The radical right hopes that a two-decade-old videotape of Barack Obama embracing radical professor Derrick Bell will sink the president. Don’t bet on it.
Are they kidding? Barack Obama hugged Derrick Bell? Wow! This just proves everything, doesn’t it? It’s “the smoking gun,” according to some Breitbartian
lickspittle, “showing that Barack Obama not only associated with
radicals but believed deeply in their principles—and wanted the rest of
us to believe in them, too.” It’s almost sad, watching them try to turn
this unremarkable minute-and-a-half into a scandal. But the main point
here is that the Bell video affair shows yet again that this “movement”
that is constantly invoking the flag and patriotism and saying it
represents America is far, far removed from mainstream American reality.
The video dates to 1990 and shows Harvard law student Obama
speaking on behalf of Bell, the law professor who resigned his Harvard
position to protest the fact that Harvard Law wasn’t hiring and granting
tenure to more African-American professors. This was a celebrated and
intense controversy at the time, involving denial of tenure to a
professor named Regina Austin, and it received national and global
attention. Obama undeniably pays homage to Bell, whose views on race and
the law in America were undeniably radical.
So
they’ve caught him red-handed, you see. But this is the crucial point,
because this is where they always veer off into a private universe of
their own bizarre and disconnected morality. To a right-winger, the
fatal embrace “proves” various allegations to be true. These allegations
line up in two categories. The first set is about Obama personally:
that he embraces and supports every word Bell ever wrote or spoke, that
he hates or at least has it in for white people, and so on. The second
and probably more agonizing (if you’re one of them) set has to do with
Obama’s secret agenda as president: that the three-plus years Obama has
spent as president not doing things like making Louis Farrakhan his
secretary of state or changing the national anthem to “Lift Every Voice
And Sing” have been just a ruse, a trap, and as soon as he is reelected,
with no fear of having to face the American electorate again, he’s
going to turn into Jomo Kenyatta.
They
are slightly different, these paranoias. But they have in common two
things. The first of course is that they’re expressions of profound fear
and anxiety in a country that is no longer the country that members of
the right thought they were living in, which is a source of terror for
them. And the second thing the paranoias have in common is that the vast
majority of normal Americans don’t share them.
I
might, for example, have written a column trying to downplay Bell’s
radicalism, or explain it. But why should I? He was a radical. And Obama
embraced him. (The fuller story, for those who care, is that Obama was
not himself deeply into “critical race theory”; he did permit such views
to be published in the Harvard Law Review, but several people from
Harvard whom I interviewed back in late 2007 said he wasn’t an
adherent.) But what the right doesn’t get is that most Americans don’t
find it alarming. He was one law professor, 20-plus years ago. In the
meantime, we have a thousand days and nights of watching Obama be
president. And people—that is, the two-thirds who occupy the mainstream
moral universe—have not seen a stealth Afrocentrist. They’ve seen a
pretty reasonable and conciliatory guy whom they basically like.
Those
same people forgave Obama for Jeremiah Wright. No, it was not, as the
right still says, that the media downplayed it. Wright was an
inescapable controversy for days. People had plenty of Wright-related
information available to them as they made their voting decisions in
2008. They had plenty of Bill Ayers-related information, and they’d
heard that Obama said small-town voters “cling” to guns and religion.
And yet, in the face of all this, American voters made him their
president.
The
right-wing explanation for this is that the media kept making excuses
for Obama, and that Acorn stole the election anyway. But the most
plausible Planet Earth explanation is that most middle-of-the-road
Americans simply didn’t find any of that stuff disqualifying. They found
it troubling to one extent or another, no doubt. But they still put the
man in the Oval Office.
Right-wingers are always claiming that they speak for middle America, but America wants little to do with them, their hectoring sermons, and their ludicrous conspiracy theories.
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