Racism claim won't silence Obama critics

Racism claim won't silence Obama critics

Nolan Finley
Detroit News
Oct. 27, 2011

Being called a racist ought to bother me more than it does. But I guess it's like any other annoyance; after a while you get used to it.

I hardly flinch when that or another adjective ending in "ist" is slapped in front of my name. As a conservative, it comes with the territory — detest the entitlement state, stand up for individual responsibility and merit, oppose the swelling of a wasteful and incompetent government, fight to keep the tax man from taking more from your wallet than he leaves behind, and obviously you are a racist. And a sexist, an elitist and likely a homophobe.

But you build up calluses on your sensitivities and come to recognize that the slingers of the slurs are motivated by one of two things:

They know playing the race card is the quickest way to deflect heat. Take the Kwame Kilpatrick example. The disgraced former Detroit mayor got caught with his pants down and his hand in the till, and his defense was that the white establishment couldn't abide a strong, swaggering black man in a seat of power. He bet the race grenade would divert the focus from his transgressions to an examination of racial attitudes.

They're so convinced of the superiority of liberal ideology that the only explanation they can come up with for someone not embracing it is that they are selfish, stupid or a bigot — or in my case, all three.

For the defenders of President Barack Obama, I think there is a little of both at work. Over the past few weeks, Obama supporters have called me a racist in phone calls and emails no less than two dozen times because of columns critical of the president's leadership. One guy dubbed me Mr. KKK; another, George Wallace.

They seem to think that the first black president also ought to be the first president off-limits for reproach.

They believe there's a general, ill-defined dislike and distrust of the president that can be traced to latent racism.

But most of those who oppose Obama are very specific in their discontent. They reject his Big Government predilections and his disregard for debt and deficits. That's got nothing to do with race.

Even the best presidents are about as hated as they are loved. Obama's skin shouldn't shield him from the heat that comes with the job. And it's been no more intense than that endured by his immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Yet you have the actor Morgan Freeman saying the only reason for Obama's falling approval numbers is a wave of racism washing over the country. And his Hollywood colleague, Sean Penn, suggests that conservatives use the n-word when they talk privately about Obama.

The charge of racism is a toxic thing, and most people don't want it landing on them. But it loses its potency with overuse. Obama's critics aren't going to be scared into silence by the risk of being labeled racist.

He'll have to defend his presidency against attacks that are rooted in the results it's produced, not in bigotry.

The reality is that a whole lot of white people voted for Obama in 2008, but unless things change, a whole lot of those white people will vote against him in 2012.

They didn't all become racists in four years. They just expected more from Obama than he's delivered.

That's doomed many white presidents before him, and it shouldn't be a shock if it dooms the first black one.