A Racist in the White House?

I started this blog partly to rant against the growing power of political correctness in this country. So I might as well say what I bet a lot of people are thinking about the Cambridge situation but are hindered by political correctness: Professor Gates, you were not arrested because you are black – you were arrested because you are at the very least a complete idiot and at worst a total asshole, but again it had nothing to do with your ethnicity, but rather was a result of your own actions.

When a police officer tells you to do something, you do it. You don’t continue screaming profanity and invectives when asked to calm down. Just as you don’t run when told to freeze or fight when told to lie down. Most law abiding people will follow an officer’s directions and if someone doesn’t then the cops have every right to think that the person is hiding something, like maybe he really is a criminal.

For some reason African Americans frequently refuse to follow a police officers’ instructions, even if they are innocent, as in the case of Professor Gates. Their reasoning is that the policemen are accusing them based on profiling, that because they are black the cops assume they are guilty. Personally, I think profiling is a wonderful tool but that is a subject for another day. Instead, to continue, what I don’t get is how does resisting the police help prove their case that the officers were racist? Wouldn’t a better course of action be to act as model citizens, following all of their requests and thereby showing the world that the police are acting unfairly? And don’t give me the argument that they fear the police will kill them if they let the cops capture them or that if they lie down they could be kicked and beaten, because it seems to me that there is a lot better chance of being tasered or killed if they resist arrest.

I also believe that most whites don’t understand why Gates was so upset that the police asked for his ID after the situation was explained to him. If Gates thought the police simply saw a black man entering a house in an upscale neighborhood then yes, I would understand if he was frustrated. But the police explained that they were investigating a burglary report. As Gates was the one found entering the house they approached him. What was racist about that? And at this point, instead of yelling “Racist” shouldn’t Gates have been grateful to the police for protecting his home?

Adding to this mess was Obama’s reaction. You want to know something interesting? Now I might be the only one but I honestly forgot that President Obama was black. He has been on TV so frequently over the past few weeks and I’ve become so use to seeing him that his color simply no longer registers with me. And that’s the way we’ve been told that it should be – we should all be color blind, except we’ve just learned that the President sure isn’t. By now the whole world knows how he labeled the Cambridge police as “acting stupidly” and accused them of being racist. I think he deserves the “acting stupidly” label more than the Cambridge police.

First, Obama acted stupidly by stepping on his own message about the (hopefully doomed) health care plan during his press conference. The Cambridge story totally eclipsed whatever the President said about health care during the first 90% of his press conference. Then in one ill conceived comment Obama shocked a lot of people by admitting he didn’t have all the facts and yet he still sided with another black man against this country’s law enforcement officers by assuming they were racially motivated. Wow. The 2008 election was supposed to usher in the post racist years where African Americans can be whatever they want to be, even President. But Obama blew that all away taking the country back a few steps from the gains he had made last year. More importantly, however, I personally think that for one of the first times, this country saw the real President Obama; an angry black man who holds police officers in contempt and believes that most cops (most whites?) are racists. Scary thought, isn’t it?

President Obama, however, is a smart politician and knew he had to make amends yesterday. Yet even then he refused to be up-front. Oh it is easy for him to apologize to the world for what he perceives were America’s “misdeeds” but he can’t seem to apologize to his own country for his own misdeeds. He spoke a couple of times yesterday supposedly apologizing for his remarks but Obama said neither “I was wrong” nor “I was sorry”. In fact I am not exactly sure what he said except for one phrase that stood out to me: “in my choice of words I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically and I could have calibrated those words differently." Calibrated his words? Excuse me?

Have you ever known anyone who calibrated their words or even used the word calibrated in that way? His phrase “calibrated those words differently” indicates that Obama does indeed calibrate his words. And once more I’m going to go back to his teleprompter. For it is again clear that when writing his speeches, Obama calibrates each word and phrase so as to give a specific impression and sway the listeners to his side. Putting it all together, I am getting this picture of a slick carefully spoken politician expounding on his message of helping people but underneath is an angry black man who distrusts whites and wants to use his powers to help his fellow blacks even if it is at the detriment to whites in this country. Am I wrong? Perhaps. But I do believe one thing, that Obama’s mask slipped this week and we caught a glimpse of the real racist in the whole situation.