As it has in so many other ways, Barack Obama's political victory in 2008 has proven false to the hope that the election of someone of African heritage would help carry the American people beyond the tragic legacy of guilt, mutual ignorance and resentful fear left by past sins of slavery and racial discrimination. Instead, the racial divide seems every day exacerbated by another instance in which someone salts the ancient racial wound with some new attempt to portray as racist all reactions against Obama's push to establish his alien neo-totalitarian ideas in place of the constitutional liberty Americans have enjoyed.
The latest such exploitative slander comes from former President Jimmy Carter. In his AP story, correspondent Greg Bluestein reports: "Responding to an audience question at a town hall at his presidential center in Atlanta Carter said Tuesday that [Rep. Joe] Wilson's outburst was also rooted in fears of a black president."
"I think it's based on racism," Carter said. "There is an inherent feeling among many that an African-American should not be president."
So, let's see. Anyone not willing to swallow the radical, un-American national socialist proposals of a communist-leaning Saul Alinsky protégé, enamored of radical Marxist teachers and ideas, is a racist who believes, according to Carter, "that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country." True to his "bigoted liberal" roots, Carter has invented a new racial stereotype. All blacks are communist-leaning proponents of national socialism. That's the only premise on which opposition to Obama's policies can be offered as prima facie evidence of anti-black racial bigotry.
As I recall it was quite common for hard-line segregationist opponents of the civil-rights movement to characterize blacks as communist agitators. It seems to me that the Southerner who's harking back to those old stereotypes isn't Joe Wilson. It's Jimmy (smile-when-you-say-that) Carter. Of course, he's not alone. For years white liberals and their fawning black Quimbos (the wicked slaveholder Simon Legree's sadistic black overseers in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin") have made it clear that only those who buy into their irrational leftist bunk will be accepted as genuine black people. Perhaps this is their recipe for getting beyond race. It worked so well for them that, after his sexual escapades in the Oval Office, they proclaimed Bill Clinton to be the first black president. (Apparently, accepting leftist bunk means rejecting traditional sexual morality. Thus, as it was for the old Southern segregationists, so too for these leftists – uncontrollable fornication becomes a sine qua non of the black identity.)
Carter is clearly working with the same logic. You can't tell a black by his cover. You have to look at his ideology. There's actually a serious truth hidden in that self-serving logic. Pigmentation may determine race, but it is not a proper basis for human communities. In this respect, though, it's impossible to see why Carter and the other Obama faction apologists keep insisting that Barack Obama has anything to do with the black American heritage. His "black" background is that of a biologically African Muslim, with a strong element of Indonesian upbringing early on. His personal history in no way leads back to the experiences that forged the black American identity. His ethnic tie to America comes through a white American, his leftist radical mother. So when Carter claims that opposing him smacks of anti-black racism, he risks becoming the object of another truth serum outburst from the Joe Wilsons of the world. If the opposition comes from racism of any kind, it must be on account of his white American heritage.
We can be thankful that, unlike Jimmy Carter, we're not trying to exploit the racist epithet for political gain. Therefore, we can discard these sophistical mental contortions and simply admit that racism has nothing to do with it. There's a rising tide of opposition to Obama because he's a communist-leaning national socialist. A majority of Americans don't want to live in a society governed by a communist-leaning national socialist regime. Therefore, they will oppose Obama once they understand what he's up to.
What's more, once they realize how thoroughly he rejects the basic premises of American liberty and justice, they will realize that, whatever his skin color, he has little or nothing in him that respects the black American identity. Forged in the struggle to survive slavery and racial injustice, the identity of black Americans has at its heart the moral premise that also informs their identity as Americans – the self-evident truth that we are all created equal, and endowed by our creator with unalienable rights. Obama is the fervent, dedicated leader of a cult of death that rejects this confirmation of the intrinsic God-ordained worth of every human life. He rejects the soul of black folk.
America will truly transcend racism when we accept the fact that, bereft of this soul of principle, Obama's skin color doesn't make him a black American. It has no significance, except as an excuse for leftist guilt-mongering. But all Americans, whatever our color, background or creed, who admit and refuse to surrender the American soul (that is in a special sense also the soul of the black American identity) – we form one people, one nation, one altogether human race. Far from being racist or divisive, our unanimous rejection of Obama's soulless socialism could revive the hope for moral justice first kindled when the U.S. was founded: the hope that was and may yet be the real and truly unifying hope of all humankind.