' own commits a racist faux pas. Of course Obama and other racial charlatans such as Al Sharpton forgive Harry Reid: They feel the same way about blacks as Reid does. 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 - that the administration's rampant racism becomes another of the reasons American voters drum Democrats out of office in droves.