Back at the end of February I wrote a piece about the challenge race poses for Barack Obama, called ‘What’s it Mean to be Uppity?‘. I was criticizing several members of the press for saying that Obama was too ‘show-offy’ or arrogant. But I was also criticizing former Black Entertainment Television president Bob Johnson for his obnoxious remarks comparing Obama to Sidney Poitier’s character in the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In the movie, Poitier plays a young, attractive black doctor, of outstanding character and from a good family, who wants to marry the white daughter of a powerful San Francisco family with professed liberal beliefs.
Poiter’s character is perfect in every way, except the color of his skin. He didn’t ‘sound’ black and he didn’t ‘act’ black. And that is the whole point of the movie. A liberal white family that supports equal rights for blacks in the abstract is confronted with treating a black man as an equal in the starkest way possible…the marriage of their daughter. Of course, maybe electing him president would have been nearly as stark? Maybe so.
Bob Johnson was calling Barack Obama a phony black man. He was saying that he had stripped himself of all black identifiers in an attempt to ‘pass’ for white. He also, in the same comments, made reference to youthful drug use to make the opposite insinuation…that Obama was just one of the kids on the corners in the Hood.
Johnson received a lot of criticism for his remarks and was quiet for a long time. But he is back.
The Charlotte Observer reported on its Web site Monday that Bob Johnson, one of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top black supporters, was commenting on remarks previously made by Geraldine Ferraro, another Clinton supporter.
“What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?” Johnson said. “And the answer is, probably not.”
“Geraldine Ferraro said it right,” Johnson added. “The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything.”
Ferraro, a Democratic candidate for vice president in 1984, stepped down last month as an adviser to Clinton amid controversy over comments she made to the Daily Breeze newspaper in Torrance, Calif. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” Ferraro said. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
Obama didn’t start out with 90% of the black vote, he got those kind of numbers because of remarks made by people like Bob Johnson! I don’t know what kind of world the Clinton supporters live in where it is just impossibly too easy for a black man to get elected president, and where Obama is the elitist, when Hillary lived in the White House for eight years. Johnson and Ferraro’s argument seems to suggest that Obama has no other merit than his race, like he an affirmative action ‘quota’ candidate. Why the Clintons’ surrogates keep saying something so patently false and so boorishly insulting, I don’t know. I wish it would stop, but it’s probably too late to change the damage they’ve done to their legacy.