Vincent J. Curtis
13 Dec 2016
Last night, President Barack Obama dissed the country he has
led for the past eight years. He maintained it was still a racist
country. Appropriately, he did so on a comedy
TV show.
“America is still struggling to overcome its legacies of
slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism, and racism," he said on Comedy Central,
Jon Stewart’s old show.
Comedy Central’s new host, Trevor
Noah, then, in all seriousness, asked Obama how does he "skirt that
line between speaking your mind and sharing your true opinions on
race whilst, at the same time, not being seen to alienate some of the
people you are talking to?”
Obama answered, "You know, my general theory is
that, if I was clear in my own mind about who I was, comfortable in my own
skin, and had clarity about the way in which race continues to be this powerful
factor in so many elements of our lives.
But that it is not the only factor in so many aspects of our lives, that
we have, by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and
colonialism and racism, but that the progress we've made has been real and
extraordinary, if I'm communicating my genuine belief that those who are not
subject to racism can sometimes have blind spots or lack of appreciation of
what it feels to be on the receiving end of that, but that doesn't mean that
they're not open to learning and caring about equality and justice and that I
can win them over because there is goodness in the majority of people."
Got that? If Obama
seriously thinks that you have a problem with race, then you should hear what
he has to say about your blind spots, about what it’s like to be on the receiving
end of racism, that you ought to be open to what he has to say if you care at
all about equality and justice. That is,
if you are a good person. Never mind
that he has no personal experience of adverse racism himself.
So, after eight years of Obama, America has by no means
overcome the “legacies” of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism,
though extraordinary and real progress has been made. What is extraordinary to me is that Obama was
ever seriously considered as a public intellectual; and that he was calls into
question the intellectual seriousness of those scholars who did. Let’s dissect what Obama just maintained.
Insofar as slavery and Jim Crow belong to the history of the
United States, there will be no overcoming of the legacies of those
things. You can’t change history, and
legacies are about history. Slavery and
Jim Crow themselves however, since they have been abolished, have been
overcome. But so long as there are race
hucksters like Michelle Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Congressional
Black Caucus, and Barack Obama himself (to say nothing of the Democrat party) exploiting
the memory of the injustices of the past for their benefit in the here and now,
there won’t be an overcoming of the “legacies” of those things.
What about the overcoming of colonialism? Obama here reveals his Bill Ayers/African
perspective. Of course America is
guilty! Never mind the details!
Europeans colonized America, a continent practically empty
of human beings in the 16th century.
The Thirteen Colonies relieved Great Britain of the guilt of colonialism
in the territory of the United States in 1784, so who in America exactly is
guilty of colonialism today, and in what sense?
America herself never had an empire as that term is conventionally
understood, and stood for the end of European colonialism before and after
World War II. If Obama means that
America colonized its own territory with Americans and displaced native
American Indians in the course of doing so, then Obama reveals a rarified,
peculiar, and utterly impractical sense of the meaning of colonialism. In that sense, Europe itself was colonized by
the barbarians between the 3rd and 6th Centuries,
A.D. Does guilt still attach to that,
and to whom does it attach in this worldview – the Europeans of today? The Mongols?
In Obama’s view, there is no escaping the guilt of
something. He says that “extraordinary and
real progress” has been made in overcoming the “legacies of slavery, Jim Crow,
colonialism and racism” but he holds out no hope of ever getting past the
legacies of these things. How much
progress must be made before a legacy is
overcome, and who is to judge when these
legacies are overcome? Obama
offers no answer, which is why I question the depth of his alleged
intellectualism. He must either have
some answer in mind, or his words are simply means of putting a class of white people
on an endless treadmill of guilt and atonement.
For a man who has not a drop of slave blood in his veins,
and who is himself half white, Obama is extraordinarily conscious of race. He admitted in his own memoirs that he could
exploit white guilt over racism and slavery to his personal benefit. Witness his career at University. Witness his claim to be president. Obama is a past master of exploiting America’s
legacy of racism for his personal benefit.
In the 2016 presidential election, over 200 counties that
voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump, and this difference is what
led to Trump’s triumph. He told his
supporters that he would regard it as a personal insult if Donald Trump were
elected president as a result of their actions or failures to act. Well, Trump was elected and Obama is about to
see his own legacy destroyed.
Appearing on a comedy show and telling America it remains
guilty of racism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and slavery is Obama’s retort and
rebuke of the country that twice elected him president, and that rejects what
he did while in office.
Obama is nothing if not modest!
-30-
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