This exchange from The View happened last week. In case you missed it, Whoopi Goldberg argues that blacks can say nigger and it’s all right, among other things.

Whoopi is a rare quadruple threat: coarse, ugly, wealthy and pompous.

On the news of Jesse Jackson’s use of the “n” word, the conversation quickly developed into the double standard involved between a white and black person’s use of the word. Sherri Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg admitted there is a double standard, but added there should be. Sherri Shepherd said she uses the word “as a term of endearment,” but said to Barbara Walters “I don’t want to hear it coming out of your mouth.”

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, puzzled by the obvious double standard, questioned how she can explain to her young daughter why she is not allowed to use that word, but other kids are, when she noted “we live in the same world,” Whoopi went off on a tangent that blacks and whites do not live in the same world. Whoopi, who also dismissed Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s concerns as “very white,” added Elisabeth just does not “understand.”

GOLDBERG: We do live in different worlds. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s the way it is Elisabeth. This is the way it is. This is how I grew up. My mother could not go and vote in the United States of America, the place of her birth. We, go- wait, wait.

WALTERS: And don’t we want that to change?

GOLDBERG: Yes, we would like to. But you don’t understand.

HASSELBECK: I’m not going to take that away from no.

GOLDBERG: No, no, I, I want you to. But what I need you to understand is the frustration that goes along when you say we live in the same world. It isn’t balanced. And we would like it to be. But you have to understand, you have to listen to the fact that we’re telling you, there are issues, there are huge problems that still affect us. And you’ve got to know this if you want to know us.

Elisabeth started to cry and asked “how are we supposed to then move forward if we keep using terms that bring back that pain?”Barbara Walters used the opportunity to promote Obama’s candidacy opining “Barack Obama and others…are trying to move forward.”

The entire transcript is below.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: I don’t know whether you’ve been watching television last night or this morning, but new footage was leaked that apparently shows Jesse Jackson using the “n” word. Fox News says the tape was leaked. They didn’t have anything to do with it. So I ask you, is any of this a surprise?

SHERRI SHEPHERD: Well, you know, what, what I think the hypocrisy is coming out because Jesse is the main, he was the main proponent of, of saying, you know, he didn’t want the rappers using it and take it out. And I thought, and we were talking about it, I thought it had been a funeral or something where they– I don’t know if Jesse came to the funeral– where they buried the “n” word.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: Did that come after Michael Richards, when after his rage, using the “n” word? He called for a boycott of all the “Seinfeld” DVD’s and episodes telling people to take of their DVR and-

SHEPHERD: Was that Al Sharpton?

HASSELBECK: Jesse was part of that as well.

JOY BEHAR: He wasn’t talking about using the word privately. He was talking about using it publicly.

HASSELBECK: Did you ever see “Crash”? Did you guys see “Crash” the movie? See I don’t think there’s an ounce of difference, and sometimes I think it’s almost worse to talk- use it privately than publicly.

SHEPHERD: No, no, it’s not true, no.

HASSELBECK: Well, I’m saying, are they equally as bad if I say it to someone in, in the privacy of my household? That’s still bad. It’s not a word that should be used. I think it’s, it’s-

SHEPHERD: Don’t tell me I can’t use that word. Because I use it.

BARBARA WALTERS: Okay, there’s something I want to add.

HASSELBECK: But how is it- you’re telling me I can’t use it, but you can use it.

SHEPHERD: It’s not the same when I use it-

HASSELBECK: Why? (more…)

LaShawn Barber:

I’m only one black American among millions, and I’m no authority on black people, nor do I speak for black people.

But I can provide insight.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book called Wrong on Race, by Bruce Bartlett. He correctly pointed out that most of the raging racists you’ve read about in history books were Democrats and that Republicans were the anti-slavery party. In fact, the GOP was founded on the principle. Republicans supported major civil rights legislation right up through the 1960s, while Democrats filibustered the bills and spoke out against equal rights for all. Republicans still support equal rights for all.

And therein lies the problem.

Knowing history is important, obviously, and all this makes for good reading. But I need to break it you: blacks who vote for Democrats do not care about this history. The only bit of history they care about is the one that provides excuses and finger-pointing opportunities: ancestors in bondage, great-grandparents and grandparents struggling to gain first class citizenship in this country, etc. They don’t care who did what to or for whom in the past. All they care about is who’s offering them the most goodies today.

My second day in Atlanta, and several things stand out. One, this is a city where the black middle class is very robust. When I lived in Miami 20 years ago, it was commonly held that blacks with ambition moved to Atlanta. It’s quite striking and quite inspiring, remembering as I do the days prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

I’m at the Hyatt Regency. With 1600 rooms, it could pass as a small town when it’s at capacity. And it is. The AME Zion church is holding its conference here. Microsoft has 18,000 people in town for an international gathering (my seatmate on the flight out was coming from Sydney — a 24 hour trip.) I’m here photographing yet another conference.

The other striking thing is CNN, which is headquartered not far from where I sit. I haven’t watched much of CNN in years, but you can no more avoid it than you can expect to be served Pepsi in this city. TVs are everywhere, even the Landmark Diner where I walked to last night to avoid another buffet.

As I ate my meal, I stared at a muted CNN with Lou Dobbs and a graphic that read “The War on the Middle Class.” Dobbs plays the same part as Bill O’Reilly — angry outraged smart guy. Or seemingly smart.

The War on the Middle Class. Hmm. Waged by whom? Must be those ultra-rich people who pay 40% of the taxes — 70% if you include the top 10% of wage earners. Clever people they, bringing down the middle class with such tricks as $4/cup coffee, vitamin water, widescreen TVs and $2500 barbeque grills — stuff the middle class has been scarfing up like suckers. Poor us.

The sense I got from seeing CNN — again as I ate breakfast — is that stockbrokers will be leaping from skyscrapers any moment now. Sheesh. Remember when Bush, post-election 2000 but before inauguration, was accused  by Clintonians of “talking down the economy?” He was merely pointing out the fallout of the tech bubble and the slowing economy. If that was talking down the economy, CNN is in full shout.

The market is down. One possibility is the market pricing in the cost of an Obama reign.

Investors this summer have been placing their bets on an Obama presidency, and for the most part that hasn’t been good for the market.

Without giving him a chance to explain himself in detail on the campaign trail or at the Democratic National Convention, they are voting with their shares by tossing financial, health insurance, manufacturing and high-dividend stocks into the ash can, and are growing skeptical about energy companies as well.

It’s not that major institutional investors don’t like the man — far from it. He has many backers among the financial elite, including multibillionaires George Soros and Ron Burkle. And it’s not that there aren’t many other reasons for investors to sell stocks now, as the global economy tangles with the terrible twin beasts of bank deleveraging and inflation.

It’s just that Obama’s rhetoric on taxes and health care is scaring common wealthy people with large capital gains from investments made over the past decade, and a lot of them don’t want to wait around to see whether it’s just populist fluff that might be set aside once he takes office.

Plus, the Democrats who run Congress know that a weaker economy favors their nominee — and they are loath to pass banking or trade legislation now to improve the nation’s industrial standing over fears that it could backfire and give comfort to the Republicans. And finally, there is a well-founded anxiety that one-party rule in Washington for at least the next two years will bring about the sort of abuse of power that has gotten both parties into trouble over the past few decades.

If you don’t know the meaning of niggardly or the meaning of black hole, you’re the victim of your schooling, not a victim of racism.

Or maybe you’re not a victim at all. Maybe you’re just ignorant.

…that begins with photographer Rick Smolan, many years ago, shooting photographs of a young girl in Korea and ends quite happily.

Another great video from TED Talks.

WATCH HERE.

George Will:

Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today’s near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling” (1997), “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops” (1998), “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction” (2000) and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime” (2003).

If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue — the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which “society” writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.

Last July, Obama said that “more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.” Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, “We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives.” But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute’s City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”

Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: “We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.” Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.

by J.C. Phillips 

I never imagined a time when directors of campus diversity would suggest that Blacks not be hired or when Black students would work to censure a speaker for suggesting that they are capable of competing with their White and Asian classmates in the academic arena. Yet, that is exactly what happened during my recent sojourn to Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania to speak on the topic of “Affirmative Action in the 21st Century.”

Who knew an appearance by little ol’ me could elicit such controversy?

The fun began when the campus Republicans (CR) approached the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs (OMA) and asked if they would like to co-sponsor the evening and join us all for dinner afterwards. The OMA declined the invitation and began working to bring their own speaker to campus. The topic was clearly one of interest; they were just uninterested in working with the students of the CR or hearing what their speaker had to say. This, I believe, is known in academic circles as having an open mind.

The OMA later contacted the CR and informed them that they wanted to add their speaker to the evening’s bill. The event organizers explained that they were satisfied with the plans they had made and politely declined. The students then contacted the campus communications department in order to advertise their event on the campus website. They were informed that unless the OMA speaker was added to the bill they would not be allowed to advertise their event. The students also became aware of an email from the director of the OMA to several other student groups on campus seeking their support for the speaker the OMA was bringing to campus. Welcome to the new academic freedom.

Another meeting was held in the office of the director of the OMA. Several students protesting the event were present and accused the CR of attempting to propagate the message that Black students were not welcome on the campus. Mind you at this point no one, not the students protesting the event or the director of the OMA had taken the time to find out exactly what my position on affirmative action is or to inquire as to what I might say during my speech. For the record, I do not oppose all affirmative action programs. My comments that evening were narrowly focused on racial preferences for the purposes of diversity. One of the main arguments I make is that racial preferences tend to reinforce stereotypes particularly as it pertains to black academic inferiority. That, of course, did not stop several students from expressing their indignation by threatening to picket the event, tear down posters and put up posters of their own attacking the officers of the CR. Nor did it dissuade the director of the OMA from suggesting to the CR that it would have been better had they invited a white speaker to address the issue. This is a prime example of the new world promotion of cross racial understanding.

Ironically, ignorance of the speaker did little to prevent Black students in the audience from viewing me as the enemy even as the president of the campus Democrats – one of their fellow protestors – expressed her outrage that I would be invited to speak given the fact that most of the Black students on campus were there because of affirmative action, (thus proving my point).

In the end, it was more sound and fury than substance and no doubt increased the events turnout proving the maxim, “all publicity is good publicity.”

There was, however, a particularly fascinating moment during the question and answer portion of the evening. A woman in the rear of the auditorium (that had been sucking her teeth for most of my talk) asked how in the world I expected Black students to get into college without racial preferences. I waited hoping that perhaps one of the Black students so indignant at my appearance would politely check this woman. I waited in vain. The new Black revolutionaries, God help us.

It is truly a sign of how mixed up the world is when a Black man telling Black students that there is no monopoly on brain power is decried as a sellout while White folk that believe Black students are only in attendance on campus because of lowered standards and that without lowered standards they would not be in school at all are seen as comrades in arms. Let’s just call that madness.

Thomas Sowell:

Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.

Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances– Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record.

Later, when the ultimate political prize– the White House– loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty– telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?

When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they need for themselves?

Will they have the skills of science, technology or medicine? Or will they have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack Obama’s stock in trade?

In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people’s ancestors.

Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime.

We don’t need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward.

The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left’s vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing.

Scientific American

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.

Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. According to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes—84 percent of them violent—occur in the U.S. every year.

The persistence of explicit bias in contemporary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hundreds of studies of implicit bias show that its effects can be equally insidious. Most social psychologists believe that certain scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. “The data on that are incontrovertible,” concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.

Director Spike Lee has waded into the ongoing controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose provocative statements have proved a thorn in the side of Democrat frontrunner Barack Obama. Lee advises the preacher to do the right thing and keep quiet. “The more he opens his mouth, the more damage he does,” he told the Guardian yesterday.

For good measure, Lee hinted at a political conspiracy behind Wright’s recent, contentious attempts to justify his remarks. “It looks like he’s being paid to keep talking,” he said….”If he loves Obama he needs to shut up right now. It makes me question his motives for talking. I’m starting to wonder whether somebody has been contributing to the building funds of his church. Seriously.”

Wright touts conspiracy theories (AIDS invented to kill blacks etc). Spike Lee thinks Wright’s conspiracy theories are a conspiracy. Maybe Spike Lee is being paid to make black people look bad.

All this recalls the scene in Little Murders when detective Alan Arkin blames the rampant crime in New York City on a conspiracy to make the police look bad. That scene wasn’t available on Youtube, but this opening scene was. Here’s how Elliott Gould meets his fiance.

Rush Limbaugh:

The Democrat superdelegates have a problem. Obama cannot win, but they are afraid to take the nomination from him because they think the black vote won’t show up in November and vote Democrat. I tell them not to worry. There’s a 50-year history showing that they have done far worse — destroying the black family, for example — and blacks still vote Democrat.

True that.

by J.C. Phillips 

A brief recap of some of the highpoints from the Jeremiah Wright resurrection tour:

The former pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago reiterated his belief that America has been a terrorist nation from its inception, defended his damning of America, stood by his belief that the American government created the HIV virus and placed drugs in the Black community in order to exterminate Black people, further derided the country as a place where “I can worship God on Sunday morning wearing a black clergy robe and kill others on Sunday evening wearing a white Klan robe.” Finally, Wright dismissed the entire controversy over his words as an attack on the Black church.

Just a guess, but I am betting he did himself no favors. I would add that rather than pen op-eds telling us all how ignorant we are because we don’t understand Black liberation theology, the reverend’s supporters would do better to simply produce a tape where the former pastor is heard preaching something along the lines of “God bless this great and good country.” The problem for Wright’s supporters and ultimately for presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who counted the reverend as his spiritual advisor, is that there is no such tape because no such sermon was delivered. Rather, what was heard on video clips across the world wide web and then repeated in the speeches and interviews before the National Press Club and the NAACP is left to stand as representative of Wright’s views. The judgment of any candidate intimately associated with such views is a legitimate political issue and one that like a bad penny will continue to revisit Obama over and over again. 

Considering the number of “good liberals” that essentially agree with the spirit if not the substance of Wright’s words and have rushed to his defense, it is also one that should haunt the Democratic Party as well. 

A few questions to Wright and those that subscribe to a view of America as “Ameri-KKK-A.” are in order. Let us concede that everything you say about America is true. America is a terrorist nation, the government has indeed sought to destroy Black people through the introduction of man made race specific diseases and addictive soul destroying drugs and racism is running rampant throughout the nation. Given the abject evil of the American government, why do you look to that same government to provide you with health care, retirement benefits and an education for your children? Wouldn’t it make more sense to support policies that limit such a government’s involvement and power over its citizens? 

The solutions proffered by the party Wright supports to each and every issue confronting Americans is an expanse of federal involvement. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton support government regulated health care; both have rejected personal ownership of retirement accounts and instead endorsed an expansion of the social security tax. Both Democratic candidates have expressed support of further government regulation of the insurance, oil and pharmaceutical companies. Both want federal funding of a universal pre-school program. If we can’t trust government not to clandestinely plan for the annihilation of the Black race, why on earth would we send our toddlers to federally financed (and ultimately run) pre-schools? 

Or is it that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency would restore moral legitimacy to this nation’s institutions and traditions and put us on track to reconciliation and redemption? And if that is the case wouldn’t it be better for you to, well, — to put it bluntly — sit down and shut up?

To this last question, Wright answers that he is defending the honor of the Black church. Ain’t nobody gonna talk about his mamma! With all do respect, the reverend neither speaks for the Black church nor do I believe his scurrilous and idiotic theories speak for the majority of Black church goers. His continued allocutions do, however, raise his national profile and increase his speaking fees.

Were Wright a Black separatist or even a (gasp!) conservative with these convictions it would make some sense, but to be a liberal Democrat preaching these theories makes him appear lunatic. A lunatic that, alas, will not go away.

Ever liberal Richard Cohen writes about the way blacks supposedly hear words differently than whites:

To my (racially) tin ear, little that either Bill or Hillary Clinton has said this election season sounded ugly. These included the remarks that seemed to have started it all — Hillary Clinton’s crushingly banal observation that for all that Martin Luther King Jr. did, it took Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to enact a monumental civil rights law. The context was clearly her contention that despite Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric, it takes good old experience (like hers) to get the job done. Who could possibly object to that?

Anyone who seeks to be offended, dummy. Taking offense rewards certain patronized groups (blacks, hispanics) political power. Where have you been, Richard?

Lots of people, it turned out, many of them African American. Obama himself called the remark “unfortunate.” My own ears heard nothing untoward, and when I mentioned that to an African American colleague, he said — to my utter surprise — that he initially took the remark as a swipe at King. I was flabbergasted. Who would take a swipe at King? A Democratic presidential candidate would have to be criminally insane to do such a thing.

LBJ was a nasty man in many ways. But without his skill in wielding Congressional power the Civil Rights Act never would have passed. Southern Democrats had blocked progress on this since the end of Reconstruction.

Hillary was right. Anyone offended by historical fact should be told to grow up, not patronized even more.

Screw sensitivity.

Bruce Walker:

“We have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the duty of intelligent men”
  - George Orwell. 

How often do we have to return to the words of Orwell to make sense of the world today?  There is madness in our lives, and it neither seeks nor wants a cure.  Great nations are altering their economies, impoverishing their poorest subjects, condemning their progeny all in support of the lie of global warming. 

Is it not obvious, by now, that a cyclical climate change is part of the history of our planet?  (Has that not been obvious since we knew about the ice ages?)  And is it not obvious that we do not even know whether the planet is growing hotter or colder?  (What if the real problem turns out to be global cooling?  Then we have no time to lose in doing all we can to heat up the environment and increase our individual carbon footprint.)  The depressing part of all this is that otherwise sane people seem invested in catastrophic silliness.  We are reduced to restating the obvious.

There is madness in race politics as well.  Most black Americans have their votes bought by new masters who need their votes to stay in power.  The historical precedent for this was in some Southern states many decades ago, when blacks were brought en masse to the polling places, given a silver dollar, a barbeque sandwich and a Coke.  These buyers of black votes were not the friends of blacks but rather their oppressors, the orchestrators of Jim Crow, the members of the very same political party which now owns African-Americans as electoral chattel still.  It is no longer a nuanced question whether ghastly public schools, fatherless homes, government housing projects and welfare mentality consume lives whole.   No great intelligence is required to grasp the dimensions of black hopelessness.  We are again reduced to simply stating the obvious.

Evil, violent people have sworn to kill us, to destroy our society, to impose a totalitarian theocracy upon us, to end Israel, to corrupt our democratic institutions, to insinuate themselves by the millions into those nations that have been our traditional allies — yet political leaders of the Left find it impossible to seriously condemn these, our sworn and mortal enemies.  Why? 

Read on.

Yesterday marked the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. It also marked the release of a “report card” on racial diversity in baseball.

Major League Baseball has received its first A-minus for racial diversity in hiring, even as the percentage of black players continues to drop.

The grade comes from Richard Lapchick, who’s the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. MLB’s grade was B-plus in last year’s report.

Honestly, does anyone believe that teams discriminate on race anymore? Sports teams are so competitive, if it turned out Osama bin Laden could throw a 98 mph fastball, some team would be trying to rehabilitate his image and sign him to a contract.

Of course, progressives never see progress. Get a load of how Lapchick is described on UCF’s website.

The Institute’s founder and director is Dr. Richard Lapchick, a scholar, author and internationally recognized human rights activist and pioneer for racial equality who is acknowledged as an expert on sports issues.

Described as “the racial conscience of sport,” Lapchick also serves as director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and is president and CEO of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS), a group of more than 210 colleges and universities that helps student-athletes complete their college degrees while serving their communities on issues such as diversity, conflict resolution and men’s violence against women.

Oh, puke.

by Burt Prelutsky

Barack Obama gave a speech that his disciples compared favorably to the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount, but which I thought came a lot closer to Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a desperate attempt to keep himself from being relegated to the trash heap of history.

Coming in the wake, as it did, of all we had come to know about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I thought Obama’s speech was far too little and much too late. Say, 20 years too late.

Frankly, I’m surprised that so many people, and not just liberals, were so willing to give Obama a pass. It’s one thing, after all, for this half-white fellow to join the Trinity United Church of (a Black) Christ in order to use it as a launching pad into Chicago’s scummy political scene. That’s just playing the game. But when one not only sticks around for two decades, but has the creep perform your wedding ceremony and baptize your daughters, and you then bring those children into church to listen to this demagogue damn our country and vilify white people, I really don’t understand why everyone isn’t as disgusted with Mr. Obama as I am.

The junior senator from Illinois first campaigned on the premise that he’s the one person who can put racial differences behind us, but when it’s discovered that he’s joined at the hip with Louis Farrakhan’s best friend, insists that he’s ready to engage in an honest dialogue on race. Well, I don’t believe he is, but I am. What’s more, I’m sure it’s not the dialogue he has in mind, which is just more of the same old dump-on-whitey bilge that Jesse Jackson, Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton, have been spewing out for so many long and profitable years.

It was back in 1964 that the Civil Rights Act was passed. In the intervening 44 years, this country has spent billions of dollars to compensate people who hadn’t suffered from Jim Crow laws for the simple reason that they hadn’t even been born yet. Be that as it may, the government continues to fund Operation Head Start; continues to use Affirmative Action as a means by which to leap-frog underachieving black students over, in most cases, better-qualified Asian students; and continues to favor black-owned businesses with low interest loans. But it’s never enough and God knows there’s no end in sight.

You’d like an honest dialogue about race relations, Sen. Obama? As Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep yelled at Tom Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee in “A Few Good Men”: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

The truth is, in America, anyone with brains, grit and self-discipline, can rise to unimaginable heights. But of course, a guy with a racist agenda, a con man like Jeremiah Wright, won’t tell you that. No, instead he uses his bully pulpit to insist that we honkies cooked up the HIV virus as a means to exterminate black people. Believe me, if we had extermination in mind, we wouldn’t have come up with anything that fancy. Why would we invent a disease that would infect whites as well as blacks? And we surely wouldn’t be blowing our tax dollars to combat the disease in Africa.

If we were a racist society, Oprah Winfrey, your fairy godmother, certainly wouldn’t be a billionaire; she’d be fetching someone’s mint julep. And Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice wouldn’t grow up to be secretaries of state; they’d be sweeping out the stables. And Will Smith and Denzel Washington wouldn’t be movie stars; they’d be in the fields picking cotton.

I don’t claim to speak for all white Americans, only for myself. But, personally, I think it stinks that there’s even a single black American who has the gall to blame white Americans for the troubles that continue to plague black communities in 2008. I mean, how is a 70% illegitimacy rate the fault of white people? How is the fact that young black men are more likely to wind up with a rap sheet than with a college degree our fault? Too many blacks, in and out of politics, get away with claiming that whites are the only racists in America because only whites have political power. But how is it that we all agree that the Ku Klux Klan is a racist organization although, aside from Robert Byrd (D), no Klan member holds high elected office? And how is it that, in this allegedly racist society, there are any number of black congressmen, governors, mayors, police chiefs and even a black United States senator?

By the way, how is it that if whites are the racists, there is far more black on white crime than white on black? Far, far more. It’s not even close.

This isn’t to suggest that we whites are blameless. Some of us are innocent, but surely not the members of the Democratic party. You’ll never hear one of their politicians utter an unpleasant truth about black underachievement. They’re quite happy to pay off black ministers at election time to extend their blessings and their pulpits to any hack with a (D) after his name. Their favorite pastime, though, is tossing tax dollars away on black so-called entitlements, otherwise known as bribes. After all, it’s not their money and they wind up with 90% of the plantation votes in their pocket.

I, myself, wouldn’t mind at all voting for a black president. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that I was quite prepared to vote for General Colin Powell when it appeared he might make a run for the White House. And, frankly, I think a cabinet filled with people such as Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, would be as good as it gets.

The sad irony of Obama’s candidacy is that so many white Americans are convinced that by voting for a black racist they’re proving how wonderfully tolerant they are. All they really prove is how childish and naïve some people are, whatever their age.

By sitting in that pew for 20 long years, soaking up Rev. Wright’s poison, Obama convinced me he’s as big a race hustler as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. The only real difference I see is that he doesn’t shout, try to sound like Algonquin J. Calhoun or insist on giving speeches that rhyme.

Oh, how I long for the good old days when the worst thing that anyone could say about Barack Hussein Obama is that, down deep, he might really be a Muslim!

by J.C. Phillips

In his book “Fatheralong”, John Edger Wideman writes that when we play race, we play a game in which “the fix is in…the inventor of race always holds the winning cards because he can choose when to play them and name their value.” Those of us that placed hope in a post racial Barack Obama candidacy are sure to be disappointed as the cards have begun to fall and the gaming begun.

Among certain of the hard core left, the reason Obama has not wrapped up the Democratic nomination is racism. They ask: “Can there be any doubt but that if Barak Obama were white, he would have beaten Hillary Clinton by now?” The fact that Hillary Clinton is a tenacious campaigner with a huge war chest and a well oiled machine behind her is completely beside the point. As is the fact that Obama has expressed a desire to be judged based on his merits. What is true is that were Obama white, he may not have had the opportunity to showcase his political skills. Very few junior senators receive such opportunities. Further, some of the allure of an Obama candidacy is the excitement of breaking the color barrier. That is not the substance of his campaign, but to deny it is a part of his success is to simply be dishonest. 

While this pitch is currently directed at Democrats, the tactic is clear. Once Obama receives the nomination, these same racial gamers will routinely point to the fact that many have judged Obama and found him wanting as a certain sign not only that racism exists (it does so please don’t write) but is the food on which Americans feed. To oppose an Obama presidency is to engage in racism, which means of course that the opposition candidate has now been appropriately defined as a card carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

John McCain has been traveling the country on a biography tour, stumping in cities and towns that have played an important part in his life. For Matthew Yglesias writing in the Atlantic, McCain’s biography tour is an appeal to racism. He writes: “…it’s the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people’s potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn’t involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way.” 

The card has been played and either McCain is a racist or as Bill Maher put it when referring to him, “he just appeals to racists.” Still unclear is how saying that Martin Luther King was a “transcendent figure in American history” appeals to racists. What is also unclear is how an actual former Klan member and a man that voted against the civil rights act (as opposed to a holiday) is able to glad hand with black “leaders” with impunity and even had the “Post Racial” candidate Barack Obama raising money for him. It would appear that this particular racist “get out of jail free” card only has value if you are, well, if you are a Democrat. 

If Obama loses the general election, it will not be a signal to the left that America is not buying what the Democratic Party has been selling. Rather it will be proof positive of the intractable nature of racism in America. I often wonder if in spite of the cheers and tears, there aren’t those Obama supporters that are deep down hoping for him to lose. A win might signal the beginning of a new era of race in America and for many, the current game is just too much fun.

Of course, even if he were to win it would not prove that America has progressed beyond “Amerikkka.” Numbers will be parsed and any group – white men, Hispanics, working women, etc. – that do not vote in overwhelming numbers for Obama will be branded with a scarlet letter “R”.

Wideman was right. The fix is in.

On April 4, 2008, at a Los Angeles event commemorating the assassination of Martin Luther King, the African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi gave Israeli-American Daphna Ziman its Tom Bradley Award for community service.

Then the event’s keynote speaker, Reverend Eric Lee, turned to Ms. Ziman and launched an anti-Semitic diatribe. Roger L. Simon interviewed Ms. Ziman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYf_xSrRSPE

Does verse.

James Lewis: 

Keeping people on the boil makes for very powerful group politics, which is why demagogues and tyrannical regimes do it all over the world. But there is an awful cost when individuals or groups remain in turmoil over wrongs that lie in the past.

Dr. Condoleeza Rice’s life story warms the hearts of many because she demonstrates the triumph of an individual over adversity in her own life. Yet our SecState vividly recalls traumatic memories of the infamous 1963 black church bombing in Birmingham,  Alabama.

“I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.

“Those terrible events burned into my consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats.”
 

Mental trauma
When psychiatrists try to help trauma victims, sometimes years after the event, they always need to tread a careful line. On the one hand, someone who can’t let go of the past may need to reconsider those old experiences. On the other hand, by constantly dwelling on the past it is all too easy to re-traumatize people, to scratch those old wounds so that they start bleeding all over again. Ethical therapists know about the danger of re-traumatizing people. They constantly try to avoid making things worse.

Look at the contrast. What the Left has done to black people in the last fifty years is a kind of emotional abuse — a constant, obsessional reliving of the traumatic past. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Acts, Democrat politicians, professors and preachers are still intent on rubbing salt into those old, painful wounds. It has now become institutionalized. Reliving the past is a major reason for Black Studies Departments all over the country, just as Women’s Studies are designed to perpetuate an everlasting cry of pain and rage about the fate of women throughout history. Those constant rehearsals of reasons for rage and resentment do not to help people; they just exploit their pain for political gain. As a result, the Left still gets the black vote more than 90% of the time, in exchange for fuzzy promises like “hope” and “change;” or worse, for welfare programs that undermine rather than strengthen black families and individuals. 

It always works on at least some people when you rile up resentments  That is why there was an NAACP TV commercial exploiting a dreadful hate crime in Texas to smear George W. Bush. It is why ethnic groups in the Balkans never stop hating each other.  It is how the Rwanda genocide happened among Tutsis and Hutus. Around the world, demagogues exploit old grievances because they don’t want them to be solved. That is why the Palestinian mess cannot be solved; it has turned into an billion dollar boondoggle for the elites. There’s always a lot of money to be made off the poverty and resentment of large groups.

Jonah Goldberg:

Thank God for Barack Obama. For until his “More Perfect Union” speech last Tuesday, it seems it never occurred to anyone that America needed to talk about race. “Maybe this’ll be the beginning of a conversation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed on “Meet the Press.” According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, just the fact of Obama’s address proves that a “national dialogue on race” is “essential.” The Chicago Tribune reported that “many voters, black and white, say they were moved by Obama’s speech … which they see as a long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm national dialogue about race.” Newspaper editorial boards agree. In the words of the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Prodding Americans to confront their racial differences is, by itself, an accomplishment of historical proportions.”

Because so many people agree on this brilliant new strategy to heal our national wounds, I can only assume that I’m the one missing something. Because when one luminary after another smacks his forehead like someone who forgot to have a V8 in epiphanic awe over the genius of Obama’s call for a national conversation on race, all I can do is wonder: “What on Earth are you people talking about?”

“Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work,” the New York Times reported within 48 hours of the speech.

Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter’s pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I’d been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses — often entire majors — dedicated to race in America. I’d even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes and issues into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. And scratching faintly in the back of my mind, I felt some vague memory that these same universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind’s eye seemed to reveal African American studies centers, banners for Black History Month and copies of books like “Race Matters” and “The Future of the Race” lined up on shelves at college bookstores.

Were all of the corporate diversity consultants and racial sensitivity seminars mere apparitions in a dream? Also disappearing in the memory hole, apparently, were the debates that followed Hurricane Katrina, Trent Lott’s remarks about Strom Thurmond, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, the publication of “The Bell Curve” and O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Not to mention the ongoing national chatter about affirmative action, racial disparities in prison sentences and racial profiling by law enforcement.

And the thousands of hours of newscasts, television dramas and movies — remember Oscar-winning films such as 2004’s “Crash?” — dedicated to racial issues? It’s as if they never existed, vanishing like the image on a TV screen after the plug’s been pulled. The New York Times’ six-week Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “How Race Is Lived in America”: just an inkblot?

It all seems so otherworldly. I feel like one of the last humans in an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movie in which all of the pod people are compelled by some alien DNA to pine continually for yet another “conversation” about a topic we’ve never, ever stopped talking about

I guess if you’re black you’re entitled to your own “facts.”

After telling its parishioners that AIDS was invented by white people to kill black people and that cocaine was a plot to destroy inner cities, the new pastor of Obama’s church reacted to criticism by

…accusing the media of character assassination and “crucifixion.”

Otis Moss III, the current pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, used his pulpit to defend his congregation and its past minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., from a wave of controversy stemming from inflammatory statements made by Wright.

“We have listened and watched as the wonderful work of our church has been vilified this week,” he told about 3,000 congregants on Palm Sunday morning. “This week should be special for us because I guess we know a little something about crucifixion.”

Or self-pity. Now get this:

The church also released a statement that began: “Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe.”

What cheap rhetoric, equating the murder of Martin Luther King with legitimate criticism of a paranoid, victicrat  — and yes, black racist — theology.

Steven Malanga addresses the point that Bill Cosby and Juan Williams both understand and speak to, and which Barack Obama does not. And Obama lovers deem him progressive!

Barack Obama’s much-discussed speech in Philadelphia earlier this week was not only about race. It was also about economics and, specifically, about poverty. Measures of group wealth, or the lack of it, are often used to support claims that our society is racist. Obama’s speech revealed that though he may be, to many people, a refreshingly new kind of post-racial politician and a healer, when it comes to notions of poverty and economic advancement, his ideas are right out of the 1960s and 1970s.

At one point in his speech, for instance, Obama suggested that some black poverty today can be attributed to the “legalized discrimination” that existed in America prior to the civil rights laws of the 1960s, which, in his telling, prevented black families from accumulating “wealth to bequeath to future generations.” Obama seemed to suggest that families in America escape poverty by patiently accumulating wealth and passing it on to future generations—when in fact millions of Americans of all races leap out of poverty within a single lifetime through their own initiative, not their inheritances. We are long past the time when the legacy of Jim Crow laws and other forms of official discrimination can explain black poverty rates.

Reading Obama’s speech prompted me to look at his larger economic policy proposals, especially those aimed at combating poverty. Clearly, he believes that our economy is failing many Americans, and to help the impoverished, he proposes everything from tax credits for the working poor to a higher minimum wage. In fairness, on these issues, he’s not much different than his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Yet both candidates are largely missing the point. While they insist that strengthening labor unions or protecting homeowners from foreclosures will alleviate the hardships of the poor, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census remind us that the breakdown of the traditional two-parent, married family is a far greater contributor to poverty in America than many of the supposed shortcomings of our economy. It’s hard to imagine that America will make much more headway on reducing persistent poverty until it halts this long-term trend.

The Census Bureau’s study on the living arrangements of American children appeared in mid-February. The data show that the number of children now living in two-parent families has dipped just below the 70 percent mark for the first time since the Census began collecting data on family formation nearly 130 years ago. After peaking in the 1950s—when about 87 percent of all children lived with two parents—the traditional family went through a rapid decline beginning in the 1970s and has continued to shrink over the last three decades, though the rate of decline has slowed somewhat. As part of this sweeping change, the percentage of children living with married parents has fallen more rapidly, down more than two full percentage points, to 66.6 percent of all kids, in the last 10 years alone. Consistent with these decreases has been a sharp rise in the number of children living with single parents and with unmarried parents.

 Shrinkwrapped examines the white-guilt writings of the New York Times Nicholas Kristof:

…To whites, for example, it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people.

That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.

“That’s a real standard belief,” noted Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton (and former member of Trinity church, when she lived in Chicago). “One of the things fascinating to me watching these responses to Jeremiah Wright is that white Americans find his beliefs so fringe or so extreme. When if you’ve spent time in black communities, they are not shared by everyone, but they are pretty common beliefs.”

Occasionally, we’ve had glimpses of this gulf between white and black America. Right after the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a CBS News poll found that 6 out of 10 whites thought that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, while 9 out of 10 blacks believed it had decided correctly. Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.

In the almost surreal unreflective post-modernist posing that passes for intellectual discourse among the self-designated cognoscenti, Kristof takes the widespread acceptance of paranoid conspiracy theories in a large part of the black community as evidence that whites have neglected to listen to blacks:

What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.

All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential. And that dialogue needs to focus not on clips from old sermons by Mr. Wright but on far more urgent challenges — for example, that about half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.

Then maybe we can achieve our goal of getting, finally, to the point where there is “not a black America and not a white America… . There’s the United States of America.”

It is not readily apparent what point Kristof is trying to make.  Is Kristof suggesting that if only we whites take the time and energy to lend credence to black paranoia, we would facilitate the more complete integration of blacks into America? 

I can’t quite tell from the piece exactly how Kristof imagines such ideas as “the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people” or “that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods” is related to the fact that “half of black males do not graduate from high school with their class.”  There is a significant connection between the two data points but I suspect it is not one Kristof would allow himself to consider.

Until Kristof or anyone else can provide some evidence to show that government scientists invented the AIDS virus and then introduced it into the black community or unearth the policy papers describing how introducing Crack into black neighborhoods would somehow achieve whatever goal fevered imaginations can come up with, these ideas, along with many others that Jeremiah Wright promulgated with minimal demurral from Barack Obama, must be considered nothing more than the worst kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories.  These are not just different perspectives or different opinions but bizarre and damaging fantasy structures that infect the thinking of those who hold such ideas.   

Human beings are prone to believe in nonsense.  We typically find ways to use our rational thinking to support our nonsense theories, and usually the nonsense we believe in is harmless so long as it doesn’t interfere with our ability to work, love, and play (to use Freud’s old descriptor’s of mental health.)  In The Value of Conspiracy Theories I described a relatively harmless conspiracy theory that is ascribed to by perhaps 40% of our British friends.  JFK conspiracy theories have been a staple of the American zeitgeist for 45 years and have spawned a cottage industry and made many people quite wealthy.  In these cases, the conspiracy theories reinforce some people’s existing anxiety about government and also reinforce the comforting idea that life is not completely random.  Even if the “they” who are in control are evil, it is a comfort to know someone is in control and knows what is going on.

John Kerry, we’ve always suspected, is really a bit of a dunce. 

In an interview with Massachusetts’ SouthCoastToday (watch it HERE), Obama-backing Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., says among other reasons he’s supporting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is his belief that “it would be such an affirmation of who we say we are as a people. if we could elect an African-American president, young leader, who is obviously visionary about the ability to inspire people.”

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”

Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

An African-American president would be “a symbol of empowerment” for those who have been disenfranchised around the world, Kerry said, “an important lesson for America to show Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other places in the world where disenfranchised people don’t get anything.”

So Obama is Obama because he’s black. Check.

Obama, being from a downtrodden race, will inspire moderate Muslims to speak up? Cue the laff track.

James Taranto asks:

What do the events of this week, involving Obama’s own church, tell us about his ability to “stand up against” a “radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion”? Nothing very encouraging in this columnist’s view, but many observers view Obama much more charitably in this regard than we do.

What is really striking about Kerry’s case for Obama, though, is that it rests on what may be the crudest stereotyping we have ever observed. Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has a chuckle over Kerry’s racial stereotyping of Obama:

Where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis.

But Kerry isn’t just stereotyping blacks. He is stereotyping Muslims too. And he is drawing an equivalence between American blacks, a racial minority in one country, and Middle Eastern Muslims, a religious majority in a whole region. To John Kerry, it seems, all “disenfranchised” people look alike.

Never mind that, as Greenwald points out, “Arab Muslims [are] none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.” Never mind that in some African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, Arab Muslims still enslave blacks.

To Kerry, it seems, all “oppressed peoples” look alike. The man has all the intellectual subtlety of a third-rate ethnic studies professor.

I’m not a huge fan of Pat Buchanan, but at least he’s not intimidated by the PC police.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

Linda Chavez points out the self-inflicted wounds of black America, inflicted after the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty.

But more fundamentally, Obama avoided dealing in any meaningful way with the single most important issue facing the black community — the breakdown of the black family. And this issue, and its consequences, explains far more about the failure of blacks to thrive today than racism or lack of social spending.

Nearly seven in 10 black babies are born to single mothers today. These children will fail in school at higher rates than those born to two parents. They are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. Their poverty rates will be higher. And they are far more likely to repeat this pattern by giving birth to or fathering a child out of wedlock themselves.

Barack Obama could talk about this problem in a personal way. While his parents were married, his African father abandoned his mother in his infancy and he was raised primarily by his white grandparents, including the grandmother whom he admits is “a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world.”

But instead of confronting the problem at the core of the black/white economic divide, he chose to repeat the litany of liberal explanations. Even while acknowledging the role of welfare policies in the erosion of black families, his main emphasis was on “[a] lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family. … The lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.”

by J.C. Phillips 

I am still trying to wrap my brain around Black Liberation Theology. I write of course about the religious doctrine practiced at the Trinity United Church of Christ, where Barack Obama is a member and preached by its outspoken former pastor Jeremiah Wright. 

I certainly understand and even agree that a Christianity that is relevant and strong must be a Christianity that defends the weak and fights against oppression. It is indeed one of the puzzlements of history that down through time so many “good friends of Jesus” have used their Christianity as a pretext to enslave and oppress other human beings. So there is something very compelling about any theology — black or otherwise — that says the church must be a source of power for the powerless. There is something very persuasive in the belief that God must be about liberty, must be about uplifting the downtrodden, and must ultimately be about salvation for all men regardless of race.

The problem with Black Liberation Theology (at least as we understand it through the words of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright) is that it rejects the universal God, the god of all Children and instead casts him as a Black Tribal champion. In order to be relevant to this community God must be African centered, must be for the goals of the black community — though what those might be depends a great deal on whom you ask — and must oppose our enemies, which again no doubt means those enemies of those defining the “black agenda”. This doctrine is problematic given that mainstream Christians like to imagine their God as God of all mankind. Mainstream Christianity also teaches that the mind of man is too limited to fully understand the infinite nature of God and that our suffering is redemptive – that ultimately god uses us to his purpose and our sufferings often become blessings. To suppose that a God that allows suffering is unjust and that in the words of James Cone, Wright’s spiritual mentor, therefore “we had better kill him,” implies that we have power to impart human reason to a God that often appears irrational.

But it is the tribal aspect of this vision of God’s work here on earth that presents the greatest problem for the political aspirations of Barack Obama. Few Christians would take issue with a church that boldly proclaims the god we worship is a God of Justice. Plenty have difficulty with a church that says the god we worship is for us and against you. For a candidate that positions himself as a healer and unifier that is a problem.

More problematic is that as Obama continues to implore the nation to have a new conversation about race, he continues to see race through the same old lens. He supports racial preferences and has opposed passage of civil rights initiatives slated to be on the ballot in five states in the November elections.

The initiatives state: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin…” Oddly enough, this language is almost identical to the language of the original civil rights act, language now found disagreeable by preferentialists, which includes the post racial candidate Barack Obama.

In what is sure to be a great irony, the lure of electing the first Black president of the United States is bound to move voters in those five states to conclude that indeed discrimination based on race is unconscionable and therefore ought to be outlawed.

I will let Jeremiah Wright fight it out with the Aryan nation as to whether God is Black or White. But the post racial or, as some have termed him, the post racism candidate must decide whether he is afoot or on horseback. Certainly, he realizes that he can no longer have it both ways. He can’t demand that the nation judge him based on his values, abilities and talent, while at the same time campaigning against non-discrimination laws. Nor can he be the candidate of change so long as he embraces the Reverend Wright of the church of “get back whitey.” 

Shelby Steele:

…The answer is that one “bargains.” Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama’s extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary’s positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by “change” or “hope” or “the future.” And he has failed to say how he would actually be a “unifier.” By the evidence of his slight political record (130 “present” votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers,” not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .” And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”

There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.

Reverend Jesse Jackson, as quoted in US News, 3/10/96

From today’s LA Daily News comes this angry op-ed from Jasmyne Cannick: 

…the focus for Obama haters has turned to his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and what’s being called “controversial” comments Wright has made from the pulpit regarding America’s politics. One black man running for president isn’t enough to erase that history or the feelings that many blacks harbor whether publicly or on the down-low toward the United States government and white folks…

But a constant state of denial has some white folks’ sheets all up in a bunch to the point where they want to now go into our churches and dictate the message that the pastor delivers. And if they have their way, we’ll be singing hallelujah and thanking Jesus for slavery, Jim Crow, and the end of affirmative action, because if you recall it was the Bible that justified whites’ mistreatment of blacks.

Sheets? Is that code for calling us honkies KKK? Just kidding.

The church, our church, white Jesus aside, is the one institution that carried blacks through America’s state-sanctioned slavery, lynching, racial discrimination, oppression, disenfranchisement, and exploitation. It is not our responsibility as blacks to sugarcoat the truth to make it an easier pill for some whites to swallow.

The “truth” that America deserved to be attacked on 9/11?

But here come the mainstream, and at times divisive, media trying to take Wright’s comments out of context and make them into a bigger issue than what they should be, perhaps to make up for a slow news day and/or Clinton’s complaints of a media love affair with Obama. Either way, I thought race isn’t supposed to be a factor in this election?

What context explains the claim that the American government invented AIDS to kill off black folk? (And if that were our aim, why Food Stamps, welfare, affirmative action etc.?) 

No one wants to dictate the content of pastor Wright’s sermons. We do want to know if a man running for president who sat in Wright’s church for 20 years listening to his rants believes them?

Want context? How about Obama’s wife saying she’d never been proud of America until hubby started running for pres? Take comments like that with Wright’s anti-American rants and a picture emerges.

That’s not a picture of a unifying post-racial (gawd, don’t you hate how lefties append “post” to things?) president, but a man selling racial grievance.

Cannick asks: 

Is that why black men and women are being imprisoned almost as fast as their mothers can give birth to them? Is that why a man who called a group of young black women “nappy-headed hos” is still on the radio? And were we rising above race when it was joked that Tiger Woods should be lynched?Are those mothers married? Capable of raising kids who become decent citizens? If not and their kids victimize black folk — as most black criminals do — should we let them walk free?

African Methodist Episcopal Church founder Richard Allen has said “the only place that blacks felt they could maintain an element of self-expression was the church.” And I’ll add, they still managed to burn down more than a few back in the day.

The only place for self expression?

Does this pastor turn on the radio? If so, he’ll hear millionaire blacks rapping ’bout bitches and ho’s. He’ll hear white singers emulating them.

Turn on his TV and he can see Oprah make Josh Groban’s Christmas CD the best selling disc in America (we’re so racist, we let Jews sell us Christmas music*.) If America is so racist, who do millions of white Americans love Oprah and her opinions so much?

Black athletes express themselves to the tune of multi-million dollar contracts.

Black CEOs ran American Express and Time-Warner — the largest financial services and largest media companies in America.

In 2002, President Bush met over dinner to map out his Iraq/UN strategy with two trusted advisors — the first black Secretary of State, Colin Powell and the first black National Security Advisor, Condi Rice.

Somehow, I cannot picture either of those two sitting mutely in Pastor Wright’s church as he sells victimhood to his congregation.

That’s the irony of race in America — the real progressives are not Democrats. Democrats sell the poison of defeat and hopelessness to black people. (Look how they turned Katrina into a racial event.) They patronize blacks as inferior folk who just can’t get by without government programs, courtesy of their white Democrat patrons.

Meanwhile, the Democrat party thwarts reform of the crappy inner-city schools because their first master is the teacher’s unions, not the throngs of poor black kids left unprepared for life in a competitive world.

Context — there’s plenty to go around if you look.

* A reader was quick to point out that I was stupid for this reference. Indeed, although Josh Groban was born to a Jewish father, his mother was Christian and his father converted to Christianity. He was raised Episcopalian.