By Rich
Lowry
Wednesday,
June 21, 2023
Barack
Obama doesn’t want America validated, at least not by the wrong people.
In taking a shot
at Republicans Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, Obama told his former campaign strategist,
David Axelrod, in a podcast interview, “I think there’s a long history of
African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who
will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it.’”
And who
would want that dangerous message spreading across the land, poisoning young
minds and misinforming the credulous?
Citing
America’s racial history, Obama said: “If somebody is not proposing, both
acknowledging and proposing elements that say, ‘No, we can’t just ignore all
that and pretend as if everything’s equal and fair. We actually have to walk
the walk and not just talk the talk.’ If they’re not doing that, then I think
people are rightly skeptical.”
Obama’s
statement was a classic expression of the disdain that progressives feel for
minority conservatives. The Left considers them traitors to their racial
groups, who use their personal credibility to counter the conventional
narrative on racism in a way that is profoundly threatening.
Scott
replied to Obama with one of his characteristic lines, “The truth of my life
disproves the lies of the radical left.”
There
are several things to say about this exchange. First, it’s rich for Obama, the
son of a white mother and a Kenyan economist, who attended a prestigious Hawaii
prep school, to lecture the descendant of slaves about the realities of race in
America.
Two,
when the mood of the Left was more optimistic and less obsessed with so-called
white supremacy, Barack Obama used to sound a lot like Tim Scott. He emphasized
uplift and how his success showed what’s possible in America. Axelrod remarked
on the similarity in his interview. It feels like an artifact from a different
time that people actually chanted, “Race doesn’t matter” at Obama’s victory
party when he won the 2008 South Carolina primary. Now, no one inclined to
attend a party for a major national Democrat would dare think such a thing, let
alone say it.
Three,
it’s wrong to imply that Tim Scott doesn’t have a plan for the betterment of
America and minorities; it’s just not the kind of plan that Obama supports as a
man of the Left who believes that the state is the essential agent of change.
Finally,
Tim Scott’s more hopeful view of America is the correct one. Despite its past
and its flaws, the country is open, fair-minded, and in no way the nightmarish
regime of white privilege portrayed in left-wing caricature. Otherwise, one
wonders, why would so many people who will be minorities in America be so eager
to leave their own countries to come here?
As
Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky State University noted in Commentary magazine,
Indian Americans have roughly double the median household income of white
Americans. Ghanaians and the Guyanese earn more than whites, while Nigerians
are the best-educated group in the country and earn about the same as whites.
The same is true of West Indians.
“West
Indian English-speakers and second-generation Ghanaian Americans,” Reilly
writes, “look and sound almost exactly like black Americans: Bigots are
unlikely to put their prejudices aside when they meet one.” Yet, by and large,
they thrive here.
“The
relevant question for scholars and public intellectuals today,” he continues,
“is not whether racism remains real (yes), but how large its effect actually is
in a 39 percent minority society where 92 percent of white people appear not to
be serious bigots. The honest answer appears to be: ‘not huge.’”
Back in
his famous DNC speech in 2004, addressing a pre-“woke” Democratic Party, Obama
said, “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story,
that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other
country on earth, is my story even possible.”
He was
right the first time.
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