Seasons of Grace
Oprah Winfrey thinks that old white people in the South have to die, before racism can be annihilated.
She also thinks that if you don’t like Obama, it’s because he’s black. I mean, what other reason could there be?
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Oprah played the race card in an interview Friday with Will Gompertz on the BBC.
Winfrey was there to talk about her new film “The Butler” which, she claims, shines a spotlight on what she perceives as persistent world-wide racism. She said that it would be “foolish to not recognize that we have a problem,” to think that we’re not “still facing the same kind of terrorism against black people en masse.” Oh, she admits, it’s gotten better. But are there still places where people are still terrorized for the color of their black skin? Yes, she insists there are.
And here’s where the conversation turned to the American South, and the case of the Scottsboro boys—nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of rape in 1931 and imprisoned in a miscarriage of justice which has been memorialized in film and on stage. The case of the Scottsboro boys is, indeed, a smudge on America’s noble history; but to compare that unfortunate sequence of events to the cultural climate today is an incredible misstatement of fact.
Has racism been prevalent in the United States? Yes, at one time. However, while Oprah seems to believe that racist values are rampant in America today, most people—most blacks among them—do not agree. And Americans also recognize that the sources of racism are different today from what they were in the past. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks think that most blacks are racists, while 24 percent of blacks think that most whites are racist.
African-American conservative Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for the National Review, recently published a very favorable review of a book by Harry Stein titled No Matter What…They’ll Call This Book Racist: How our Fear of Talking Honestly About Race Hurts Us All
Sowell explains his admiration for Stein’s frank discussion of race:
Black civil-rights attorneys and activists, who denounce whites for objecting to the bussing of kids from the ghetto into their neighborhood schools, have not hesitated to send their own children to private schools instead of subjecting them to this kind of “diversity” in the public schools.As for whites, author Harry Stein says that many white liberals ‘give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind.’ This, of course, is no favor to those particular blacks.”
Sowell looks to Stein for further proofs that the conversation about racism in America has been distorted:
He looks behind the highly sanitized picture of Al Sharpton as a civil-rights statesman with his own MSNBC program and his designation as a White House adviser, to the factual reality of a man with a trail of slime that has included inciting mobs, in some cases costing innocent lives.Positive news also receives its due. Some readers of this book may be surprised to learn that the ban on racial preferences in the University of California system did not lead to a disappearance of blacks from the system, as the supporters of affirmative action claimed would happen.On the contrary, more blacks graduated from the system after the ban — for the very common-sense reason that they were now admitted to University of California campuses where they qualified, rather than to places like UCLA and Berkeley, where they had often been admitted to fill a quota, and often failed.Stein’s book is also one of the few places where many young people will see the actual words of people like Bill Cosby, Shelby Steele, Pat Moynihan, and others who have opposed the fashionable platitudes that confuse racial issues.
In the BBC interview, Oprah Winfrey cited Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst at the 2009 State of the Union address as a clear example of white racism. “Just the level of disrespect,” Winfrey exclaimed.
“Yeah, I think there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases, and maybe even many cases, because he’s African-American.”
I’ve got news for Ms. Winfrey.
Joe Wilson said “You lie” because the President lied. Not because he was a black liar—just because he was a liar.
Wilson disagreed with Obama’s claim that Americans would not have to absorb the cost of healthcare for illegal immigrants. And even today, illegal immigrants impose a serious financial burden upon taxpaying American citizens. According to the National Research Council, undocumented workers costs American taxpayers $346 billion annually—and a substantial part of that cost is healthcare.
According to MoneyNews:
The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the current cost of treating uninsured immigrants who entered this country illegally at all levels of government to be $4.3 billion a year, primarily at emergency rooms and free clinics. This doesn’t take into account the billions being absorbed by in-patient care delivered by hospitals.Who is picking up these costs? Every American taxpayer — not to mention medical facilities and insurance companies who turn around and raise their rates for everyone else.For instance, it may surprise you to learn that immigrants who entered this country illegally, who have not paid one dime into Medicaid, are receiving Medicaid benefits. Kaiser Healthcare News reports that “federal law generally bars immigrants who enter this country illegally from being covered by Medicaid. But a little-known part of the state-federal health insurance program for the poor has long paid about $2 billion a year for emergency treatment for a group of patients who, according to hospitals, mostly comprise this class of immigrants.”A 2007 report by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in a four-year period, about 99 percent of those who used Emergency Medicaid were determined to be immigrants that entered this country illegally.
American conservatives don’t like the President’s policy—not because he’s a black man, but because the Affordable Care Act is ill conceived. The Affordable Care Act is intrusive and socialistic and unaffordable, and it denies Americans their basic constitutional right to religious liberty.
We don’t like this President because he, more than any elected official in our nation’s history, has embraced the killing of unborn children as a pivotal right. He has repeatedly scoffed at the religious values held by a majority of citizens, and has denied the Constitutional free exercise of religion—insisting that American business owners check their faith at the office door, even preventing Catholic clergy (but not Protestants) from holding religious services on military bases during the government shutdown. He has stood idly by while four Americans in service to our nation died under horrendous conditions in Benghazi.
Were he a lily-white Anglo-Saxon, we would dislike him just as much.
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