Lies, Hoaxes, Distortions

The history of race in this country has been a sordid one, and many well-meaning voters cast their lot with Obama to resolve centuries of racial polarization. Obama campaigned as our first "post-racial" candidate for the Presidency. Dissertations could and have been written about abduction in Africa, the Triangle Trade, involuntary servitude, Jim Crow, lynch law, enforced segregation, and Black studies programs and their permutations (Hispanic, Asian, and now even queer studies) have documented injustice and strife (but almost exclusively, that conducted by America, conspicuously avoiding any mention of the North African slave trade involving the capture of whites as has been pointed out by the sui generis Thomas Sowell, who happens to be black himself, with his scholarship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford). But many clung to the notion that our young President would act as a force to galvanize us as Americans-regardless of race. In the event, Obama is living down to his long association with Reverend Wright and separating us in matters of race. White liberals burdened with guilt for offenses they never committed thought a vote for Obama was a vote for racial reconciliation, a national kumbaya that would create a Utopia. These innocents at home whose relatives may have been in Italy or Russia, at the time whites held blacks as slaves in America were deceived by a smooth line and a hidden history-Obama's biography as he was introduced to America deliberately omitted Jeremiah Wright's simmering, anti-white hostility. Obama was sold to America as a racial neuter who would facilitate the great group hug to put all that animus and tragedy behind us. The Gates incident and the President's subsequent uninformed and inflammatory statement gave us insight into the character of Obama rarely seen, or more apropos, rarely allowed to walk out among the public with such precise stage management obscuring the real Barry-you saw it during the talk in Joe the plumber's neighborhood and you saw it in his knee jerk reference to racial profiling in the incident with a chip on the shoulder Harvard professor who should have been smart enough to remain composed whether the chip was based on Gates self-perception as an elite who should not have been subjected to police scrutiny or whether Gates really felt racially stigmatized by the conduct of the police (which would show a lack of reflection on the professor's part as he resides in one of the great liberal states in its most liberal bastion-a Bull Connor cop would never be hired in Cambridge and if one snuck through, he would be immediately removed from the force the moment his racial prejudice became apparent). Police are human, many have the utmost integrity-some do not. Is it possible that the policeman who made the arrest felt insulted by the professor's evident haughtiness and anger and baited him to go outside the house to make an arrest more plausible? Certainly it is, only the handful of people who were physically present know, but two adults acting like children should never have been blown into a racial cataclysm by the ill-chosen, intemperate words of our neophyte President who was acting more like a community organizer than the leader of the free world. When rumors were spread that the levy had been deliberately destroyed by the white power structure to rid the world of lower Ninth Ward blacks during Hurricane Katrina, I do not recall African American study professors rising en masse to denounce and debunk the monstrous lie. I have no recollection of these learned race professors rising to counter claims that the CIA brought in crack cocaine to destroy the black community or abjuring the notion that the government introduced AIDs to "kill off blacks". I recall no objections from the nascent black studies departments when it was claimed during the late sixties that blacks were being sent to Vietnam by McNamara to prevent them from resisting white oppression on America's streets. I did not see these cool-headed didacs rushing to stop violence in L.A. after Rodney King, in Crown Heights, at Freddy's Fashion Mart, or trot out to call Al Sharpton a race-baiter and liar in Tawana Brawley's grotesque hoax. In fact, these professors often make common cause with Sharpton. So is there a racial component in the Gates' affair that Obama rushed into-sure, many African Americans are deeply suspicious of white police officers. In this incident that merited no Presidential attention, both Gates and Obama drew on their tremendous reservoir of anger.