Get Ready For More Charges of Racism

Posted By Bruce Thornton On June 29, 2012 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

The implosion of the Obama administration will create more and more desperate narratives on the part of progressives as we head toward the November election. With no record of achievement to run on, Obama must try to misdirect voters by shifting blame elsewhere: so far George Bush, the Eurozone crisis, the Japanese tsunami, even ATMs have all been fingered as the cause of our sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. Since the barrel of excuses is close to empty, get ready for something scraped from the bottom: Americans don’t support Obama because Americans are racists.

Of course this charge has already been reflexively trotted out whenever progressives hear something they don’t like, particularly criticism of Obama and his administration. Ex-President Jimmy Carter opined, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.” Then what explains our “intensely demonstrated animosity toward” you, Jimmy? ABC’s Sam Donaldson, responding to a conservative reporter’s aggressive questioning of the president, huffed, “Many on the political right believe this President ought not to be there — they oppose him not for his polices and political view, but for who he is, an African American.” Then we do we like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, Sam?

The racism charge also provides effective camouflage for incompetence. Embattled Attorney General Eric Holder last December claimed that criticism of him is “a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said, “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.” Over at the Huffington Post, race hustler and MSNBC host Al Sharpton said of the Congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, “The highest officer of law and order in this nation has been ridiculed, scapegoated and handled as some sort of criminal throughout this ‘investigation,’” and “was spoken to and mistreated as if he were a child, and reminded that despite his esteemed position, he can and would be profiled. AG Holder was in essence ‘stopped & frisked’ without probable cause, and after he cooperated, he was made an example of.” Such outlandishly false statements neatly evade Holder’s gross incompetence, lying to Congress, and the way he has crudely politicized his office.

Such ludicrous, ad hominem evasions of fact and argument are so common on the left that many dismiss them as mere political background noise. But such attacks are based on an incoherent public discourse on race that reflects a larger intellectual and moral idiocy. Consider the recent speech by Melissa Harris-Perry, host of her own show on MSNBC. Harris-Perry said that after 9/11, white America suffered from a “nationalist fervor” resembling post-traumatic stress disorder. Suffering from this disease, Americans were able to “stomach a kind of horrific racial violence in the name of national security,” and started searching for an “imagined racial enemy.” This happens, Harris-Perry continues, because “Americans in part identify who we are, and who deserves what, through our notions of whiteness and of the racial enemies that are the non-whites.”

Well, the enemy wasn’t “imagined,” he was real, and he wasn’t an enemy because he was an Arab, but because he acted on a theology of violence proclaimed by a multi-racial religion and murdered 3,000 Americans. Next, there was nothing even close to “horrific racial violence” after 9/11. In fact, what is remarkable is the restraint most American showed towards American Muslims, and the obsessive need of the Bush administration repeatedly to tell the world how much we respect Islam and Muslims. Nor did this country attack Muslim countries with the vengeful fury English Lancaster bombers unleashed on German cities in World War II. Instead, our military power was used to liberate two Muslim countries from murderous dictators, and billions has been spent in an attempt to rebuild the infrastructure of those countries and establish politically free governments. Finally, those “notions of whiteness” are kept alive mostly by the race-obsessed like Harris-Perry or Eric Holder. They endorse the reverse bigotry of the university race-theorists, who demonize “whiteness” as selfish, exploitative, and repressed, all the flaws and neuroses that create what Obama called the “bitter clingers to guns and religion.”

If you think I exaggerate, consider the video made at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, part of an ad-campaign created to fight for “racial justice” by pointing out “white privilege.” In the ad, self-flagellating white people confess their “white privilege” with the statements scrawled in ink across their faces. For example, one woman says, “We’re privileged that people see us, not a color.” There’s something incoherent in complaints about being seen as black when all hear are insistent demands that we recognize how wonderful being black is. Then there’s the man who scolds, “We’re privileged because society was set up for us, and our silence keeps it in place.” These sentiments reflect the old charge of “white-skin privilege,” which had some truth-value before the vast changes in racial relations and opportunities that followed the Civil Rights Act, the astonishing growth of the black middle class, and programs such as Affirmative Action.

But even before those changes, there certainly wasn’t any “white-skin privilege” for poor or working-class whites. I grew up amidst the rural poverty of the San Joaquin Valley, and none of the poor white kids there were being paid to attend Harvard or handed a job with IBM just because they were white. Many of them ended up where many poor Mexicans and poor blacks did: in jail, the army, or on drugs. The obsession with “whiteness” and “white privilege” obscures the real advantages provided by social class and the possession of social capital.

Here we reach the fundamental lie at the heart of such racialist discourse. As Obama himself shows, these days as long as a black person is suitably progressive in his political beliefs, his skin-color is an asset, particularly if he is obviously middle-class in his demeanor, speech, and dress––or as Joe Biden said, “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” How else explain Obama’s careful fabrication in his memoir of a black consciousness and subjection to racism––which, according to David Maraniss’s recent biography of the president, made him “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was––if not to exploit that privilege? As Jonah Goldberg writes, Obama is “a product of campus culture — at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago — and his vignettes of racial struggle were in some respects the coin of his realm. Later, when he entered the national political scene, he discovered this currency was accepted by much of the mainstream media as well.” For millions of educated, middle-class black people, their race may cause them the annoyance of being followed in a store, but it also can grant them huge social advantages––including becoming the president of the United States.

Those advantages explain why some well-off, educated black people, especially those who work in government, education, and the media, are quick to exploit the race card. By identifying with and capitalizing on the social miseries of under-privileged blacks, they can gain social power, deflect criticism of their shortcomings, and direct attention away from their own socio-economic privilege, which often surpasses that of millions of whites. Meanwhile, the degradation of the black underclass worsens, something that has little to do with race or racism, and everything to do with a dysfunctional culture that scorns the traditional virtues like self-control, personal responsibility, and hard work that in the past sustained black life even in the days of Jim Crow.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that in the next few months Obama and his supporters will obscure his incompetence and failure with the verbal spray-paint of white racism. Without it, he wouldn’t have become president in the first place.

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Get Ready For More Charges of Racism

Surely NOT!!!

"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.

The first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of any one of the children of Adam. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings.

This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race--that they should be the 'servant of servants', and they will be, until that curse is removed."

Brigham Young-President and second 'Prophet' of the Mormon Church, 1844-1877- Extract from Journal of Discourses.

Here are two examples from their 'other testament', the Book of Mormon.

2 Nephi 5: 21 'And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.'

Alma 3: 6 'And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men.'

August 27, 1954 in an address at Brigham Young University (BYU), Mormon Elder, Mark E Peterson, in speaking to a convention of teachers of religion at the college level, said:

"The discussion on civil rights, especially over the last 20 years, has drawn some very sharp lines. It has blinded the thinking of some of our own people, I believe. They have allowed their political affiliations to color their thinking to some extent.I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the Negro is after."
"He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn't just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn't that he just desires to go to the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the Negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage."
"That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feelings to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for Negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have. Remember the little statement that we used to say about sin, 'First we pity, then endure, then embrace'...."

(Rosa Parks would have probably told Petersen under which wheel of the bus he should go sit.)

1967, (then) Mormon President Ezra Taft Benson said,

"The Communist program for revolution in America has been in progress for many years and is far advanced. First of all, we must not place the blame upon Negroes. They are merely the unfortunate group that has been selected by professional Communist agitators to be used as the primary source of cannon fodder."

We are told that on June 8, 1978, it was 'revealed' to the then president, Spencer Kimball, that people of color could now gain entry into the priesthood.

According to the church, Kimball spent many long hours petitioning God, begging him to give worthy black people the priesthood. God finally relented.

Sometime before the 'revelation' came to chief 'Prophet' Spencer Kimball in June 1978, General Authority, Bruce R McConkie had said:

"The Blacks are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty.
The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man's origin, it is the Lord's doings."
(Mormon Doctrine, pp. 526-527).

When Mormon 'Apostle' Mark E Petersen spoke on 'Race Problems- As they affect the Church' at the BYU campus in 1954, the following was also said:

"...if the negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory."

When Mormon 'Prophet' and second President of the Church, Brigham Young, spoke in 1863 the following was also said:

"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so."
(Journal of Discourses, Vo. 10, p. 110)

Yeah; Native Americans are althroughout the Book of MORMON; too.

“I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.... For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.

At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen-sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather.... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

(Improvement Era, December 1960, pp.922-23). (p. 209)

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