The Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt is out with a screed about President Obama’s horrible week and tried to blame him for the mess with Trayvon Martin, saying he has a tendency toward racial profiling. What? In case Charles Hurt hasn’t noticed, President Obama is a black man (though biracial but history dictates that he’s black) and yes, racial profiling is a huge problem for black men. That includes my father, who is now retired, but he was a law-abiding, hard-working Christian man, who was pulled over by a New York City cop in the early 1990s and roughed up over nothing and threatened by a white officer that he would take his “brand new car” if he mouthed off. I’m pretty sure that same white cop wouldn’t have told Mr. Hurt’s father that.
People on the right like Charles Hurt would like to sweep the racial injustices perpetrated against blacks for decades under a rug. They expect us not to take a stand when there has been an obvious police cover-up in the murder of an unarmed black teen, but to just accept that cover-up because it’s just the right thing to do in their eyes. When Charles Hurt has walked in the shoes of a black American, who has lived through the darkest days in this country’s history, then he has earned the right to accuse President Obama of having a tendency towards racial profiling. Here’s an excerpt from Charles Hurt’s column:
• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.
Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.
• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.
• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he was.
By most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.
• Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to hide behind.
I am in agreement with Hurt’s argument about the Supreme Court and Obamacare. I really don’t see this as a win-win for the Democrats and the president if the Supreme Court throws out this legislation. It will be a big problem for President Obama’s reelection bid. But blaming him for the Trayvon Martin case and for fomenting blacks is just irresponsible. In case Charles Hurt hasn’t noticed, the black experience in this country has been tainted by racial profiling, among other things. Obama is right when he said the country needs to do some “soul-searching” because we have a faction of the population that continues to be racially profiled and too many innocent black males are losing their lives as a result. While I won’t go as far as to compare Trayvon Martin’s death to that of Emmett Till, it does bring the issue of racial profiling front and center. President Obama could have very easily said, while it’s a tragedy, I will allow the legal process to work.
About Janet Shan
