Barack Obama Part Six

Obama Accuses Bush Administration of “Passive Indifference” in Responding to Hurricane Katrina's Effects on Mostly-Black New Orleans

In that same 2005 speech, Obama derided the “passive indifference” that allegedly had caused the Bush administration to respond slowly to the poor, black victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans. He also mocked the administration's supposedly elitist attitude and inability to empathize with people who were not white and affluent. Said Obama: “You know, after the hurricane and its aftermath, there was a lot of discussion about the fact that those who were impacted by the achingly slow response on the part of the federal government were disproportionately black … [W]hat was revealed was a passive indifference that is common in our culture, common in our society, that of course, a sense that of course once the evacuation order is issued, that you will hop in your SUV and fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline and load up your trunk with some sparkling water and take your credit card and check in to the nearest hotel until the storm passes. And the notion that folks couldn't do that simply did not register in the minds of those in charge. And it's not surprising that it didn't register, because it hasn't registered for the last 6, 7, 8, 20, 50, 75, 100 years.”

Obama Accuses the Bush Administration of Racial Insensitivity Regarding Hurricane Katrina

In September 2005, Senator Obama spoke at a town hall meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus. Nominally devoted to the subject of “eradicating poverty,” the meeting was replete with condemnations of President Bush, the Republican Party, and America’s purportedly intractable racial inequities. Obama stopped short of suggesting that the federal government's alleged slowness in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina—especially black victims—was motivated by racism. But he nonetheless claimed that racism was the cause of what he perceived to be the Bush administration’s lack of sensitivity to the struggles of African Americans generally: “The incompetence was colorblind. What wasn’t colorblind was the indifference. Human efforts will always pale in comparison to nature’s forces. But [the Bush administration] is a set of folks who simply don’t recognize what’s happening in large parts of the country.”

Emphasis on Judges' “Hearts” and Their Inclination to Help “the Weak,” Rather Than on Abiding by the Law

When President Bush in 2005 nominated John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Senator Obama stated that few Supreme Court cases involve any controversy at all, “so that both a [conservative like] Scalia and a [leftist like] Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of cases.” In the other 5 percent, he said, “the critical ingredient” was neither the law nor the Constitution says, but rather “what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama said in a floor speech on September 22, 2005: “[W]hen I examined Judge Roberts’ record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak ... he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process … he seemed dismissive of concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.”

Obama was also “deeply troubled” by “the philosophy, ideology and record” of yet another Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. “[W]hen you look at his record,” Obama said in a floor speech on January 26, 2006, “when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I found that in almost every case he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless.”

Obama Endorses Dorothy Tillman, Proponent of Reparations and Admirer of Louis Farrakhan

In 2006, Senator Obama endorsed candidate Dorothy Tillman in the Third Ward race for the Chicago City Council. A passionate admirer of Louis Farrakhan, Tillman was a leading proponent of reparations for slavery. Claiming that America remains “one of the cruelest nations in the world when it comes to black folks,” Tillman continues to declare that the U.S. “owes blacks a debt.”

Obama's Charges Government with Racism in Response to Hurricane Katrina

In a June 2007 campaign appearance at Hampton University in Virginia, then-presidential candidate Obama delivered a racially charged and, at times, angry speech to an audience of black ministers, including his longtime pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Wright's long tradition of anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic rhetoric had recently been exposed by a few media outlets.) In the speech, Obama explicitly defended Wright, saying: “They [the media] had stories about Trinity United Church of Christ, because we talked about black people in church.” Obama then mocked Wright's critics, accusing them of having said, in essence: “Oh, that might be a separatist church.”

The Daily Caller said of the video showing Obama's 2007 speech: “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 spine of Obama’s speech is a parable about a pregnant woman shot in the stomach during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The baby is born with a bullet in her arm, which doctors successfully remove. That bullet, Obama explains, is a metaphor for the problems facing black America, namely racism. And with that, Obama pivots to his central point: The Los Angeles riots and Hurricane Katrina have racism in common.”

In his Hampton speech, Obama shouted: “The federal response after Katrina was similar to the response we saw after the riots in LA. People in Washington, they wake up, they’re surprised: ‘There’s poverty in our midst! Folks are frustrated! Black people angry!’ Then there’s gonna be some panels, and hearings, and there are commissions and there are reports, and then there’s some aid money, although we don’t always know where it’s going—it can’t seem to get to the people who need it—and nothin’ really changes, except the news coverage quiets down and Anderson Cooper is on to something else.”

At that point in the speech, an agitated Obama told the crowd that he wanted to give “one example because this really steams me up.” He continued: “Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later, there’s a law, federal law—when you get reconstruction money from the federal government—called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar. Now here’s the thing, when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act—said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together—because you’re part of the American family.’”

Obama then stated, angrily, that majority-black New Orleans was treated differently by the federal government: “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money? Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans, they [government leaders] don’t care about as much!”

In reality, by January of 2007—fully six months before Obama’s Hampton University speech—the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina, as compared to just $20 billion that had been pledged to New York City after 9/11. Moreover, the federal government had, on occasion, waived the Stafford Act during its reconstruction efforts. For instance, on May 25, 2007—a few weeks before Obama's Hampton speech—the Bush administration had sent an additional $6.9 billion to Katrina-affected areas with no requirements for local outlays. It is inconceivable that Obama, as a sitting U.S. Senator, could have been unaware of this.

Also in the Hampton speech, Obama made repeated appeals to racial solidarity: “We [blacks] should have had our young people trained to rebuild the homes down in the Gulf. We don’t need Halliburton doing it. We can have the people who were displaced doing that work.... We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the [affluent white] suburbs.” Rather, said Obama: “We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.”

Obama ended his speech this way: “America will survive. Just like black folks will survive. We won’t forget where we came from. We won’t forget what happened 19 months ago, or 15 years ago, or 300 years ago”—an unambiguous reference to slavery.

2007 Speech to the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”)

In July 2007, presidential candidate Obama was a featured speaker at the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza, which lobbies for racial preferences, mass immigration, and a path to legalization for illegal aliens. Among his remarks were the following:

“I will never walk away from the 12 million undocumented immigrants who live, work, and contribute to our country every single day.”

“[W]e are a nation of immigrants … That's the America we believe in. But that's the America that the President and too many Republicans walked away from when the politics got tough.... [W]e saw parts of the immigration debate took a turn that was both ugly and racist in a way we haven't seen since the struggle for civil rights....”

“[W]hen millions of children start the race of life so far behind only because of race, only because of class, that's a betrayal of our ideals. That's not just a Latino problem or an African-American problem; that is an American problem that we have to solve....”

2008 Speech to the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”)

In July 2008, candidate Obama again spoke to the National Council of La Raza. Among his remarks were the following:

“I honor you, I congratulate you, I thank you, and I wish you another forty years as extraordinary as your last ...”

“The system isn't working when Hispanics are losing their jobs faster than almost anybody else, or working jobs that pay less, and come with fewer benefits than almost anybody else.”

“The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids—when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel….”

“[W]e'll make the system work again for everyone. By living up to the ideals that this organization has always embodied the ideals reflected in your name, ‘Raza,’ the people. [Actually, a literal translation is “the race.”] … And together, we won't just win an election; we will transform this nation.”

Obama Administration's Massive Support for the National Council of La Raza

A Judicial Watch investigation revealed that federal funding for the National Council of La Raza and its affiliates skyrocketed after President Obama had appointed La Raza's senior vice president, Cecilia Muñoz, to be his director of intergovernmental affairs in 2009. The year Muñoz joined the White House, government funds earmarked for La Raza increased from $4.1 million to $11 million. Fully 60% of that money came from the Department of Labor, headed by Hilda Solis, who has close ties to the La Raza movement. Also in 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave La Raza $2.5 million for housing counseling, the Department of Education contributed almost $800,000, and the Centers for Disease Control gave approximately $250,000.

Moreover, La Raza affiliates nationwide collected tens of millions of government grant and recovery dollars in 2010. A La Raza offshoot called Chicanos Por La Causa, for example, saw its federal funding nearly double to $18.3 million following Muñoz’s appointment. Another group, Ayuda Inc., which provides immigration law services and guarantees confidentiality to assure illegal aliens that they will not be reported to authorities, took in $600,000 in 2009 and $548,000 in 2010 from the Department of Justice. (The group had not received any federal funding between 2005 and 2008.)

Obama Appoints La Raza's Cecilia Munoz to Administrative Posts

In January 2009, President Obama appointed longtime National Council of La Raza policy analyst Cecilia Munoz to be his director of intergovernmental affairs. In 2012, Obama appointed Muñoz as director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Obama Urges Hispanic Voters to “Punish” Their “Enemies”

In a radio interview conducted in late October 2010, just a few days before the November midterm elections, Obama sought to assure Hispanics that he was committed to an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy. Stressing that such a goal would be much easier to achieve if the Democrats were to retain control of both houses of Congress, he urged Hispanic listeners to flock to the polls: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Referring specifically to Republicans who were calling for border security and were supporting strict immigration laws like Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration measure, Obama said: “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”

Obama Says the Criminal-Justice System Is Racially Inequitable

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said: “The criminal-justice system is not color-blind. It does not work for all people equally, and that is why it's critical to have a president who sends a signal that we are going to have a system of justice that is not just us, but is everybody.”

Also during the 2008 campaign, Obama said that “in our criminal-justice system, African-Americans and whites, for the same crime … are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences.”

Obama has also complained that “certain sentences … are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.”

As a legislator, Obama voted against a proposal to criminalize contact with gang members for any convicts who were free on probation or on bail. In 2001 he opposed, for reasons of racial equity, making gang membership a consideration in determining whether or not a killer may be eligible for capital punishment. “There's a strong overlap between gang affiliation and young men of color,” said Obama. “… I think it's problematic for them [nonwhites] to be singled out as more likely to receive the death penalty for carrying out certain acts than are others who do the same thing.”

What Obama Misrepresented:

The Truth about the Criminal-Justice System

Obama's assertions about the criminal-justice system are utterly untrue. They are designed not to instruct, but rather to divide Americans along racial lines. Consider the following:

As early as 1983, the Panel on Sentencing Research, which was established by the liberal-leaning National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on request of the U.S. Justice Department, reviewed more than 70 studies on sentencing patterns and concluded: “Our overall assessment of the available research suggests that factors other than racial discrimination in the sentencing process account for most of the disproportionate representation of black males in U.S. prisons ...” Further, the NAS reported that it had found “no evidence of a widespread systematic pattern of discrimination in sentencing.”

In a 1987 review essay of the three most comprehensive books examining the role of race in the American criminal-justice system, the journal Criminology concluded that there was little evidence of anti-black discrimination.

In his 1987 book The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, William Wilbanks wrote: “The black/white variation in sentences is generally reduced to near zero when several legal variables are introduced as controls.”

The most exhaustive, best-designed study of sentencing patterns ever conducted—a 1990 analysis of more than 11,000 recently convicted criminals in California—found that the severity of sentences depended heavily on such factors as prior criminal records, the seriousness of the crimes, and whether guns were used in the commission of those crimes; race was found to have no effect whatsoever.

Likewise, a 1991 RAND Corporation study found that a defendant's racial or ethnic background bore little or no relationship to conviction rates; far more important than race were such factors as the amount of evidence presented, and whether or not a credible eyewitness testified.

In 1993 a Justice Department study tracked the experience of more than 10,000 accused felons in America's 75 largest cities found that black defendants fared better than their white counterparts—66% of black defendants were actually prosecuted, versus 69% of white defendants. Among those prosecuted, 75% of blacks were convicted, as compared to 78% of whites.

Liberal criminologist Michael Tonry wrote in 1995: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned.”

A 1996 analysis of 55,000 big-city felony cases found that black defendants were convicted at a lower rate than whites in 12 of the 14 federally designated felony categories. This finding was consistent with the overwhelming consensus of other, previous, well-designed studies, most of which indicated that black defendants were slightly less likely to be convicted of criminal charges against them than white defendants.

In 1997, liberal criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen undertook a painstaking review of the voluminous literature on charging and sentencing, and concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” and not racism, explained why proportionately more blacks than whites were in prison—and for longer terms.

The foregoing realities remain true to this day. Even though America's legal-education and civil-rights establishments have created a massive industry devoted entirely to uncovering even the barest shred of evidence pointing toward white racism in the justice system, the net result of their herculean efforts has been nothing more than an occasional study showing a miniscule, unexplained racial disparity in sentencing, while most other analyses continue to find no racial effect at all.

Obama Says Crack Cocaine Laws Are Racially Discriminatory

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama stated that the harsher penalties for crimes involving crack cocaine as opposed to powder-based cocaine—the former disproportionately involve black offenders, whereas the latter involve mostly white offenders—were unfair. In August 2010 he signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which eliminated much of the disparity in crack-vs.-powder sentencing guidelines.

What Obama Misrepresented:

The Truth about the Crack-vs.-Powder Sentencing Disparities

The original sentencing disparity was not due to racism in the justice system or in the legislature. The Congressional Record shows that in 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was first being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating black communities across the United States—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties.

The vast majority of cocaine arrests in the U.S. are made at the state—not the federal—level, where sentencing disparities between cases involving crack and powder cocaine generally have never existed. Moreover, drug possession accounts for fewer than 2% of all the offenses that propel individuals into federal prisons. Those most likely to be incarcerated for drug convictions are not mere users, but traffickers who are largely career criminals with very long rap sheets.

The harsher punishments for crack violations harmed only a small subset of the black population—namely drug dealers and users—while benefiting the great mass of law-abiding people in black neighborhoods.

Critics of the crack-vs.-powder penalty imbalance have been largely silent on the matter of federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties—which, it could easily be argued, discriminate heavily against whites. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald explains: “The press almost never mentions the federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties, which are identical to those for crack: five grams of meth net you a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the [5,619] crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black. But no one calls the federal meth laws anti-Hispanic or anti-white."

Obama Says Drug-Dealing Results from Economic Deprivation

In Obama’s calculus, many young black men engage in street-level drug dealing not because they seek to profit handsomely from it, but because they are unable to find legitimate jobs anywhere. Said Obama: “For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills—and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record. We can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in the drug trade, crime in any community would drop.”

Obama's African American Religious Leadership Committee

On December 4, 2007, Obama’s presidential campaign announced the creation of its African American Religious Leadership Committee. Among the committee's more notable members was Jeremiah Wright, whose contempt for white people was discussed at some length above.

Another member of Obama's African American Religious Leadership Committee was the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a prominent figure with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Viewing the United States as a nation that is “not committed to serious efforts to address the issue of racism,” Lowery has warned that “white racism is gaining respectability again,” and that “there’s a resurgence of racism … at almost every level of life.” Further, Lowery has expressed contempt for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, because Thomas opposes the use of affirmative action (i.e., race preferences) in business and academia. “I have told [Thomas] I am ashamed of him,” says Lowery, “because he is becoming to the black community what Benedict Arnold was to the nation he deserted; and what Judas Iscariot was to Jesus: a traitor; and what Brutus was to Caesar: an assassin.”

Another Racialist Minister with Ties to Obama: James Meeks

Yet another religious figure affiliated with Obama (but not on his Advisory Council) is the Rev. James Meeks, a Democratic member of the Illinois state senate, where he served alongside Obama from 2002-2004. Meeks also has been the pastor of Chicago’s 22,000-member Salem Baptist Church since 1985, and he was once the executive vice president of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH coalition. In 2003-04 Obama frequently campaigned at the Salem Baptist Church during his run for the U.S. Senate. Meeks, meanwhile, appeared in television ads supporting Obama’s candidacy. In 2004, Obama personally selected Meeks to endorse him in a radio ad. In a 2004 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama described Meeks as an adviser to whom he looked for “spiritual counsel.” In 2007 Meeks served on Obama’s exploratory committee for the presidency. The Obama campaign website listed Meeks as one of the candidate’s “influential black supporters.” A Meeks endorsement of Obama was featured on that same website in 2008. Also in 2008, Meeks was named as an Illinois superdelegate pledged to Obama for the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado.

In July 2006, Meeks sparked controversy when he delivered a heated sermon excoriating Chicago mayor Richard Daley and others regarding public-school funding issues. “We don’t have slave masters,” Meeks shouted. “We got mayors. But they [are] still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able ... to be educated.”

Also among the targets of Meeks’ wrath were blacks who supported Daley. Said Meeks: “You got some preachers that are house niggers. You got some elected officials that are house niggers. And rather than them trying to break this up, they gonna fight you to protect this white man.”

Accusing Republicans of Racism

At a June 2008 campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida, Obama suggested that his political opponents were trying to exploit the issue of race to undermine his candidacy. “It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy,” he said. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

The following month, Obama told his listeners at another campaign event: “They [Republicans] know that you’re not real happy with them and so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. What they’re saying is ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, he’s a got a funny name.’”

Obama's Alliance with Al Sharpton

In March 2008, civil-rights activist Al Sharpton, a strong supporter of Obama’s presidential candidacy, revealed publicly that he was in the habit of speaking to Obama on a regular basis—“two or three times a week.”

Sharpton also said that he had told Obama earlier in the campaign that he (Sharpton) would prefer, because of his own controversial reputation, not to formally endorse Obama for president: “I can be freer not endorsing you to help you and everybody else.” But according to Sharpton, Obama then protested and asked for his public support: “No, no, no. I want you to endorse.”

In 2008, Obama, as he had also done the year before, addressed Al Sharpton's National Action Network to seek its support for his presidential campaign. Calling Sharpton “a voice for the voiceless and ... dispossessed,” Obama stated: “What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.”

On April 6, 2011, President Obama traveled to New York's Sheraton Hotel & Towers to attend a 20th anniversary celebration of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. When addressing the crowd, Obama, who had heartily embraced Sharpton with a hug and a handshake, joked: “Some things have changed a lot since 1991. I told Reverend Al backstage he's getting skinnier than me. But he hasn't lost his style.” Obama also praised “the National Action Network's commitment to fight injustice and inequality here in New York City and across America. That's not only a testament to Reverend Sharpton. It's a testament to all of you who are here tonight. I want to commend you for the work that you've done over the last two decades.”

On December 4, 2012, President Barack Obama met with several “influential progressive” advisors (as described by White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest) to strategize on how to best sell the American public on the need to raise taxes on people earning $250,000 or more, while extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all other U.S. residents. Among those advisors were Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC host Ed Schultz, and Arianna Huffington.

In October 2014, Obama sent an aide to attend Al Sharpton's lavish birthday party at New York's Four Seasons restaurant, where the aide read a message praising Sharpton’s “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.”

Who Is Al Sharpton, Friend of Obama?

In 1987 Sharpton promoted the fiction that a black teenager named Tawana Brawley had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by six white kidnappers in upstate New York. The case dragged on for many months and caused immense racial turmoil in New York.

In the aftermath of a 1991 Brooklyn, New York car accident in which a Hasidic Jew accidentally killed a seven-year-old black child, Sharpton declared that the child's death was due not merely to a car accident, but rather to “the social accident of apartheid.” Thereafter he organized a series of massive demonstrations to protest what he viewed as the racial undertones of the killing. He even challenged local Jews—“diamond merchants,” he called them—to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score if they disagreed with his portrayal of the incident. Stirred in part by Sharpton’s incendiary rhetoric, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took to the streets, pelting Jewish homes with rocks, setting vehicles on fire, and shouting “Jew! Jew!” As the riots continued for three days and nights, Sharpton said: “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

In 1995 Sharpton led his National Action Network in a boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announce that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. He repeatedly referred to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers” and “greedy Jew bastards.” All of this occurred under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who vowed not to allow “some white interloper” to “expand his business” in Harlem, and who exhorted blacks to join “the struggle brother Powell and I are engaged in.” The subsequent picketing became increasingly militant in its tone, until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire—killing seven people.

That same year, Sharpton told an audience at New Jersey’s Kean College: “White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” Sharpton’s Kean College speech also featured his assertion that America’s founders consisted of “the worst criminals, the rejects they sent from Europe … to the colonies.” “So [if] some cracker,” Sharpton continued, “come and tell you, ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold you pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.”

Obama's Black Advisory Council (Cornel West)

For his 2008 presidential run, Obama formed a Black Advisory Council whose members included, most notably: (a) Professor Cornel West, a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a great admirer of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright; and (b) Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, a reparations-for-slavery proponent who has advised Obama on such matters as criminal-justice reform.

In 2007, Obama had appeared with Cornel West at a Harlem, New York fundraiser attended by some 1,500 people. It was Obama's first campaign visit to Harlem, and it came shortly after the senator had announced his candidacy for President. At the event, West vehemently denounced the “racist criminal-justice system” of the “American empire.” He then introduced Obama to the crowd, saying: “He is my brother and my companion and comrade.” When Obama took the microphone, he expressed his gratitude to West, calling him “not only a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, an oracle ... he's also a loving person.” The senator then asked the audience to give West a round of applause.

Who Is Cornel West, the “Genius” and “Oracle”?

West's views on race are extremely noteworthy. He has branded the U.S. a “racist patriarchal” nation where “white supremacy” continues to define everyday life. “White America,” he writes, “has been historically weak-willed in ensuring racial justice and has continued to resist fully accepting the humanity of blacks.” This has resulted, he claims, in the creation of many “degraded and oppressed people [who are] hungry for identity, meaning, and self-worth.”

West attributes most of the black community's problems to “existential angst derive[d] from the lived experience of ontological wounds and emotional scars inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and images permeating U.S. society and culture.” He explains that “the accumulated effect of the black wounds and scars suffered in a white-dominated society is a deep-seated anger, a boiling sense of rage, and a passionate pessimism regarding America's will to justice.” “It goes without saying,” he adds, “that a profound hatred of African people ... sits at the center of American civilization.”

In West's view, the 9/11 attacks gave white Americans a glimpse of what it means to be a black person in the United States—feeling “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence and hated for who they are.” “Since 9/11,” he said, “the whole nation has the blues, when before it was just black people.”

“They Cling to Guns or Religion”: Obama Refers to American Bigotry and Intolerance

During an April 2008 campaign stop in San Francisco, Obama said: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama Says Inadequate Funding for Education Causes High Minority-Dropout Rates

In the 2008 campaign, Obama said: “Latinos have such a high dropout rate. What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters.”

Obama Favors Racial Preferences

Obama supports racial preferences for nonwhite minorities in university admissions, public employment, and state contracting. “I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination,” said Obama in April 2008.

Obama Laments America's Mistreatment of Native Americans

Speaking at a July 2008 gathering of hundreds of minority journalists in Chicago, Obama said the United States should acknowledge its history of treating certain ethnic groups poorly: “There's no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we've got some very sad and difficult things to account for…. I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged…. I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.”

Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court

In May 2009, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sotomayor formerly had been a board of directors member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a member of the National Council of La Raza, two organizations that strongly emphasize identity politics. In the past, Sotomayor had spoken publicly about the role that affirmative action had played in her own educational background, and about her unwavering support of affirmative action policies. Refuting the notion that judges should not permit personal traits to influence their legal decisions, Sotomayor had famously said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

The Henry Louis Gates Affair and America's “Long History” of Racial Injustice

On the afternoon of July 16, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates (an African American) became involved in a high-profile controversy with racial overtones when a neighbor, mistaking him for someone trying to break into a Cambridge, Massachusetts home, called the police. (Unknown to the caller was the fact that the house in question, whose front door was jammed—thus making it impossible for Gates to open it with his key—was Gates’ own residence.) When a white police sergeant named James Crowley arrived at the scene to investigate, Gates became verbally abusive and accused Crowley of being a racist who was targeting him only “[b]ecause I'm a black man in America.” Ultimately Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, though the charges were later dropped. Obama, without knowing all the facts of the case, said: "My understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house. And at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct.... I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us [in that position] would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."