When Nobel Prize winning poet Tony Morrison can write an October 1988 New Yorker article titled “Clinton as the first black president”, then what is “black”? When the NAACP calls the black conservative Kenneth Gladney, “not black enough”, and “not a brother” then what is “black”? When Time magazine’s Jack White calls Supreme Court Justice Thomas, “the scariest of all the hobgoblins”, saying “Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy”, than what is “black”? And when Obama, a man whose mother is Caucasian, can tell us in a widely read autobiography that in his youth he struggled with his racial identity before *deciding* to be black, what is “black”?
When Bill Maher, during a panel discussion on HBO complains that Obama’s policies are “half-assed” “because he’s only half black.” and that “if he was fully black, I’m telling you, he would be a better president.”, and that “there’s a white man in him holding him back”, than what is “black”?
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien writes of a private meeting in 2007 with Jesse Jackson in her book, “The Next Big Story.” During the meeting, Jackson complained to O’Brien, whose mother is a black woman from Cuba, that there weren’t any black anchors on CNN. She wrote, “He looks me in the eye and reaches his fingers over to tap a spot of skin on my right hand. He shakes his head. “You don’t count,” he says.” She closed the section with “[t]he arbiter of blackness had weighed in. I had been measured and found wanting.”
When the results of an August 2010 Missouri ballot proposition directing that state to protect its citizens from being forced into ObamaCare were announced and the voter sentiment scored a record for beings such a lopsided adoption of the provision, Juan Williams complained on Fox News this was really about race.
And Dr. Cornel West, whose official web site describes him as “a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual”, was the subject of an article in the May 18, 2011 Washington Post. Reporter Krissah Thompson opened with, “Scholar Cornel West’s scathing critique of President Obama’s liberal bona fides in a series of recent interviews has ignited a furious debate among African American bloggers and commentators.”
References to race, and especially to “black”, in all these contexts, is clearly not about “race”. It is about ideology, socialist ideology.
As far as I am concerned, we are all made in the image of God. While we all have the same rights and deserve the same respect, none of us have greater rights or deserve greater respect than anyone else. With respect to BHO being black: it is not about the race he was born with, it is about the ideology he adopted. It is not what percent black he is, it is about how thoroughly red he is.
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