Reason to Hate: Barack Obama’s Racist Roots (Part 1)

The morning after Election Day, 2008, The New York Times proclaimed that Barack Obama’s victory had swept “away the last racial barrier in American politics.” However, as the President’s first term draws to a close, a case can be made that the historic election was anything but post-racial; rather, it has been the most racially polarizing presidency in modern times.

This is not a surprise, however, to those familiar with Obama’s background and thinking on racial matters, nor to those who have studied the role played by Communist Frank Marshall Davis in raising him as a young man in Hawaii during his critical coming of age period. Davis was not only a slavish follower of Joseph Stalin, but a black racist who saw sinister white plots in the foreign policies of the United States and other Western nations.

Davis, a poet and writer, had written a controversial poem, “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” dismissing the object of the Christian faith as “another New White Hope.”

Obama’s own book, Dreams from My Father, talks about asking “Frank” for advice when his white grandmother had been accosted by a black panhandler. Davis told Obama that his grandmother was right to be scared and that “She understands that black people have reason to hate.”

Paul Kengor’s new book, The Communist. Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, examines the Davis mentality and ideology which shaped Obama in more detail. As Kengor’s book documents, Davis:

• Considered American racism a “disease” that “Red Russia” had solved
• Wrote in a column on July 20, 1946, that the Soviet Union had, “in less than a generation,” abolished “discrimination and racism”
• Wrote that “the only people” Winston Churchill cared about were “the white people of the British empire”
• Labeled the Marshall Plan for Western Europe after World War II a form of white imperialism, designed to “help maintain European empires at the expense of exploited dark colonial peoples”
• Considered anti-communism a form of racism

Some of this information about Davis was available in 2008, when Accuracy in Media disclosed the fact that Obama’s mentor “Frank” in his book, Dreams from My Father, was actually Frank Marshall Davis. We noted that, by Obama’s own account, Davis had subjected the young man to racial advice and diatribes. However, the Kengor book draws upon many of Davis’s columns, published in Communist papers in Chicago and Hawaii, where these views were put into print. Hence, it expands our understanding of Davis—and therefore Obama. What’s more, Kengor looks at Davis’s views in terms of Obama’s policies as President.

In 2008 the major media didn’t want to hear about any of this. Jon Meacham wrote in Newsweek that Frank Marshall Davis was “a strong voice for racial justice” and political activist whose “writings on civil-rights and labor issues” had “prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Meacham was suggesting that Davis was the target of false allegations, and that he was not a communist. But Meacham was negligent to the point of dishonesty. In the first place, Senator Joseph McCarthy was not obviously in charge of any House committee. Second, Davis was in fact a card-carrying communist.

“In Dreams from My Father, most of Davis’s views offered by Obama are along the lines of race,” Kengor told AIM in an exclusive interview. “Obama is clear on that. He quotes Davis at length as an influence on race. All the liberal, pro-Obama biographers who dare to mention Davis cite him as an influence on Obama on race. Everyone agrees at least on that.”

“Davis was first and foremost a communist,” Kengor notes. “Thus, we titled the book, The Communist. That was who he was. And yet, anyone who dared to expose that communism was framed as a racist.”

Is this the playbook being used against opponents of Obama? What kind of influence did Davis have on the President?

This article is meant to examine in-depth, the racial, if not racist, agenda of the Obama administration. The new evidence about the racist influence that Frank Marshall Davis had over Barack Obama puts these matters in a new and frightening perspective. Seemingly spontaneous comments Obama has made on racial matters take on a new significance in view of the Kengor book and his revelations about Davis and Obama.

The upcoming election will likely see an escalation of racial tactics on Obama’s part.

Indeed, as the 2012 election season grows red hot, the President and his election campaign have demonstrated that their strategy will remain anything other than shades of gray.

It began in early June, when the campaign launched an overt attempt to court African-Americans with a radio ad aimed specifically at black voters. The Grio reported that “The 60-second ad, entitled ‘We’ve Got Your Back,’ appeals to black voters’ nostalgia about the election of the nation’s first African-American president, calling for those voters to stand with the president again in November.” According to an advertising representative, this particular type of ad would normally come out during “get out the vote” efforts. So the playing of the race card is ahead of schedule.

The “We’ve Got Your Back” campaign is not an isolated demonstration of the racial polarization of this election. Politico, which is perceived to be pro-Obama, ran a news article that flat-out describes the Obama campaign’s agenda as turning Mitt Romney “into the candidate of old, straight, white men.”

As you’ll see, however, the President has already been governing through a prism of black and white.

During a 2010 interview for the book, Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House, President Obama spoke of his desire to build a “race-neutral administration,” while also claiming that race doesn’t drive decision-making in the White House. When asked about race and how he conducts his business, the President responded, “You just don’t think about it, you really don’t.”

But the Obama administration’s agenda has been anything but race-neutral, and has to be considered race-driven when looking through a history of unprecedented prejudiced actions and rhetoric. Here is but a brief sampling:

• In one of his more high-profile comments on race, President Obama waded into the charged waters of the Henry Louis Gates case, an incident which saw Gates, an African-American, arrested in his own home after reports of a possible break-in. Gates and police on the scene gave conflicting reports on the level of cooperation between individuals, and the facts of the case remained murky. That said, after confessing to being limited on facts, Obama acted as judge and jury, declaring that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” in their haste to arrest Gates. To back up the suggestion that the police officers had acted inappropriately, the President cited “a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

• The signature achievement of this administration, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is not devoid of racial components. In 2009, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had already declared that the Obamacare plan was laced with race-based incentives, including giving “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships,” and was littered with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants.” A few months after it was signed into law, the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) pointed out that the new healthcare reform had provisions in place to provide monetary rewards doled out on a criterion of racial preference. One such provision stated, “In awarding grants or contracts under this section, the Secretary shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of the following:…Training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

• As AIM has disclosed, even some of the Obama stimulus dollars have gone for racial purposes. Joshua Correll, a University of Chicago professor, received $154,563 in stimulus grant money for what is called a collaborative project at the University of Chicago which “outlines a series of studies investigating the role of individual differences in executive functions (EFs) in expression of implicit racial bias.” This appears to be academic jargon for identifying and naming alleged racists. In fact, Correll operates a “Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory” that has been working since 2000 to develop and refine a first-person-shooter video game that was originally designed to ferret out allegedly racist cops in order to re-educate them.

• The President’s policy on terrorism seems to play the race card when convenient, but very inconsistently. In the summer of 2010, Obama suggested that race is what motivates the actions of Al-Qaeda, as opposed to blind, radical ideology. The discussion was in stark contrast to several months earlier, when the administration was unable or unwilling to mention race, religion, or creed when reporting on the motivations of Fort Hood terrorist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The Pentagon had released a report on the shooting rampage which failed to mention the word “Islam” or “Muslim.” In turn, while Obama did not wish to stir up anti-Muslim sentiments in the Hasan case, he was more than willing to play up anti-Muslim sentiments when he claimed that Israel is suspicious of him because his middle name is Hussein.

• The Latino community has frequently been targeted as a key demographic in elections, but has equally been targeted by this administration in their attempts to racially divide a group through government policies. When Governor Jan Brewer and the state of Arizona tried to defend their borders, the President quickly tried to demonize them, insinuating that racial profiling could result in someone without papers being harassed while engaging in the simple act of having ice cream with their family. This approach led former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich to proclaim that Obama had engaged in “a racist dialogue to try to frighten Latinos away from the Republican Party.”

• In March of 2010, the Obama administration filed a brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that supported the University of Texas’ use of racial preferences in their undergraduate admissions process. The brief had been filed by then solicitor general and current Justice, Elena Kagan, and stems from a battle over a 2003 ruling that narrowly permitted race-conscious policies in public higher education. Such blatant support for the exploitation of race in education was panned by the National Review’s Roger Clegg, when he described the brief as “a full-throated endorsement of such discrimination.” The Supreme Court has opted to review the affirmative action case, which is expected to occur in October—placing it squarely in the minds of voters just weeks prior to the presidential election.