[Bret L]

NYT Editorialist: Obama peeved at his postracial image
[Steve Sailer]

"Brent Staples of the New York Times editorial board explains in the NYT that Obama was elected under false pretenses about his being postracial and transcending race and what not, and that it’s getting on Obama’s nerves that the idiot press keeps believing the facade David Axelrod concocted just to get him elected:

Successful African-Americans — whether they are sports stars,
entertainers or politicians — are often accorded a more tortured
significance. In addition to being held up as proof that racism has
been extinguished, they are often employed as weapons in the age-old
campaign to discredit, and even demean, the disadvantaged. …

Mr. Obama has refused to play this role, even though people have
tried to thrust it upon him. …

He underscored this point again this week when he commented on the
arrest in Cambridge, Mass., of the Harvard African-American scholar
(and my longtime friend) Henry Louis Gates Jr. and about the tendency
of police officers to target blacks and Hispanics for traffic stops.

These remarks could change how the news media sees the president’s
views on race. Up to now, he has been consistently and wrongly
portrayed as a stern black exceptionalist who takes Negroes to task
for not meeting his standard.

He is not happy with this characterization. That was clear in a
recent Oval Office interview with the columnist Eugene Robinson of The
Washington Post. Mr. Obama complained about the press coverage of his
speeches and seemed especially miffed about the portrayal of the one
he delivered before the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People this month.

He suggested that the news media had overemphasized his remarks
about “personal responsibility” — a venerable theme in the African-
American church — while disregarding “the whole other half of the
speech,” which included a classic exercise in civil-rights oratory.

The president described disproportionate rates of unemployment,
imprisonment and lack of health insurance in minority communities as
barriers of the moment. He contrasted them with the clubs and police
dogs that black marchers faced in the 1960s and said that solving
present-day problems would require comparable determination.

And “make no mistake,” he continued, “the pain of discrimination
is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for
doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different
gender.”

This was no exceptionalist rant. Speaking to Mr. Robinson, the
president used the first-person plural revealingly when he said: “I do
think it is important for the African-American community, in its
diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African-American
experience, which is we know what it’s like to be on the outside,”
said the President of the United States from behind his desk in the
Oval Office.

Oh, wait, I added that part after the close quotes. Never mind.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama tended to avoid direct engagement
with racial issues until circumstances (a tempest over his former
pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) made further evasion impossible.

He reached a similar moment when he was asked to comment on Mr.
Gates’s arrest at a White House news conference on Wednesday.

In a remark that became instantly famous, he responded that the
police acted “stupidly” in arresting Mr. Gates when no crime had been
committed and the professor was standing in his own home. Mr. Obama
further noted that disproportionate attention from the police was an
unwelcome fact of black life in America.

People who have heretofore viewed Mr. Obama as a “postracial”
abstraction were no doubt surprised by these remarks. This could be
because they were hearing him fully for the first time.

Dear National Media Personalities: Do you know what would be a
convenient way for you to finally hear Obama fully for the first time?
Read my book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of
Race and Inheritance,” in which I explain in straightforward prose
that you can understand what Obama is saying in his autobiography."


http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2009/...tracial-image/