Michael Wolfe

Obama and his campaign have talked about “post-racial” America. He ran a campaign on based on “unity” despite dividing his followers along racial lines on his campaign website. Consider the following brief exerts from Obama’s book, “Dreams from my father.” Whether Joyce is real, or a “composite” created by Obama (which is possible based on the preface, his feelings on racial identity are clear. Given his bi-racial heritage, he chose to adopt an African cultural identity. Certainly, no one can deny him that. And yet, when someone else decides to define themselves how they want, Obama lashes out viciously eviscerating them for not taking a “side” that he feels they should take (all of the exerts are from page 98-100 in the 2004 softback edition).

In his own words:

our worries seemed indistinguishable from those of the white kids around us. Surviving classes. Finding a well-paying gig after graduation. Trying to get laid. I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren’t interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you. So why couldn’t I let it go? I don’t know. I didn’t have the luxury, I suppose, the certainty of the tribe. Grow up in Compton and survival becomes a revolutionary act. You get to college and your family is still back there rooting for you. They’re happy to see you escape; there’s no question of betrayal. But I hadn’t grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren’t defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals.

It is clear by this that Obama has a disdain for those who reject a collective racialist identity for an individual one. It gets even better in the next section:

That’s how Joyce liked to talk. She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was, with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her. One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students’ Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn’t want what it sees on the spoon.

First, he builds up her physical attractiveness, especially to the black men. Then he goes for the kill. She doesn’t want to get involved with the BSA, so he converts her from a woman to a baby, ignorant and unwilling to get involved with something he believes is good. Throughout his book, Obama reveals how he self determined his own ethnic identity, molding himself into his own perception of an African man, not only rejecting the Anglo blood within himself, but connecting it with the rape of Malcom X’s mother. However, when Joyce attempts to chart her own ethnic identity, Barack slams her hard:

“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry. “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No-it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am….”

Its clear from this that Joyce has a diverse heritage. Why should she be forced to exclude any part of it (including the “something else” which Barack so smoothly derides. Barack makes it seem like the “they” she is talking about is African-Americans or blacks as a collective whole. But this is deceptive. The “they” she is referring to here is very likely the racialized radicals like Obama and his mentor Frank Marshal Davis and later on Reverend Wright. The radicals must have constantly harassed Joyce about being a sell-out or “uncle Tom” pressuring her to despise the totality of her heritage and cast her lot with the racialized marxists (as we shall see later in the paragraph after the discussion on Joyce). Obama continues to rip Joyce:

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-although that’s what we tell ourselves-but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary n***er.

Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!

So, based on the fact that Joyce refused to join herself to one organization, Obama concludes she avoided black people. He goes on to deride integration, painting “nonracial” culture as merely a white thing. This paragraph also makes the ignorant assumption that all cabs are driven by white racists, all women are fearful of black men, and all “coloreds” are less fortunate. Of course his derision of individuals and individualism has become a trademark of his campaign and presidency, most recently highlighted by his attempt to transform a confrontation between a cop and a belligerent uncooperative man into a national race war. Obama deals in collectivist mentalities not personal freedoms, liberties, or individuals. This is explained by the paragraph immediately succeeding the above, where he arrogantly claims to “understand” people like Joyce:

The truth was that I understood her, her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did. In their mannerisms, their speech, their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that’s exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my own racial credentials all over again, Ray’s trump card still lurking in the back of my mind. I needed to put distance between them and myself, to convince myself that I wasn’t compromised-that I was indeed still awake. To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

He only understood her in relation to his socialistic mindset. He basically says that Marxism is part of an uncompromised “black” identity! Then, he slams people who identify as “individuals” instead of collectives as being “confused.” His radicalization is also demonstrated in his choice of friends. “Birds of a feather flock together.”According He chose Marxists and radicals as his friends, and he did it carefully. Here he succeeds in tying his ethnic identity (Black) to radical ideologies (Marxism and leftist activists). Therefore, by his definition, Joyce, or any other multi-racial or African who rejects his mixture of leftist radicalism to embrace individualism or a western mindset would be a “confused” individual “selling out” their ethnic identity.

Someone with a truly post-racial mentality would not attempt to use race as a bludgeon or wedge to force someone off of the beliefs they hold dear. Barack Obama is stuck in a racist marxist mindset that has no place in an America that has been making continued strides towards a standard of true equality as far as laws and government can create such a standard. He himself is proof that progress only goes as far as individuals are willing to take it. For it takes only one person to revive the specter of government sanctioned racism, one judge that puts race above justice. Yes, an individual can almost single handedly turn the ride of progress back, and then use the resulting discord to further his degenerate ends. Sonya Sotomayor, Van Jones, Maria del Carmen, and other racists and Marxists are being selected for positions high in Obama‘s administration. Over two hundred years of progress in relations between Americans of diverse colors are being systematically dismantled by the man who was heralded as the culmination of racial unity and equality.