President Obama can’t catch a break on race. In addition to the relentless pummeling he’s getting from the far right, now he’s got people hating from the left. Obama is accused, by a white person no less, of having too many Caucasian advisers around him who understand little to nothing about Southern black culture or slavery, says Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Dowd may be a talented writer, but she is seriously deficient as an amateur social scientist. Dowd even dismisses blacks’ racial credibility in the Obama White House — including the president himself.
“The Obama White House is too white,“ Dowd writes. “It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian ‘hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.”
As if these experiences protected the two from racism or the black experience. But then the writer goes further.
“But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.”
Dowd blames the protective cordon of “white guys” around Obama for initiating the infamous and embarrassing Shirley Sherrod firing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And according to her, some black Democrat official asked this rhetorical question: “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?”
I believe that Dowd missed the bus on this one. As we saw with the foolish speech uttered by NAACP President Ben Jealous, who is black, that it was not just white men who screwed up in the Shirley Sherrod case. Ignorance, knee-jerk reactionism and simple laziness (as it pertains to not doing their homework before speaking and behaving) is not race specific.
I believe the Obama administration, unfortunately, was exposed during the Shirley Sherrod catastrophe as being terrified of the radical right, particularly the mental patients and kooks in the Tea Party and the race-bating fire breathers on Fox News. Obama, not his white advisers, exhibits extreme sensitivity to being painted as a black president helping blacks at the expense of whites and the country.
But that hasn’t stopped Obama from hurling criticisms at Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians, as most presidents are deathly afraid to do. Also, as you said in your own words, Ms. Dowd, that Obama went against his advisers’ wishes and made the risky speech about Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the campaign. So your explanation doesn’t fit your theory. There‘s a reason it‘s called the Obama White House: because Obama is running it, regardless of who he has around him. –terry shropshire
