REUTERS/Jason Reed
As we all know by now, and as his remarks Friday indicate, President Obama is a cautious man, particularly when it comes to matters of race. But I was relieved to see that he did not “apologize” to the officer in question or the Cambridge police department.
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The bottom line is that the president was right to speak out against racial injustice & racial profiling given this nation’s history with race and police brutality against black men.
President Obama should have calibrated his Friday remarks to offer a flatout apology to Crowley and the Cambridge police department for his earlier “ill-informed” presidential opinion. And then he should have apologized to the American public for exacerbating race relations in the United States.
The “trans-racial” president has been anything but “post-racial”. On the surface, he looks and sounds centrist, speaks of bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, and pretends to be the American president, rather than “the black” president. But sitting in Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years, President Obama can’t help himself, but be who he is: black first, American second.
There is a kind of racism that America has yet to overcome. And it is exemplified by President Obama. It is not based on hatred, but based on an an “over-emphasis” of racial identification. Of seeing oneself primarily in terms of skin color before all else.
President Obama can’t escape the influence he subjected himself to and gravitated toward all his life, in spite of his attempts to distance himself from Reverend Wright and other radical associations during the 2008 presidential campaign.
When visiting a slave station in Ghana recently, Anderson Cooper asked the president how he explained the slave trade to Sasha and Malia. He used it as a teaching moment about how “people were willing to degrade others because they appeared differently“. Really?! Ghanaians at the slave station degraded their fellow Africans because “they appeared differently?”
President Obama also said the capacity of discrimination is “not just on the basis of race, but on the basis of religion, or the basis of sexual orientation or gender” rather than shedding light on the fact that it was Africans who captured and sold fellow Africans at slave stations like the one he was being interviewed at. He could have used it as a teaching moment to educate people that slavery was a universal crime, and one not strictly about racism.
Senator Obama has stated that he is against the notion of reparations:
“I have said in the past — and I’ll repeat again — that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed,”
The second half of that statement is important to note. Because although he knows the “30 acres and a mule” brand of reparations is unrealistic with a great deal of political opposition, what President Obama is trying to accomplish is a sort of “stealth reparations” through policies like his healthcare proposals, that will carry out “economic justice”, with minorities being the most affected. Glenn Beck:
More from Glenn Beck on Back Door Reparations.
President Obama didn’t have all the facts in; yet his instincts were to condemn the police of “acting stupidly” and give his friend Gates the benefit of the doubt (because he’s a friend, or because he’s a black man?).
President Obama was so ready to take sides. Why? Well, he answered that: “… What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
Not quite. It’s a contentious and emotional minefield. Yes, there has been harassment of blacks by white police departments. But that’s hardly the whole story. Blacks and Hispanics also commit a disproportionately high percentage of crimes.
It seems the Obama presidency means we’re mostly past white racism. As for reverse racism, it’s still in fashion.
Unfortunately, racism is alive and well in the United States; but it is being kept alive by both “traditional” victims and stereotypical “traditional” perpetrators.
And the problem is being exacerbated by a supposed “post-racial” president who can’t calibrate his words and rise above his own racist shortcomings.
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
From the picture it looks like “we are three”. (Obama plus the two teleprompters)
I think we will look back on this Gates episode as the pivot point in the defeat of what is now called Obamacare. It will serve to separate the far left democrats to whom the police are symbolic of the oppressive state from the moderate democrats who enjoy peace, quiet and safety in their neighborhoods. It will alert the independents once again to the mistake they made as they voted for change. It will solidify the Republicans and conservatives who do believe in law and order. Finally, it will give the conservative Democrats the cover they need to vote as their constituents want – against the monstrosity. Here, an ostensibly unrelated incident exposed even more the arrogance of the President and the extent that he is willing to overreach to achieve whatever is the objective de jour. The best indication of this change is the exuberance of the stock market that emerged as it became clearer that Obama was not going to ram his health care monstrosity down our throats. Funny how things work. He is getting tripped up on his attitude which, in turn, raises serious questions about his substance.
Disturber
The main reason anyone would get stopped by the Sheriff here is if they are speeding. 9 times out of 10 when a car speeds past me clearly exceeding the speed limit guess what color skin the driver has?
The “racial profiling” excuse is another way to shield blacks from the same sort of accountability the rest of us face daily.
If I had mouthed off to a cop the way Gates did I would be face down eating dirt.
I suppose if the cop was black I could claim he was racist but who would listen.
Exactly. Claims of racism are also used as a weapon. 3 different black women I work with claimed racism against my boss. What did she do? Her job! These three women seemed to think the rules didn’t apply to them. The mere act of her making them abide by the rules or punishing them for repeatedly breaking them motivated them to go to HR and complain. Thing is, my boss treated everyone the same. The difference was that we generally did our job and didn’t mouth off to her when we were corrected for not doing it. This was asking too much of them it seems.
So now my boss has a black mark on her record and may yet lose her job over it, just because some bigots wanted to get back at her.
Oh and yes, they are racist. I overheard some of the conversations among the three of them.
It would have been priceless if Abe had leaned forward and said to Obie:
“Get off my lawn!”
@Aye Chihuahua:
It’s out, apparently the public wasn’t impressed with the way the news conference or Obamagatesgate was handled:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
Thanks Missy!
I hadn’t seen that yet.
We just got home from church.
Man, O-Bum-Looker seems to be in deep trouble.
Sgt. Crowley should decline that beer with Obama. Instead, he should invite both Obama and Gates to attend his anti-racial-profiling training in Cambridge, no cameras allowed.