Go Team!

On Sunday’s “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” on TVOne, host Martin questioned several black journalists about the support shown by the Obama administration and black leaders for Attorney General Eric Holder, currently stonewalling Congress regarding a full accounting of what occurred in the “Fast and Furious” debacle.

“Many Republicans are calling on him to resign by demanding he release more documents, also in the Fast and Furious case,” Martin said.  “So, I want to ask the panel, is this White House doing enough to protect the attorney general? And also, where is black leadership? I mean, here you have Eric Holder, who has been — first of all, he was a high-ranking official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. He becomes the black, first African-American attorney general. He has been very aggressive on many issues. But some folks are saying that look, he’s been taken to the woodshed and he is not getting the kind of support that you would think he would be getting.”

This is a disgraceful question that assumes that unethical conduct—racial bias— is somehow admirable. What difference does it make that Holder is the first black attorney general? How could that justify the media, the White House, black leaders or Congress treating  a black Attorney General any differently than they would treat a white, Asian or Cherokee Attorney General? Isn’t the issue whether he is a competent and effective Attorney General? Shouldn’t that judgment be race blind? Aren’t black journalists, like white journalists, obligated to keep race out of their assessments of how public officials behave?

Apparently not. Martin’s guests, apparently secure in the belief that no white viewers would be watching their open and unapologetic display of race team cheerleading, all accepted the assumption that there was some duty on behalf of black leadership and the administration of a black President to come to the aid of Holder—-not because he isn’t shockingly inept (because he is), but because he is black.

Martin, who also masquerades as a journalist on CNN, was astonished  that the White House and black leaders have not rallied to Holder’s side, and compared this to how George W. Bush’s incompetent Attorney General was defended. “I think back to President George W. Bush. I look at AG Alberto Gonzalez,” Martin marveled. “…I mean, you saw folks saying we’re going to have your back. And I’m looking at again black leadership. I have not seen an aggressive defense of AG Holder.”

Yes, and of course the defense of Gonzalez was irresponsible and hyper-partisan. A competent administration would have fired Gonzalez on merit, or lack of it. Yet Martin was citing this as model behavior. Worse, it was the model he and the proudly race-biased journalists on his show were displaying on the spot. It’s all about teams, folks! There’s the black team and the white team, the conservative team and the liberal team. Pick your team, and be loyal to it: performance has nothing to do with anything.

This is exactly upside down and backwards, and the open race bias displayed on Martin’s show is disturbing, though not surprising. These black journalists, and one can only hope that they are not representative, perceive that it is the duty of African-Americans, including supposedly objective journalists, to rally to the side of black officials when they are under fire…not because of such trivialities as character, competence, and facts, but based on the necessity of race loyalty.

Should black journalists be promoting race loyalty as a virtue? Of course not. Black journalists have an obligation to be objective, like all journalists. If they are incapable of separating their own race from their judgment of their subjects, they have no business being journalists at all.

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Source: The Daily Caller

Graphic: NY Post

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