Obama Fails the Test

Everyone agrees that Senator Barack Obama delivered a great speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

But not everyone agrees with the message.

Obama was forced to give this speech because of the recent flap over the racist, hateful sermons delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for over 20 years of the African nationalist church in Chicago to which Obama belonged.

Everyone understands that Wright is a symbol for America’s present shameful secret, the one you are not allowed to voice: that the most racist people in the United States are African Americans.

There’s a simple reason for this. Liberals give blacks a pass. If anyone in the United States other than a black voices a single racist word that person is shamed and blamed. But when blacks talk racist or act racist liberals give them a pass. Well, they say, how can you expect blacks to observe the standards of the rest of America—after centuries of slavery and oppression. Or there’s this one. You can’t be racist unless you have power, and blacks don’t have power.

Senator Obama, who now has the fervent support of black voters, had the opportunity, for one shining moment, to lead America’s blacks out of the wilderness of black racism and into the land of milk and honey. He could have said: “I utterly reject the hateful, racist philosophy of Minister Wright. That sort of rhetoric has no place in America. Period.” With that speech he could have begun the post-racist era in America. He would have gone down in the history books as a Jefferson or a Lincoln.

But he didn’t. Instead he ducked. He didn’t have the courage to be a leader.

Instead of leadership he gave us the usual liberal guilt trip and the usual bromides about racism and the understandable rage of blacks who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

But the story of race in the United States is not shameful. It is incandescent.

At the dawn of the modern era, within 20 years of Lord Mansfield famously ruling in Somersett’s Case that slavery was unlawful in England, the founding fathers attempted to do the same in the United States. They tried to make slavery illegal in the new constitution. But they were blocked by the southern states. So they compromised, agreeing not to outlaw the slave trade—yet.

It was a weak moment, because for the next 80 years the South reacted with purple rage whenever the subject of slavery was brought up. For a potted history of the slavery issue start at the Northwest Ordinance and follow the events leading up the the Civil War. That was the epochal event, you recall, in which America tossed an entire generation of young men and a year of national income down the toilet. But the Civil War decided the slavery issue once and for all.

Only one US war was as costly as the Civil War. Our American grandparents spend 130 percent of national income in World War II fighting fascism and Japanese expansionism. We decided that question once and for all too.

Then right after World War II Americans rolled up their sleeves and began to work on the lingering race issue, the de jure oppression of blacks in the South and the de facto oppression in the North. This struggle culminated in the great Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Liberals were the leaders in this great work. It was liberals’ finest hour.

It was a courageous thing for liberals to do, as President Johnson is said to have recognized, because it wiped out the Democratic Party’s power in the South.

Unfortunately, courageous as they were to walk away from white racism in the South, Democrats and liberals were not courageous enough to act against black racism in the North.

And so today we have the corrupt system of affirmative action, quotas, and “diversity” that has so poisoned the relations between the races, and has so cruelly prevented American blacks from taking their rightful place as equal and honored members of the American family. You can’t really take your place at the family table until you give up your rage and your victimhood, put on a smile, and start to discuss family business without always bringing up ancient feuds and humiliations.

In the United States today there is no worse accusation for a white than to be called a “racist.” But blacks get a pass on racist speech and actions. Instead, for blacks, most likely, there is no worse accusation than to be called an “Uncle Tom,” or to sneered at for “acting white.”

This double standard, this injustice, is a cancer eating away at the heart of America. America is waiting, longing for the leader who will lead us out of the tar pits of racist recrimination to the sunny upland meadows of post-racism. Many Americans hoped that Barack Obama might be that leader.

Now we know that he is not.