“This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again, who has a deep seated hatred for . . . white people? Or the white culture?” [Glenn] Beck asked. “I don’t know what it is, but you can’t sit in a pew with [former Obama pastor] Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, have it wash over.” . . .
“I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “I’m saying he has a problem. This guy, I believe, is a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by.”
Predictably, Beck’s off hand remarks created a storm of controversy in the leftwing blogosphere, the same group that had been apologists for the Rev. Wright’s statements of hate against whites and Jews.
Color of Change, which claims to be the largest African-American political organization online with 600,000 members, has seized on Beck’s comment to mount a campaign to discourage companies from advertising on the program.
Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker spoke with Newsmax, and made clear his organization’s goal is for Beck’s voice to be silenced.
“It’s preposterous and absurd,” Rucker says of Beck’s opinion. “It’s insulting to black Americans; and it corrupts honest debate. Anyone who uses such a platform to spew such vitriol, whether Glenn Beck or anyone else, has no place on the air, and we at Color Of Change would use every resource available to us to remove corporate sponsorship from their platform.”
Newsmax, in reporting on this, is most interested in the possibility that the Obama administration is behind this attack, since a former head of Color of Change (one of its co-founders) is a member of the administration; certainly, that possibility is completely consonant with Barack Obama’s typical approach to dissent, and that of his followers. It’s worrisome, no question, especially because it fits a building pattern of behavior.
For my part, though, I’m more interested in the truly invidious double standard here. For Glenn Beck to call the president a racist is a horrible, terrible, intolerable thing; indeed, his attackers seem to be saying, to suggest that any black person is a racist is insulting to black people. For his attackers to suggest that he’s a racist, and to do so at length and in quite loaded terms, however, is perfectly acceptable. There’s no need to consider whether Beck has any justification for his assertion—whether Barack Obama’s 20 years of comfortable acceptance of high-voltage racist preaching might be meaningful, for example, or whether the president’s knee-jerk assumption that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. must have been racist is in fact significant in understanding his mindset; they feel they can simply dismiss and denounce it as “insulting” “vitriol” without ever even having to disprove it.
Why? Because Glenn Beck is white and Barack Obama is black? I don’t see any other justification here (unless it’s the fact that Barack Obama is the President and Glenn Beck isn’t); and if that’s it, then aren’t they basing their conclusion solely on the respective colors of these men’s skins?
And isn’t that a textbook example of racism?
Welcome to the South. This attitude has been around for years down here.
Interesting blog post.
I can't speak for the true South, since I've never lived there; I have lived in southern Texas, but the issue there was white/black (mostly white) vs. Hispanic.
This is, I think, an example ("tolerance" would be another) of the Left using terminology to pre-emptively define agreement with its positions as right and disagreement as wrong.
Exactly. A very common example that comes to mind on the school playground (I'm a therapist in our school system) is the use of racial slurs – ok for one group, but not for the other. Not fun to see in anyone, but really hard to watch these attitudes cultivated in children, on both sides of it.
Yeah, that is hard. How do you work against it?
I don't know that I work against it – it's too big for me. But I can work toward something to put in it's place – fairness, acceptance, and love. I think those are bigger weapons than lectures.
Well, a necessary part of working against evil is cultivating good in its place. Obviously, you can't change the whole culture–but teaching one child at a time a better way matters.