America Still Talking About Race
According to that bastion of fairness, CNN.com, some of the criticism of first lady Michelle Obama is driven by white resentment of the “uppity Negro.”
C'mon. Only Democrat Harry Reid uses the word “Negro” any more. Secondly, this is the 21st century and still there are those who continue to talk about race as if it were 1955. Liberals stuck in the past?
Last February, in a speech to honor Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder remarked that Americans of all colors should stop avoiding an honest discussion of race in America. Said Holder: "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."
What exactly does he want?
The American conversation on race began more than two centuries ago and it has continued on and on. The topic permeated the discussions during the drafting of both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and continues today, with a black man sitting in the white house.
Not cowards, we are just exhausted and bone tired and wanting to move on.
This was the great “hope” for Barack Obama. The great tide that swept Barack Obama into the White House was not the hope of a hard left social and economic agenda. Americans were eager to move on to a new and more uplifting conversation about their nation and their lives as citizens. And one of the things they wanted to change was the conversation on race.
Were we expecting too much? It was that man, however, who promised that his nomination as a candidate for president would be remembered as the moment the planet would heal and the oceans would calm, so he set himself up form the beginning.
And early on, there were signs that it was all too good to be true.
His 20-year association with the reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of the universal church of “get back whitey.” This eye-opener was followed by several editorials introducing voters to the new “racial code.” We discovered, for instance, that talking about Obama’s elitism was code for saying he was “uppity” and to point out his inexperience was to call him a “boy.”
Yup, it had begun.
This administration dismisses all opposition with smears of racism and bigotry. As a nation, we seem to be talking about race more than ever. As far as leading this nation into a post racial era, the election of Barack Obama is doing the opposite.
This past March, in a deliberate attempt to provoke a racial incident, members of the Congressional Black Caucus marched through a large crowd of angry, mostly white, ObamaCare protestors. But the trick failed. The fire hoses didn’t appear; neither did the attack dogs, or the white racists shouting the N-word. Sure, the left claimed it happened–that these noble black heroes were spat upon and called ugly names as in days gone by–but the lie failed to gain traction.
Representatives Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters have claimed that race is behind investigations into their behavior, as opposed to the possibility that they have been unethical and dishonest. There was a time when such charges would have been greeted with seriousness as opposed to the snickering these recent protests have garnered.
The new left media is hard at work attempting to prove racial animus but perhaps something else is afoot. Indeed, it may be that this nation is moving in a new direction on race. Sure, there will continue to be those who cling to the outdated view of black-white relationships, but increasingly they must be seen as out-of-step with the times. If true, it is both reason to celebrate and to shake Mr. Obama’s hand.
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Tags: racism
