My article from the Aug. 27, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:
Top 10 Racist African-Americans
By Matthew Vadum
Sadly, racism is very much alive in America — among influential black Americans.
It was very much on display Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial where prominent black activists gathered a few days ahead of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I have a dream” speech in order to advance their careers by pretending to care about the state of race relations in the nation today.
Instead of simply using the opportunity to honor the work of his father in a dignified way, King’s son, Martin Luther King III, cheapened it by attempting to stir up racial hatred. He said the Trayvon Martin killing last year, ruled by a jury to be a justifiable homicide in which race played no role, shows that America is a deeply racist country.
“The task is not done, the journey is not complete,” he said. “The vision preached by my father a half-century ago was that his four little children would no longer live in a nation where they would judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“However, sadly, the tears of Trayvon Martin’s mother and father remind us that, far too frequently, the color of one’s skin remains a license to profile, to arrest and to even murder with no regard for the content of one’s character,” King said, throwing in a pitch to repeal “stand your ground” self-defense laws, which had no bearing on the Martin case.
King is not alone among black leaders in trying to leverage the Martin killing for political purposes and self-advancement. Pseudo-intellectuals like Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson said after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin that it would be a good thing for more white children to be murdered so Americans could better understand racism.
These people have become rich and famous by vilifying white people and the American system, claiming blacks are persecuted and discriminated against, and asserting that there is an invisible conspiracy of white supremacists preventing black people from becoming successful. Not everything they do or say is actually racist in any meaningful sense, but they routinely say things that conservatives would be pilloried for had they said them about people of a different race.
The weekend celebration would have been worthwhile as a historical commemoration, but activists like King and Al Sharpton decided to ruin the event by turning it into a call to action. The leaders on the weekend were largely race industry profiteers and poverty pimps, not sincere celebrants marking a solemn occasion. They rallied against evils that no longer exist.
And they ignored the evils that do exist.
As Colin Flaherty, author of White Girl Bleed A Lot, has documented, black-on-white violence has become increasingly commonplace in recent years, despite the best efforts of the media, politicians, and left-wing activists to ignore it or deny its existence. America’s major urban centers, cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, have been plagued by black race riots in recent years. Few people know about these often deadly melees because they rarely get reported.
Just a few days ago, 88-year-old World War II veteran Delbert Belton was allegedly beaten to death by blacks in Spokane. Before that 23-year-old Australian college student Chris Lane was shot to death in Oklahoma allegedly by young black males out of boredom. Before that, blacks allegedly killed nurse David Santucci in Memphis.
Before that, blacks in Minnesota allegedly beat Ray Widstrand so brutally that he suffered permanent brain damage, and in Missouri a black mob allegedly hit a hot dog vendor in the head with a hammer. This weekend a black mob allegedly assaulted a police officer with a baseball bat, leaving him with a fractured skull. A few months ago two young black men in Georgia allegedly killed 13-month-old Antonio West in front of his mother during an attempted robbery.
No doubt some politicians and journalists deny the existence of all this racially motivated violence in a misguided effort to protect blacks who in the past suffered from racial discrimination and the ravages of slavery. They see reports of black violence as reinforcing negative stereotypes and setting back race relations.
But members of today’s civil rights establishment don’t have that excuse available to them. They aren’t interested in solving or even acknowledging the problems of the black community because they profit so handsomely from them. They see turmoil in black neighborhoods as opportunities to promote change.
Speakers at the weekend rally seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that America has come a long way since 1963 when Democratic President John F. Kennedy and congressional Democrats worked together to block civil rights legislation. Yet people like Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), who got so worked up during his speech Saturday it seemed he might hurt himself, continue to act as if the whole country is even now run by racist Democrats George Wallace and Bull Connor.
It is as if the civil rights revolution never happened and Jim Crow is still making the lives of black Americans miserable. The unspoken premise of all these self-serving rants is that America somehow owes blacks for past injustices even though most Americans today weren’t even alive in 1963.
Martin Luther King III isn’t even the worst offender among the race hustlers, most of whom skipped the event at the Lincoln Memorial.
Here is Frontpage’s Top 10 List:
1) Al Sharpton.
Provocateur and make-believe civil rights leader.
A TV show host at MSNBC despite his inability to speak proper English or at times, to formulate coherent thoughts, Sharpton has largely managed to escape his past. Founder of the National Action Network, he helped to incite anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights, New York in 1991. He uses the word “cracker” to refer to various white people, has ties to the criminal underworld, and participated in the infamous racially charged Tawana Brawley hoax and incited black anti-Semites against a Jewish business establishment in Harlem in 1995. He appeared on the late Morton Downey’s television program and publicly used an anti-gay slur, calling an audience member “a punk faggot!” He even tried to win the Democratic Party presidential nod in 2004.
His widespread acceptance as a legitimate spokesman for the black community by the rest of the media and the Obama administration has allowed Sharpton to supplant Jesse Jackson Sr. as America’s foremost retail race hustler. He was publicly embraced by Obama cabinet members, including Attorney General Eric Holder and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, at his group’s convention in Washington, D.C. last year.
Some liberal journalists are tiring of him, though. Last week Margaret Carlson lamented the declining quality of leadership in today’s so-called civil rights movement. “We’ve gone from Martin Luther King to the Reverend Al Sharpton, and as a leader, as he is trying to be this weekend, it’s very dispiriting.”
2) Barack Obama.
U.S. president who rarely fails to inject race into a political fight, no matter how inappropriate.
Barack Obama has long regarded America as a deeply flawed, profoundly racist country. He has attacked the Constitution as an outmoded, obsolete document written by white men. He has called opponents of affirmative action racists. In 1995, Obama made reference to a hypothetical “white executive living out in the suburbs, who doesn’t want to pay taxes to inner city children for them to go to school.”
He even famously threw his own white grandmother under the bus, suggesting she harbored racial animosity. “She is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know there’s a reaction that’s been been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way and that’s just the nature of race in our society.” [emphasis added]
While at Harvard Law School Obama defended racist law professor Derrick Bell, the creator of critical race theory. Bell was notoriously anti-white and believed America has a hopelessly racist country. Obama described Bell as someone who spoke “the truth.” Obama later taught courses about America’s “Institutional Racism” at the University of Chicago Law School.
When a friend of his, a black Harvard professor, was arrested in Cambridge, Mass., without examining the facts Obama said the police “acted stupidly.” After Trayvon Martin was killed last year, Obama injected race into the matter by saying if he had a soon he’d look like Martin.
The above list is not exhaustive.
3) Michelle Obama.
First Lady who only stopped being ashamed of her country when it began to support her husband.
First Lady Michelle Obama has had greater difficulty concealing her hatred of America than her husband has had. She regards America as a racist, sexist, homophobic nation, declaring in 2008, after the American public began warming to her husband’s presidential campaign, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country…”
A beneficiary of affirmative action, Mrs. Obama was a member of the board of a radical, racist group called Third World Center while studying at Princeton. She was also admitted to Harvard Law School, given preference because of her skin color. In law school she embraced critical race theory, an intellectual movement whose adherent federal Judge Richard Posner has described as the “lunatic core” of “radical legal egalitarianism.”
4) Eric Holder.
U.S. attorney general, who hates conservatives and doesn’t believe in enforcing civil rights laws when white people are victims.
As attorney general, Eric Holder refused to prosecute the New Black Panther Party members who openly brandished weapons at a Philadelphia polling station in 2008 in order to intimidate white voters. He also refuses to enforce electoral integrity laws and fights voter ID laws because he alleges they discriminate against minorities. He supports affirmative action programs, which by definition, of course, are racist because they discriminate against white Americans.
Holder has called America “essentially a nation of cowards,” because most Americans don’t share his radical left-wing multiculturalists views on race. “[W]e, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable…. [T]his nation has still not come to grips with its racial past …”
Holder calls conservatives “defenders of the status quo, afraid of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all but the most blatant inequalities.” They “put the environment at risk for the sake of unproven economic theories, to play to the fears of our citizens, and not to their hopes, and to return the nation to a time that in fact never existed.” The hallmarks of the “conservative agenda” include “social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense posture that does not really make us safer.”
5) Oprah Winfrey.
Billionaire media entrepreneur, beloved by her largely white following, but who can’t stop resenting white people.
A longtime Obama idolator, Oprah Winfrey was instrumental in the president’s rise. She invited Obama on her TV show to promote one of his books and promoted him relentlessly.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Winfrey insists on blaming the killing of Trayvon Martin on racial animosity. “To me, it’s ridiculous to look at that case and not to think that race was involved,” she said.
She also likened the killing of Martin to the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old black Emmett Till. “In my mind, same thing,” she said. Till was kidnapped by two white men in Mississippi who beat him, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head, and dumped his body into a river. His death helped to galvanize the early civil rights movement.
6) James Cone.
Founder of black liberation theology.
James Cone is the father of it all. We can only wonder how many people have been killed by followers of black liberation theology, which Cone invented. Cone was a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He regards America as an irredeemably racist nation.
“What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of Black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love,” Cone wrote.
A more sophisticated version of Louis Farrakhan, Cone blames whites for, well, everything bad. “This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective. What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”
Jeremiah Wright and other radical church leaders believe in black liberation theology, an Afrocentrist mix of Christianity, Marxism, and anti-white racial bigotry. Cone claims that “black values” –whatever those may be– are superior to American values.
7) Martin Luther King III.
One of the leaders of a civil rights movement that long ago outlived its usefulness.
As already described above, at the Saturday rally King described the killing of Trayvon Martin as racially motivated, even though that claim was ultimately rejected by police and the jury. Apparently following the advice of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, who taught that action itself is more important than having real issues to campaign on, King urged action. “This is not the time for nostalgic commemoration,” King added. “Nor is this the time for self-congratulation. The task is not done. The journey is not complete. We can and we must do more.”
Of course, King has been dining out on his father’s hard work for decades. He has frequently been criticized by his own allies for laziness. In 2001 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference suspended King as president out of concern he was neglecting his duties at the group founded by his father. He was a Fulton County, Ga., commissioner until his deadbeat ways became public knowledge, leading to his electoral defeat in 1993. He owed the federal government more than $200,000 in back taxes and fines.
8) Cornel West.
Best-selling author and superstar professor whose image manages to outshine his dreary intellectual mediocrity.
Cornel West, who describes himself as a “non-Marxist socialist,” was an adviser on President Obama’s 2008 campaign team. He wrote in his book Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, that the U.S. is under the control of racist, patriarchal, authoritarian fundamentalists. He supports black liberation theology, the same set of radical, anti-American beliefs preached by Obama’s longtime Jew-hating pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
9) Louis Farrakhan.
Leader of a hateful Islamic cult.
There are few groups in American society that Louis Farrakhan, who ought to be under constant FBI surveillance, does not hate. The legendary anti-Semite, who says the U.S. government has long been conspiring against blacks, developed a strong dislike for Malcolm X in the 1960s because he believed X was too moderate. Farrakhan refers to Caucasians as “white devils” and Jews as “bloodsuckers.”
In 1984 after a black Washington Post reporter named Milton Coleman publicly revealed that then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson Sr. had referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown,” Farrakhan told Coleman: “One day soon we will punish you with death.” He regarded Coleman as a race traitor.
The problem isn’t so much that leftists explicitly embrace Farrakhan. Few do, perhaps because they view him as an embarrassing cartoon. It’s not often that you’ll see mainstream broadcasters give him air time. The problem is that leftists refuse to denounce Farrakhan and his poisonous ideas.
10) Alice Walker.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and bleeding heart who adores cop killers and Fidel Castro.
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Walker endorsed him. “He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.”
Walker is a supporter of convicted, unrepentant cop killer Mumia abu Jamal and compares Israel to Nazi Germany. Describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, she uses words and phrases such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture.”
In 2002, Walker appeared in a documentary film about Fidel Castro. She was quoted saying “What’s not to like about the man? If Fidel could dance, he’d be perfect!”
Following the 9/11 attacks, Walker urged that “love” be used against the terrorist perpetrators. “In a war on Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems quite prepared. But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love.”
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These 10 public figures for the most part do not suffer any consequences for their racism or their cynical use of race for political purposes.
If Martin Luther King were alive today, would he defend these 10 people and everything they do?