Caller: Put Bigotry in the Past

RUSH: Jean in Tehachapi, California, I’m glad that you waited. You’re next on the program. How are you?

CALLER: Well, Rush, I hope… I’m really nervous because I never made a call before, but I was so mad when I heard that speech this morning, that I know my blood pressure is about to go through the roof, because I know what prejudice is. I’m American Indian. My grandfather was a Cherokee Indy — Indian, and my grandmother was white. I never knew them.

RUSH: Your grandmother was white?

CALLER: Yes. She wasn’t Indian, and she married my grandfather, and they both died in their twenties. They were real young.

RUSH: Well, you realize then that because you probably are a victim, and you are probably are a savage and a racist, too.

CALLER: No, no.

RUSH: Well, Obama said today that we are what we are and we are who we come from and we are who we’ve known. You have this Indian background and so forth, and according to Obama, that’s how we must look at you.

CALLER: Rush, my mother died a couple years ago. She was 91. She had two sisters and a brother. And their mother died in childbirth, and they put her… My great aunt hated the Indians. She was prejudiced. She put ’em on a train and sent them to Shalaka Indian School, until she ran away and married my dad. So I know what prejudice is. But, I mean, I love my country. We’ve never dwelt on it. It’s history, you know? It’s history.

RUSH: And we’ve moved on from it. We’ve moved on from it. This is what about Obama’s speech made you mad today, right?

CALLER: Yes. It’s history! Get over it! You know, my great aunt that sent ’em away to school, before she died, told me she was ashamed of what she did. But they had Indian blood. But she said, ‘I was wrong,’ and none of it — I’m sitting here looking at a proposed bill from Congress about my mother was going to get $3,000. I have my grandfather’s role number. She got, from what I remember, around $60 and ‘more to follow.’ She never got any more money. Did this eat at us? No. It’s history. We tried to get everything out of grandma that she could tell us about our grandparents, because I didn’t know them. But I don’t hate our government for it or my great aunt for it.

RUSH: Amen. Amen.

CALLER: It’s history.

RUSH: Well, I’m glad you called. I’m glad you waited, Jean, because this is one of the points I was trying to make. One of these sound bites that we played that’s being portrayed as one of the great unifying aspects of the speech actually is a recipe for how everybody is really not an individual. They are who they are based on people they’ve never known that might be in their family, people they’ve hung around. Except Reverend Wright. If you’ve hung around him, you’re not going to adopt anything he says, but anybody else around… He trashed his own grandmother as a racist, and said: This is who I am. No! Just because your grandmother was a racist doesn’t mean that you are, Barack! See, this is how they do it, folks. This is how this little trick is played. As I said at that portion of the program, those of us in our mid-fifties and even older, you start talking about parents and grandparents? You’re going to go back to periods in this country where there was a lot different attitude, racial attitudes. There was more racism then than there is now. So guilt by association! We’re back to that. By the way, I found last night, there was such legislation in Illinois. It was 1998. I couldn’t find it under the name of Guilt-by-Association Act, and I could not find any quotes of Obama to explain why he voted against it, but it was a piece of legislation that would have penalized people on parole hanging around other people that had been involved in the criminal elements of our society. So there was legislation. Obama was one of three people that voted against it. I just couldn’t find it under the name that the caller gave to us yesterday, nor could I find any statement from Obama about why he opposed it. It was ten years ago.