From Ta-Nehisi Coats in The Atlantic:

…From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.

Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said in his “More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race…

The article is quite long and it just goes on and on like that – America is and has been a hopeless, racist hell and Obama hasn’t been doing enough to pay whitey back for his transgressions.  Obama is just playing the white man’s game, as it were, for fear that an enraged black man will awaken the racist within us all and thus defeat him on November 6th.  The underlying premise of it all is that all white people are guilty and until they confront their terrible crimes, we can’t get past the race issue in the United States.

The reality is a bit different, of course.  The true issue of race in America is that it is dead as a doornail except for those who need it for fun and profit.  The fact that Obama has been treated just like anyone else doesn’t enter in to liberal minds – it was my (very white) wife who first clued me in to the Obama phenomena.  She was quite taken with this well spoken, good looking man who was clearly ambitious for higher office.  I, too, could not escape immediately the charm of Obama.  While I wouldn’t have voted for him under any circumstances this was entirely due to his standard-liberal positions on the issues.  That he is a black man was, is and always will be entirely irrelevant.  It wasn’t until the Jeremiah Wright issue came up that I became aware of the dishonesty underneath the surface of Obama – and while an author like Coats clearly admirers people like Wright, anyone who is not committed to the con-job which is race in America these days would immediately be offended by someone who lives well off America and yet condemns it in such hateful terms.  And as Obama and team started going “Jeremiah who?” it really just told us that Obama is dishonest – he sat in the man’s church for 20 years and could not reasonably argue that he was unaware of Wright’s raving lunacy.

Obama’s 2008 persona, though, carried him through to victory – just as anyone else with that sort of persona and given that set of political circumstances would likely have been carried in to the White House.  In other words; treated just like anyone else.  The problem for Obama is that his management style (probably the worst decision-maker we’ve ever had in the White House) coupled with the disastrous policies normal to liberalism have ensured complete failure of his Administration.  And just like any other person who is failing in the job of President, he’s getting hammered in popular approval and will likely lose on November 6th.  He wasn’t elected due to race in 2008, won’t be defeated in 2012 because of race – he was elected because of his personality and circumstances and will be defeated because of his policies.  But if this narrative is accepted as true then all the racial con-artists out there (people like Wright and Farrakhan and Jackson and Sharpton) would shortly be out of work.  A certain segment of the population (which does include a very large number of white people, of course) needs to have race to be a painful, divisive issue now and forever more.

It will be funny – not to me, as I’ll be dead right around that time – in 30 or 40 years when America is no longer a white-majority nation to see the successors of these people.  How will they keep the race hustle up?  Don’t doubt that they will try – Mugabe in Zimbabwe is still blaming the white people of Zimbabwe for his problems even though there are hardly any white people left in that country.  It’ll just be entertaining to watch the mental back flips these people will have to do to convince people that whitey is still keeping the black man down.   Think of it like this – the race-hustlers of 2052 will be trying to convince a panel of 1 (aged) white guy, two Latinos, two Asians and three mixed-race people that we still need racial set-asides to clear up the racial disparities of the Jim Crow era.

The sad part of it is really the way these people feel the need to keep hate alive.  We all know the truth of our past – the glory and the sins; slavery will always be a stain upon the Great Republic, as will segregation.  But it is also very much long past, now.  There are no slaves left.  No children of slaves, either.  I doubt we even have a great-grand-child of a slave alive in the United States.  The Jim Crow laws have been a dead letter since the mid-60’s.  Black people serve at all levels of American society and no one would ever dream of barring anyone from any position simply based upon their skin color.  More and more of us, also, have mixed race families – while I’m sure there are still some hill-apes out there who don’t want their daughters to marry a black man, they are few and far between (and getting ever fewer by the day); people just don’t care about it any longer.  All we want is decent people who obey the law and do the right thing – skin color is irrelevant.  But here are our liberals – so fearful that the race-baiting gravy train may come to an end that they will do whatever is necessary to keep old hatreds inflamed.

Pray for them.  Don’t get mad about it.  Hopefully they will wake up from their befuddlement in the by and by.