“Look all of this othering of Obama, like he’s from some other planet. Everything he does is subject to a different lens and seen through a microscope that really tends to pick him apart. I think it’s indivisible from the broader issue of his race, of his being a black man with a certain kind of authority. These are impolite things we don’t want to talk about. We think that they’re being extraordinary ratcheted up. But I don’t see any other way to explain it but a remarkable resistance to the integrity of this man that has no other explanation”

—-Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, discussing criticism of President Obama’s comments on the Supreme Court during Sunday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” 

Prof. Dyson

When we look at why it is that there is a vast divide between black and white Americans regarding such incidents as the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the irresponsible comments of supposedly respectable commentators like Dyson must be given due weight. How all previous presidents must envy President Obama, whose defenders have a ready and versatile, if disgraceful, defense for any misstep, error, mistake, misstatement or policy that goes awry: it’s just racism.  What a wonderful tool to deflect criticism! Of course, it is ethically indefensible and contributes to racial divisions in the nation and society, which President Obama supposedly sought to heal, but polls must be telling the Democrats, and their flacks in the media, that it is effective.

Prof. Dyson is a scholar at a major university, and his race-baiting to discourage open and fair political discourse is thus more despicable and harmful than that of celebrities like Morgan Freeman and professional race-card dealers like Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Maxine Waters. Astoundingly, his outburst occurred during a discussion of President Obama’s almost universally derided and shockingly inaccurate comments about the possibility that a majority of the Supreme Court would find Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional. The criticism of the President was legitimate, substantive, and richly deserved: if that criticism was based on race, than all criticism of Obama is motivated by race. That, of course, is exactly the message that Prof. Dyson wants to deliver.