I honestly do get tired of talking about it, but there is a large segment of our population that basically has a fundamental problem with black people, including our president. I know a lot of them are Democrats. It used to be, not so long ago, that the majority of them were Democrats. But, today, they are Republicans. The Obamas went to an Easter service at the Shiloh Baptist Church in the District of Columbia. The church was built by slaves, and now it was hosting a black president and his family on Easter. It should have been a feel-good story. But Sean Hannity doesn’t want to let a visit to a black church go unexamined. So, he unearthed a speech Shiloh’s Rev. Wallace Charles Smith gave in Philadelphia early last year.
“It may not be Jim Crow anymore,” Smith says in the videotape. “Now, Jim Crow wears blue pinstripes, goes to law school and carries fancy briefs in cases. And now, Jim Crow has become James Crow, esquire. And he doesn’t have to wear white robes anymore because now he can wear the protective cover of talk radio or can get a regular news program on Fox.”
That Fox News is a 24-hour-a-day racism engine should be obvious to any casual observer. It’s well-documented, for those of you who sensibly avoid watching the channel. And Rev. Smith’s remarks struck right at Sean Hannity’s heart, as he is both a Fox News personality and a talk-radio shock-jock demagogue. So, how could he resist making a stink about Obama visiting another radical black church? Disregarding the fact that Reagan, Poppy Bush, and Clinton all attended services at Shiloh as well, Hannity said, “Dr. Wallace Charles Smith doesn’t think that there’s anything wrong with what Jeremiah Wright preached. I don’t believe that it is a coincidence out of all the churches in the country that Obama finds himself sitting in, why is he always in pews listening to such controversial spiritual leaders?”
The result?
Shiloh Baptist Church in the District said it has received threatening phone calls and e-mails after an Easter visit from President Obama and a conservative television commentator’s subsequent playing of a videotape in which the pastor said that those espousing racial prejudice do so “under the protective cover of talk radio.”
The Rev. Wallace Charles Smith said the church has received more than 100 threats since Fox News channel’s Sean Hannity aired a tape Monday of a speech Smith gave in January 2010 at Eastern University in Saint Davids, Pa.
“We received a fax that had the image of a monkey with a target across is face,” Smith said. “My secretary has received telephone calls that have been so vulgar until she has had to hang up.”
This is at the same time that the Republicans’ leading presidential contender (according to Rasmussen) is going around telling black reporters that he knows that they are big fans of Obama, bragging that he gets along great with “The Blacks” and saying he is the last person in the world who should be accused of racism. Just yesterday he suggested the president only got into Ivy League schools because of Affirmative Action. The man graduated from the country’s most difficult law school magna cum laude.
It’s not just The Donald. Republicans make news with their racist comments nearly every day of the year. Today there’s one in Oklahoma saying that blacks are stupid and lazy. Sean Hannity knows what he’s doing; he just doesn’t care. If he gets someone killed, he’ll blame it on the murderer or the victim. But it’s not just Hannity. This modern GOP is a flat-out racist party. They have even more venom for Arabs and Latinos than they do for blacks. What do you call a party that demonizes racial and religious minorities, waves the flag around, and serves the interests of major industrialists and corporate heads? What’s the word for that?
