Trying to explain why racial relations haven’t improved under our ever-so-healing biracial president, New York magazine blames a photo of Obama in Marine One with four black assistants, taken in 2009. “One cannot have that photo without a massive reaction to that photo … it is not possible to have a black president surrounded by black aides on Marine One without paying a price.”
The “price” was first paid when Harvard’s Henry Gates was arrested for “trying to unstick the stubborn front door” of his own home in Cambridge, leading in time to the famous Beer Summit, in which the president sat “at a little table with an arguably racist white beat cop from Boston,” after which his resolve seemed to crumble.
“The courageous president we had voted for disappeared.” In fact, the courageous president had been told by police of all races that when they respond to reports of a possible break-in they MUST check the IDs of those they find present. Gates was taken into custody when he refused to produce his ID, not for trying to enter his residence.
And the cop was not racist, but was used to train others in sensitivity training, and been praised by the family of a black athlete for trying to save him when he collapsed and then died on the field. Other than that, the story was accurate, and, as Pat Moynihan tells us, you can have your opinions, but not your own facts.
Fear apparently then kept Obama from fighting against voter ID laws, (supported by 67 percent of black Americans) and embracing Black Lives Matter, the protest begun after several unarmed black males were confronted and killed by police. But in the signature case in Ferguson, Mo., the unarmed male weighed almost 300 pounds and had robbed a convenience store, charged the policeman who tried to confront him and reached for his gun. The riots that followed destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of people, mostly non-white.
The excuse given here was that a largely black town was ruled by white politicians and white police forces. But when the same thing happened in Baltimore, which had a black mayor, black police commissioner and largely minority police department, the magazine and the Left both ran out of excuses. This can’t be blamed on a photo few people had noticed. The left wing has run out of steam.
One place that hasn’t is South Carolina, home of Fort Sumter and site of two harrowing murders — one of a man fleeing a traffic stop and one of nine people, most of them women, shot dead while praying in church. The state broke out in a riot … of biracial mourning.
After that, the confederate flag was removed from the grounds of the capitol after a debate in which a descendant of Jefferson Davis, openly weeping, said she was voting to take down the banner because she saw it was hurting her friends. The move was endorsed by a son of Strom Thurmond, who in 2010 lost a primary race to Tim Scott, who is now the first black senator from the Old South since Reconstruction. Scott was appointed, and the flag was removed, by Nikki Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants and the state’s first female governor.
The lessons from this? That liberals, both black and white, don’t have a clue as to what they are doing in these sort of matters, which should be outsourced to conservatives who are non-Caucasian, helped by the descendants of anti-Civil Rights icons, all from the state where the Civil War started — and where it may finally end.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
