Apparently the first Black president of the United States isn’t allowed to talk about race. At least that’s the message some white politicos are sending out after President Obama deigned to mention race in an expansive interview with David Remnick in the New Yorker.
GOP darling Sarah Palin even managed to deliver a spank to Obama at the same time as she was putting up a Facebook post celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This is what she wrote:
“Happy MLK, Jr. Day! I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card.”
Though it’s not clear exactly what Palin was referring to, it’s likely she was responding to the president’s quote in the New Yorker, where he said:
“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a Black President,” Obama said. “There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues.”
While to many that sounds like the president stating the obvious, to some conservatives those are fighting words.
On Fox News, the hosts were incredulous that the president could actually believe that any hatred of him was connected to his skin color.
“Be honest for once! Be intellectually honest! He always goes right to the race piece out of the gate,” Andrea Tantaros said. She claimed Obama “always goes there” because “he can’t possibly believe” that his bad poll numbers might have to do with his overall performance.
While most of the African-American community and much of the political left have been repeating as conventional wisdom for the past six years the same claim Obama made in the interview, the political right is acting as if it never even occurred to them that Obama is Black.
On CNN, Don Lemon and Marc Lamont Hill could not get Republican strategist Alice Stewart to concede that there are white people in America who are opposed to the president because of his race. Stewart said all of the resentment of Obama is because of his policies, and she added that “he refuses to acknowledge” the racial gains the country’s made.
As we have reported before on Atlanta Black Star, since Obama’s election in 2008, there has been a 813 percent rise in the number of anti-government hate groups in the U.S., to a high of 1,360 groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012.
Yet they accuse the president of being intellectually dishonest.
