The Niggerization of Barack Obama

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Following Mitt Romney's disparaging statements describing 47 percent of Americans as moochers, Romney has been behind in all of the crucial swing states. Essentially, the GOP realizes that the President Obama is now connecting with many different demographics, including white working class men. As reported in Politico and on Morning Joe,

Since 1972, white men have voted roughly 60-40 percent in favor of the Republican Party in presidential elections. The exception was 1976, when Democratic Southerner Jimmy Carter attracted 48 percent of the white male vote. Then, in 2008, Obama surpassed the numbers of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry to win 41 percent of the white male vote nationally. But by 2010, white male support had shrunk back to 37 percent — a precarious landing spot for the president.  

Now, things could be shifting again. Already struggling to connect with average voters of all stripes because of his wealth and social station, Romney faces an additional hurdle with middle-class men in the secretly recorded video at a Florida fundraiser in which he seems to be assailing the working class as deadbeats and moochers.

In an act of desperation, Romney surrogates are attempting to create a wedge between the President and white voters. The Republicans realize that they cannot win this election on the merits.   Instead of taking the high road, Romney and the GOP are resorting to two different race baiting tactics.

The first tactic is make white voters fear the President by depicting him as the stereotypical angry, militant, divisive black man. The Right is attempting to resurrect that old, tired, dead Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy by digging up a 2007 video showing President Obama recognizing and praising his former pastor.  Essentially, they are trying to Farrakhanize Obama. For example, the Daily Caller reported that:

In a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama tells an audience of black ministers, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism.  

...The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.

Another example of this fear tactic is the ongoing promotion of false and absurd notions that the President is foreign, Muslim and socialist. Some misguided, ignorant people continue to believe that the President's birth certificate is a forgery. A couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney pandered to that group of simpletons by joking about his birth certificate. Moreover, despite doing countless interviews stating that he is a Christian, many people continue to insist that the President is a Muslim. In some quarters, the word "Muslim" is just another word for terrorist.

The second race baiting tactic is to make white voters resent the President by equating him with the lazy, undeserving, unqualified, welfare dependent negro stereotype. In the words of MSNBC commentator Toure, the Romney Campaign and its surrogates are attempting to niggerize the President. That are doing that by creating misleading ads and staged videos suggesting that President Obama is expanding welfare and giving away free cellphones to lazy black people.



Furthermore, in the Washington Post, columnist George Will basically wrote that the Obama will be re-elected simply because he is black.

"Perhaps a pleasant paradox defines this political season: That Obama is African American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up. Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head."

Another example is former Speaker House Newt Gingrich describing the President as the "food stamp president" and as "not a real president". More specifically, as stated in the Hill,

“[Obama] really is like the substitute [National Football League] referees in the sense that he’s not a real president,” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Tuesday night. “He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”



George Will's and Newt Gingrich's statements essentially convey the idea that the President is an unqualified, undeserving individual who achieved success based solely on unwarranted racial preferences and white liberal paternalism.  These attacks are nothing but dog whistles designed to use race to make white voters support Romney.

Hopefully, after tonight's presidential debate, no one will be talking about that five year old Obama video footage.  I look forward to hearing the President and Romney debate on substantive issues.

Republicans Resort to Race Baiting

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Yesterday on MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Matthews discussed how Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are resorting to race baiting to secure votes from bigots.

The GOP's Message to Black People: Who Needs Niggers!

As reported on ABC News, a couple of weeks ago, Republican Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich starked controversy when he said:

“And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

ABC News also reported that Newt Gingrich repeatedly refers to the first African American President as the food stamp president:

"A portion of Gingrich’s usual speech given to crowds includes a line in which Gingrich says more people are on food stamps under President Obama than with any other president. ABC News fact checked Gingrich’s food stamp claims earlier this month, confirming that Americans on food stamps is at a record high, but mostly attributed to a weak economy.

“The fact is if I become your nominee we will make the key test very simple – food stamps versus paychecks. Obama is the best food stamp president in American history. More people are on food stamps today because of Obama’s policies than ever in history,” Gingrich said. “I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history.”

To top it all off, Newt Gingrich basically said that poor children, code for "poor black children", are lazy and shiftless:



On Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Newt Gingrich spent time defending his racist statements during the Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina. The crowd's reaction was even more sickening than Gingrich's statements.

The crowd applauded when Newt Gingrich justified his bigoted statements. The crowd booed FOX news analyst Juan Williams for having the audacity to question Gingrich about the statements. Unfortunately, the crowd's response is a symptom of a larger problem.

As reported on Politics365, Newt Gingrich is not the only Republican candidate to make racist statements about African Americans:

"A second Republican candidate said: “I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to earn the money and provide for themselves and their families…”

A third Republican candidate for president published a newsletter in his 50s claiming that “racial violence will fill our cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’”

A fourth Republican candidate for the presidency signed a pledge claiming that African American children were more likely to grow up in stable families during slavery than in contemporary times.

A fifth Republican candidate said: “many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open minded to not even considering a conservative point of view…” two months ago."

The Republican Party's Southern Strategy to secure the redneck, racist white vote continues today. As long as it benefits them politically, Republican candidates will continue to label African Americans as lazy and welfare dependent. I would not be surprised if the candidates try to out racist each other while campaigning in South Carolina. After all, it is the heart of the Confederacy. In case you forgot, they proudly display the Confederate flag at the state capital to remind you.

Even worst than their racist statements, Republicans will continue to pursue policies that are detrimental to African Americans. The Republican Party's stances on affirmative action, health care reform, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, workers rights, voter identification requirements and other issues adversely and disproportionately impact black people.

As far as the GOP is concerned, black people are invisible, irrelevant and expendable. Republicans clearly don't give a damn about us or our issues. Through their policies and bigoted statements, the Republican Party is essentially saying to the black community, "Who needs niggers!"

This article is cross-posted on Jack and Jill Politics.

Colin Powell on Newt Gingrich's "Kenyan, Anticolonialist" Statement

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I Wish Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D'Souza Were Right!

Today, Morning Joe reported that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the National Review that President Obama follows a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview. To support his ridiculous argument, Newt Gingrich cited a so-called "insightful" article by Dinesh D'Souza. Gingrich's statement is despicable. When I heard about it, I thought, "Here we go again." Clearly, Gingrich was pandering to Birthers, Tea Party extremists and other fringe lunatics by portraying Obama as a radical, socialist foreigner. Later, I read the two news articles mentioned in the story.

In his Forbes article, conservative Dinesh D'Souza asserts that Obama is fulfilling his father's "anticolonialist" dreams. D'Souza wrote:

"Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites...This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India..."

"From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world."

"It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying...He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet."

Those two articles confirmed my initial impression. However, in some respects, I wish Gingrich and D'Souza were right. If Obama was anticolonialist, he would have immediately withdrew all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead requiring citizens to purchase private health insurance from avaricious companies, Obama would fought for a single payer health care system. If Obama was an anticolonialist, he would not have bailed out the Wall Street. Instead, he would have bailed out Main Street by imposing an immediate moratorium on foreclosures. If Obama was an anticolonialist, instead of lecturing Africans about nepotism, corruption, democracy and the rule of law, Obama would have demanded reparations for slavery and colonialism.  In college, I studied Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon.  Obama is no Nkrumah.  He is no Fanon.

As always, I welcome your comments.

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Islamophobia: Mainstream Hate

The proposed construction of a Muslim community center two long blocks away from ground zero has exposed and unleashed a rabid new wave of anti-Muslim hatred. Without doubt, the opposition to the mosque is rooted in prejudice and hate. Essentially, the opposition views all Muslims as terrorists or potential terrorists. That is primary reason why they oppose building a mosque near ground zero.

The opposition to building mosques is not confined to the area near ground zero. For instance, as noted in the New York Times article by Laurie Goodstein titled Across the Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition,

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.

In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.

In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.

In addition to protests against the building of mosques, there are other examples of anti-Muslim hatred. For example, one church plans to hold a Quran burning ceremony on September 11, 2010. Moreover, as pointed out on the Rachel Maddow Show, the hate group Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE) seeks to outlaw Islam in America.

This hatred is also reflected in polls. According to TIME magazine’s poll,

61% of respondents oppose the construction of the Park51/Cordoba House project, compared with 26% who support it. More than 70% concur with the premise that proceeding with the plan would be an insult to the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President....

The discussion centering around President Obama’s faith is another example of anti-Muslim hatred. Many view being a Muslim as a blot on one's character. For instance, President Obama has been forced to repeatedly explain that he is a Christian and not a Muslim. Nonetheless, many Americans remain unconvinced. Shortly after the President voiced support for building a mosque near ground zero, the Pew Research Center released the results of a national survey. According to the survey,

[N]early one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama’s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center. The view that Obama is a Muslim is more widespread among his political opponents than among his backers. Roughly a third of conservative Republicans (34%) say Obama is a Muslim, as do 30% of those who disapprove of Obama’s job performance. But even among many of his supporters and allies, less than half now say Obama is a Christian. Among Democrats, for instance, 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55%in March 2009.

Frankly, as Muslim, I find this anti-Muslim trend to be frightening because it is not just coming from the lunatic fringe. Mainstream politician politicians such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Republican Governor Sarah Palin and Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio joined the hateful chorus. Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis. Some hypocritical politicians like Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio are actually pimping the 9/11 tragedy to score political points. Under pressure from the anti-Muslim right, feeble Democrats such as U.S. Senator Harry Reid and former Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean have capitulated and now oppose the building of the Muslim community center.

It is particularly disturbing to see victims of discrimination embrace this new form of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a long and distinguished history of fighting discrimination. Yet, ADL issued a press statement opposing construction of the Muslim community center. I was shocked to learn that even some prominent black bloggers have jumped on the hate Muslims bandwagon.

It is time to stop the hate.