ObamaGates

Sophia A. Nelson:

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?).

Mona Charen:

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.