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About Fiore
Fiore is a freelance political writer based in New York.
His commentary has been posted over numerous Web sites and publications around
the world. |
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Past Articles
A
Post-Racial President? Hardly |
Vincent Fiore
A Post-Racial President? Hardly
May 3, 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. |
