Left Obsessed with Obama’s Blackness

RUSH: Los Angeles Times had an interesting piece on the 19th. This is yesterday, by Louis Chude-Sokei, and it’s a hyphenated name and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s titled, ?Redefining Black,? and centers upon the question of Barack Obama’s relative blackness. Now, the main point according to this guy is that Obama is not black enough to get the support of the standing black American leadership because of his white Hawaiian African heritage. By the way, this is key, and Warner Todd Huston at NewsBusters had a great bunch of insight on this piece in the LA Times and points out here that Obama is not getting “the support of the standing Black American leadership because of his White/Hawaiian/African (meaning NOT African American, but real African) heritage.” In other words, it is his real African heritage that is denying him official black status with African-American leaders. Obama is aware of this. Let’s go back to the audio sound bites February 11th on 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft interviewing Obama. Says, ?Your mother was white, your father was African. You were raised in a white household, yet at some point you decided you were black.?
OBAMA: I’m not sure I decided it. I think, you know, if you — if you look African-American in this society you’re treated as an African-American, and when you’re a child in particular, that is how you begin to identify yourself.
RUSH: Now, this is amazing. He’s saying he didn’t decide his race. He didn’t choose, it was chosen for him. Amazing admission on the part of somebody who wants to be president of the United States to say that kind of self-decision is something I had no control over, which led me to say the following a couple of days later.
RUSH ARCHIVE: So what we conclude here is that he didn’t define himself as black, that the way he looks does, ?I’m not sure I decided it.? Well, if you didn’t decide it, then how did it happen? ?Well, when you look like that, that’s what you are.? Well, renounce it then. If it’s not something you want to be, if you didn’t decide it, renounce it, become white, just say so. He can. He could say he’s white. He grew up in a white household, his mother was white. But he said he didn’t have any say-so over this.
RUSH: Now, this comment of mine fortunately and laughingly caused all kinds of hysterics in the Drive-By Media. But I mean what’s the natural reaction to this? The natural lib reaction is, ?Oh, poor guy, that’s right, you know, we’re such a racist, bigoted society, that we determine how somebody’s going to grow up and how they’re going to be looked at. Especially kids, our kids are mean-spirited, impolite little bullies, and our kids made Obama feel black. Not Obama. Obama didn’t know, wasn’t aware, way he was treated.? But now he knows, and if he doesn’t like it he can renounce it. He could very easily say, ?I’m not black.? Some would say, ?Well, he can’t do that, he’s got African-American blood — he’s got African blood.? Well, his mother was white. He could say, ?I choose to be white.? It would be kind of interesting if he did. He could do this. Why is the automatic assumption that he?s black? 50-50, he can do what he wants. He is in charge here. But we know the answer to all this. These comments in a couple days when they show up on the left-wing websites — well, this might make the network news tonight. More fireworks tonight on how Limbaugh’s a racist bigot, whatever else. Jake Tapper last Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America said this.

TAPPER: There is a feeling among the Obama campaign that a lot of African-Americans don’t even know that he’s African-American because they don’t know much about him yet, so they’re hoping things will turn around in time.
RUSH: How can this be? A lot of African-Americans don’t even know he’s African-American? Now I’m really confused. If he is African-American based on how he’s treated because of the way people see him, how in the name of Sam Hill can there be a whole lot of people who do not know he’s African-American? Are they just listening to him on the radio? Anyway, it’s not me obsessed with race. I’m simply reacting to what Obama is saying, what Jake Tapper is saying. We have this LA Times story: Obama not black enough. And there have been several of these. Now, the feeling of Obama not being black enough for black American leaders to warm up to is, according to this piece in the LA Times, “because of the growing community of immigrant blacks in the US who are not really African Americans in the way that black leaders prefer. Meaning that they aren’t Americans but immigrants and they are immigrants that do not kow-tow to black American prejudices and racial political demagoguery causing Black leaders to distrust them.”
In other words, Obama’s got a problem because he’s not African-American, and therefore not part of the civil rights tradition and the slavery tradition — he’s from Africa. He’s a straight old immigrant. It’s total discrimination. The African-American leaders are discriminating against real Africans according to this guy writing in the Los Angeles Times. Also, and here’s another thing — stick with me on this — because the immigrants are often better educated, or interested in being so, than their native born American fellows.” They are also shunned. Well, we know this to be true, doing well on test scores, some blacks are accused of being too white. “Naturally, Chude-Sokei completely avoids the fact that natural born African Americans are less educated and less interested in education but the inference is clearly there if the reader is paying attention.”
Listen to this. “A good proportion of immigrants tend to be better educated than African Americans, don’t have the ‘chip’ of racial resentment on their shoulder and exhibit the classic immigrant optimism about assimilation into the mainstream culture.” Now, what can you infer from reading this? You can infer that African immigrants are better educated than African-Americans, they don’t have the chip on their shoulder because they haven’t been raised that way with the so-called slavery tradition and culture, and they come here and they’re optimistic. They just arrived in America. They want a better life, whereas African-American leaders are telling their charges, ?It ain’t possible because there’s racism in America. The only way you can get halfway where you want to go is through us and affirmative action.? That’s why people like Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, Lynn Swann and Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, are routinely scorched because they have made it without going through the prescriptions required by the African-American leadership in this country.

Obama hasn’t, either, and this is the reason they are conflicted. How in the world do you sit there and trash a Condoleezza Rice, a Ken Blackwell, a Michael Steele, a Clarence Thomas, and then give Obama a pass? The only difference is he’s a lib, he’s a good lib. But still not an African-American. So now they’re writing LA Times columns on, is he black enough? And they call us the racists. They say we’re the ones preoccupied with race. Here they’re having a hand-wringing session over whether Obama is black enough. “Now, Chude-Sokei is a professor at UC Santa Cruz, so his perspective is a bit different than the average person’s and his claim that whites ?exploit these differences? is absurd in the general population, even as it might be true in the University setting. Many whites, however, exploit these differences to magnify the problems of African Americans while avoiding charges of racism. And because these differences often result in greater employment and more educational opportunities for immigrants and their descendants, they also feed tensions between native and immigrant blacks.”
The bottom line, even though this guy doesn’t know what he’s saying here, is that immigrant blacks, true African immigrants, are posing a problem here, and Obama is one of them. Well, he’s not one of them. He’s a citizen. Well, I don’t know if Obama did sell out if he would be called an Uncle Tom. I don’t know that I’m qualified to proclaim that or answer this. “Chude-Sokei also makes another key mistake common to the University set. He assumes that black pathology is still all the fault of White people. He says of immigrant blacks, ?They also are less responsive to American racial traumas?, as if these ?traumas? are ongoing and still integral to how Blacks can fit into white society. If this were true then immigrants would find themselves in agreement with the so-called Black leadership in America who continually fan the flames of race hatred to justify their places of power.”

This is exactly right. So these African immigrants are less responsive to American racial traumas. Of course, as we stated, these traumas must never end because there’s a race business out there. Just to remind you again, this is a column in the LA Times. I am reacting to it: Is Obama black enough? This is Warner Todd Huston concluding here — ?So, Blacks do not distrust Obama because he is an immigrant and therefore not ?black enough.’ They distrust him because he is able and successful, smart and educated so that is what makes him not ?black enough.’? It’s hard to conclude otherwise when you start reading all this. I’m telling you, folks, it is the American left, the Drive-By Media who are obsessed with race and gender and everything else that defines us as different on the basis of appearance.