Black Panthers: Obama's latest Rev. Wright

A race uniter or a race divider?

Which will President Obama be?

Unfortunately for the White House, the New Black Panther Party is quickly becoming Obama's next case of Rev. Wright, or possibly his sequel to the Professor Gates controversy.

Barack Obama's association with the New Black Panther Party has cast renewed doubt on his ability to be a transformative president capable of leading the nation into a new dimension where race in America is no longer divisive.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a user-generated posting by the New Black Panther Party on the official Obama '08 website was taken down, but only after it generated controversy.

"We removed the user-generated blog post because we don't condone any group that advocates violence," Obama presidential campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor told the Washington Times on March 20, 2008, explaining why the post was removed. "Sen. Obama gave a 37-minute speech about race [Tuesday], and we hope people will focus on that and not what one individual posted on a blog."

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Vietor explained that BarackObama.com allowed supporters to set up their own blog pages and that the website at that time included more than 1 million pages.

The New Black Panther Party posting as an Obama fan on the campaign website was clearly polarizing, drawing at the time the criticism of yet another racial extremist in the person of David Duke, the Louisiana former state representative who discredited himself as an outspoken white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

"Now that Obama has a real chance to be president and needs white support, he claims to condemn Rev. Wright," Duke wrote on his website March 25, 2008. "In fact, Obama's official website even welcomes the support of a racist, communist black organization such as the Black Panthers, an organization with a long history of violence against white Americans."

The point is not that David Duke is right. Clearly, Duke's racism demands to be condemned just as does the racism of the New Black Panther Party.

The point is that instead of making race a nonissue, President Obama's record is that he polarizes race issues, perhaps because deep down he intellectually agrees with the radical polemics he admits in his autobiography were his intellectual pillars growing up – including antiwhite firebrands such as Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon.

The question becomes increasingly relevant as evidence continues to come out supporting the contention that the Department of Justice under Eric Holder is anything but color-blind.

The issue of the New Black Panther Party has the potential to dog Barack Obama, much as the Rev. Wright issue did during the 2008 campaign and the Professor Gates controversy did in the first months of his presidency.

In recent days, the resurfacing on the Internet of the New Black Panther Party post on the Obama '08 website has raised the question whether the New Black Panther Party's campaign support in delivering votes for Obama in 2008 may be a reason the administration does not want to prosecute the group on federal charges of intimidating white voters.

The test will come in the next few days.

Will Barack Obama throw the New Black Panthers under the bus, as he did Rev. Wright when Rev. Wright's racism became too toxic for the candidate to support?

Clearly, a "beer summit" at the White House is out, especially when it comes to entertaining Malik Zulu Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party's national chairman.

But there is a deeper question here.

Can Eric Holder's Justice Department tolerate the intimidation of white voters by a black racist organization and still allow progressives to maintain that President Obama is intent on playing a transformational role in making race a nonissue in America?