Obama’s candidacy does not transcend race; it confronts it. Obama is a bridge builder, not a bridge burner. He seeks to heal this country’s racial divide, not to prey upon it. And in these last, desperate hours of her candidacy, like a wounded vulture at some road kill, Hillary Clinton continues to feed upon the rotted corpse of racism.
Two weeks ago, in a column for The Black Star News entitled “Racism and Hypocrisy,” I delineated a pattern of racism in the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton.
Apparently this column struck a nerve. That article was the most highly read and voted upon in Black Star history, shattering the previous record by more than 500 percent. It was picked up and posted on several other blog sites across the country. And one irate (and, I might add, illiterate) reader attacked me on Yahoo by calling me a “hack.”
Some argued that the pattern I referenced was simply a string of coincidences — Bill Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson in the aftermath of
But the idea that playing the race card was anything but a calculated and Machiavellian move by the Clintons was forever put to rest later that evening when Clinton campaign apologist Paul Begala, in a tense exchange with Donna Brazile on CNN, declared, “Obama can’t win with just the eggheads and African-Americans….”
And with that overtly racist and demeaning comment, Begala stripped bare the
While Begala had no trouble spewing out these clearly crafted lines, if you listen to the USA Today interview, an obviously dispirited Senator Clinton had trouble uttering hers. It was almost as if she were reading directly from a scri pt, stumbling over the word “white” both times she spoke it.
She knew what she was doing. And we now know that the lines were scri pted for her. They were essentially the same as Begala’s. The ruse of
At some point during this campaign, probably after
Somewhere along the line, some
That’s why there has been a clear and definitive pattern of racism in the
Bill Clinton’s comments after
And that’s when the momentum in the campaign began to shift.
And so it was.
In the wake of Obama’s huge victory this week in
Of course not. The mainstream American media likes to cover up this country’s racial divide. The
All over this country, people at the grassroots level have understood that the Obama candidacy marks a new day in American racial politics. Obama’s candidacy does not transcend race; it confronts it. Obama is a bridge builder, not a bridge burner. He seeks to heal this country’s racial divide, not to prey upon it. And in these last, desperate hours of her candidacy, like a wounded vulture at some road kill, Hillary Clinton continues to feed upon the rotted corpse of racism. Hers is a politics of division.
That is why the
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Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Geoffrey Dunn, Ph. D., is the former recipient of a both a John L. Senior Fellowship to the Cornell University Graduate School of Government and a National Newspaper Association Award for Investigative Journalism. His most recent film is Calypso Dreams. His article for The Black Star News on racism in the
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