Posted on October 8, 2008

The Audacity of Obama

Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall, October 7, 2008

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To see why it is impossible for Obama to play this transcending role, read his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” His Dreams are obsessed with race and race conflict.

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Obama describes how he deliberately separated himself from his multiracial heritage in order to give himself a 100 percent black persona, different and alienated from the white world around him. Obama writes that the book is “a record of a personal, interior journey” to establish himself as “a black American.”

With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a “smaller and smaller coil of rage.” He lives with a “nightmare vision” of black powerlessness.

Obama says that the hate doesn’t go away. “It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

Obama’s worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning “someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture.”

He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the “landlocked center” of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of “suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”

Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of “aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries.” Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that “we were always playing on the white man’s court . . . by the white man’s rules.”

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Obama immersed himself in the writings of radical blacks: Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Obama’s favorite became Malcolm X.

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Obama described his happiness in going to Kenya: “For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide.” He felt he “belonged” and had come home. Apparently, the only other place he felt at home was in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago.

Obama rejects racial integration because it is “a one-way street” with blacks being “assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.” Does he think America would be a better country if whites were assimilated into African culture?

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In his autobiography, Obama accepts the view that “black people have reason to hate.” His later book is called “The Audacity of Hope,” but his autobiography, which he has never disavowed, should be titled “The Audacity of Hate.”