Right-Wing Racial Panic
Tuesday night they hyped a 2007 Barack Obama speech to a group of black ministers at Hampton University in Virginia, and they engaged in the most rancid racial fear-mongering I’ve seen in a long time. Hannity hailed the speech as “a glimpse into the mind of the real Barack Obama,” and he tried out his own black preacher voice for special effect. Carlson insisted Obama was preaching racial division to his black audience and sputtered, “This is not a dog whistle, this is a dog siren!”
He would know.
Mainly, their complaint came down to: How dare a black president (or at the time, presidential candidate) talk to a black audience about black poverty and suffering! And the legacy of slavery, and the endurance of racism! Has he no shame?
There was absolutely nothing objectionable in Obama’s speech. (I watched the whole thing on the Daily Caller Web site, but I won’t link to it.) It made me proud to have a president who could speak with that complexity. If you know anything about his audience of African-American ministers, you could hear him at one point chiding them for their own divisions and competitiveness. It was a speech that preached personal responsibility as part of the answer to poverty.
Was his accent a little different with that crowd? Well, so was Hillary Clinton’s and Al Gore’s in comparable situations - as Hannity noted with no self-awareness. So was Joe Biden’s at the NAACP. White politicians pick up a certain … cadence in black crowds, and they maybe get teased a little. Obama does it, and it’s a racial scandal.
“This accent is absurd,” Carlson told Hannity, clutching his pearls. “This is not the way Obama talks. It’s put on, it’s phony.”
Side note: What we have here is an epidemic of white guys ruling on the correct way for other people to identify themselves in ethnic terms. First Scott Brown insists Elizabeth Warren “obviously” doesn’t have Native American heritage because she doesn’t look like she does. Now Tucker is telling us he knows how Obama really talks. On Twitter, Adam Weinstein quipped: “Scott Brown and Tucker Carlson should start a ‘School of Telling People What Indians Look Like and Blacks Sound Like.’”
