The Leader of the Free World seems to forget at times that he’s no longer a community organiser or a civil rights lawyer in a bad part of Chicago.
He’s in his second term as president of the United States. In this capacity he’s sworn to uphold the interests of the whole nation, most of which is still white.
His comments on the Trayvon Martin case point at a conflict between his brain and his heart. The upper organ put him on the right track by making him say that “the jury has spoken” and leaving it at that.
However, the lower organ was restless. You see, Obama is black. Actually, saying that is being unfair to his white mother, who is implicitly discounted as an annoying irrelevance. It’s as if Obama père had produced little Barack Hussein by parthenogenesis.
Yet both the black community in America and the left half of the white one still appear to be living by Jim Crow laws. In the old days white racists in places like Alabama would hiss “a drop of tar, all nigger”. Though ‘liberal’ Americans eschew the ‘n’ word nowadays, they seem to live by the principles that inspired its formerly wide use.
That makes Barack Hussein unreservedly black, in most people’s minds probably, in his own definitely. Without in any way suggesting that his heart is black morally, it evidently is racially.
Thus last week Obama had to make two statements in addition to the commendable one that had come from his brain. In one he opined that if he had a son, the boy would look like Trayvon Martin. What, dead? Presumably, Barack Hussein didn’t mean that.
Then Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House press room to inform the furiously scribbling pundits that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
When that eye-opening statement was communicated to the country, many sighed wistfully. Considering Obama’s record in office, the thought that he could have been shot in self-defence at age 16 wasn’t without appeal.
Obama’s head knew better than to question the jury verdict based on a long trial in which dozens of witnesses were heard, 250 pages of evidence were presented, and the defence made its case.
He probably also realises that to call for the case to be retried in the federal human-rights court would only lead to more violent riots all across the country. This is something professional blacks like Al Sharpton wish to see, but for a president to share such cravings would be going a bit too far.
But the president’s heart overrode his head, making him meet Sharpton halfway. “There are very few African-American men,” said the president, “who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happened to me – at least before I was a senator.” Connotation running riot; denotation fleeing in disarray.
Has he ever wondered why those locks click? Is it because of white America’s congenital Negrophobia? Is it because white Americans are ignorant of the facts of life? Or is it precisely because they do know them?
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly does. According to him, blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, with 98 percent of all gun assaults and muggings.
Fernando Mateo, himself both a black and a Hispanic, heads the New York taxicab union. According to him, “The God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing cab drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”
What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower. Except that 433,934 such crimes were committed by blacks on whites – four times the number of those going the other way. Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.
That’s why, Mr President, those locks click on car doors when a black man walks down the street. Americans aren’t racist, at least not en masse. They’re just prudent. They know what to expect from a group in which 73 percent of all children are born on the wrong side of the blanket.
Obviously, the Leader of the Free World knows such facts – in his head. But his heart doesn’t want to know.
Mr Obama really ought to confine his thinking to his brain, rather than other parts of his anatomy. That way he’d make fewer people in America and elsewhere wish he had indeed suffered Trayvon Martin’s fate 35 years ago.