The Patriot Post® · Obama: Back to the Racist Future

America is enduring an ever-increasing spiral of heinous black-on-white violence. Less than a week after 22-year-old Australian baseball player Christopher Lane was allegedly executed by three “bored” wannabe gang-bangers, 88-year-old World War II veteran Delbert “Shorty” Belton was allegedly beaten to death by two 16-year-old black American teens, Demetrius Glenn and Kenan D. Adams-Kinard, both of whom have histories of violent crime. In Poughkeepsie, NY, 20-year-old Javon Tyrek Rogers has been charged with first degree murder and first degree burglary in the killing of 99-year-old Fannie Gumbinger. On August 13, two black male youths and their female accomplice were charged with robbing and killing 27-year-old David Santucci in Memphis, TN. Despite these and other incidents, President Obama, Democrats, and the usual gaggle of racial arsonists remain conspicuously silent. That is no accident. All of them have a vested interest in turning back the clock on race relations and they have all played a role in where we are today.

Despite their selective caution in bringing race politics into cases such as those mentioned above, President Obama and his race agitator allies have no problem whatsoever with rushing to judgment and rashly injecting themselves into highly sensitive and controversial situations. Recall when Cambridge police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama said it was self-evident that the department “acted stupidly” for arresting someone at their own house, ceding to the narrative that the police likely only arrested Gates because he was black and therefore  suspicious. In fact, the police only arrested Gates because he embarked on an enraged tirade and became belligerent and disorderly.

In the Trayvon Martin case, Obama contended a son of his would look like Martin, or that he himself could have been Martin “35 years ago." In his second speech regarding Martin, Obama did comment on the reality of runaway violence committed overwhelmingly by black American males, but then excused the behavior because "some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.”

Meanwhile, the president’s solutions for stemming the violence implied that “the system” was to blame and that it needed to be fixed. Obama urged his followers to "work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists" and “to examine some state and local laws to see if it – if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.”

Perhaps the president could explain how “mistrust in the system” caused two black 16-year-olds to douse a 13-year-old white boy with gasoline and set him on fire in Kansas City in March of 2012. Or why a group of black neighbors brutally assaulted Matthew Owen with with bats, brass knuckles, a chair, a paint can and other objects “for Trayvon” in Mobile, AL in April of 2012. Or why six “bored” black youths beat a 46-year-old white Ohio man so savagely last August that they may face additional charges in the man’s death this past July. Or why 18-year-old De'Marquise Elkins allegedly murdered 13-month-old Antonio Santiago. Or why three 15-year-old black teens brutally beat up a 13-year-old white teen on a Florida school bus earlier this month.

None of those incidents, or the disturbing phenomenon of black flash mob attacks on whites that regularly occur in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, or Washington, D.C. had anything to do with the “system,” nor did they merit a single word of condemnation from the president, or any other the demagogues who usually seek to turn any incident of white on black crime into a national conversation – a one-sided conversation that is invariably an indictment of an irredeemably racist America itself.

These race agitators, however, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to put the blame exactly where it belongs, namely, on the legions of violent thugs who commit murder and mayhem without the slightest hint of remorse. As for the poverty and dysfunction that allegedly underpins this mayhem, it’s about time the Democratic Party owned up to the reality that no one has facilitated that history more than Democrats themselves, courtesy of Great Society programs that incentivized the destruction of the nuclear family, and an out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black American community that has now reached 73 percent.

Furthermore, Democrats can’t plead ignorance about those consequences. They were warned by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" in 1965. "There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,“ Moynihan said, "a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future–that community asks for and gets chaos.” Naturally, Moynihan was excoriated and his report was dismissed as “racist propaganda.”

Nearly 50 years later, nothing in that regard has changed. Even as the chaos and social disintegration occurring on a routine basis in many black American communities continues, anyone who challenges the Democratic contention that black Americans are largely victims of forces beyond their control – all of which require big-government solutions implemented by Democrats – is branded a racist. But few things are more racist, hypocritical and immoral than the political party that founded the KKK espousing a mode of governance that has robbed millions of black American youths of their dignity, integrity and, ultimately, their decency, while they themselves look the other way and lead lynch mobs against racial scapegoats.

Yet for the self-anointed “civil rights” leaders such a status quo is something to be encouraged, not disbanded. Perpetual dependency is good for the party that promotes dependency, and perpetual race conflict is good for the party that purports to be devoted to “addressing” race conflicts. Nurturing the racial divide is a core component of the Democratic Party’s political strategy. As long as the perception of white mistreatments of blacks is alive, the left’s race-hatred industry will always be relevant. The more distorted and exaggerated the fear, the more power flows to those who would exploit it. The more it is exploited, the more we are divided.

The Obama administration has been at the forefront of this exploitation. Eric Holder, who spoke out against voter ID laws and the Supreme Court decision overturning Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act at the Washington rally, continues to perpetrate the racial polarization that has become the hallmark of his tenure as head of the Justice Department. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has compared opponents of ObamaCare to those who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Former Assistant Attorney General and current Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has promoted hate crimes prosecution insisting, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that such crimes remain a mostly white-on-black problem.

And then there is Ayo Kimathi. The acquisitions officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement – in charge of buying weapons and ammunition for the government – was put on paid leave by the DHS, for running a website on which he warned Americans about the coming race war. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the website declares, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.” One of his former supervisors was “astounded he’s employed by the federal government, let alone Homeland Security.”

Sadly, it isn’t astounding, any more than the deafening silence of a president who is in the unprecedented position of being the one leader who could speak to black America with the kind of credibility no one else can match. But as long as Obama, Democrats, the racial agitators and their media enablers can exploit the carnage, turning back the clock on race relations is a winning scenario. For the rest of the nation, it is an unmitigated tragedy.

Arnold Ahlert is a columnist for FrontPage Magazine.