Posted on February
27, 2018
“Sort-Of-A-Play-On”
A Bigoted Ex-President
by
Daniel
Clark
This would be a difficult one for former president
Barack Obama to talk his way out of.
Lucky for him, he doesn’t have to, because nobody’s asking.
For his official presidential portrait, on display at
the Smithsonian, Obama reportedly sought out painter Kehinde
Wiley. Since he had undoubtedly
researched the artist, he surely must have known about Wiley’s two paintings
that have depicted black women beheading white women. These works were loosely based on the
biblical story in which Judith beheads the Assyrian general Holofornes
to prevent him from destroying her city.
The biblical context is deliberately lost, however, by Wiley’s replacing
Holofornes’ head with that of a presumably militarily
powerless woman. So why did he do
it? “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill
whitey’ thing,” the artist told New York
magazine.
As of this writing, it’s been two weeks since the
unveiling of Wiley’s portrait of Obama, and the ex-prez
has yet to explain his desire to be immortalized on canvas by such a vile, 
hate-filled bag of pus. Imagine the MOAB of outrage that would be
dropped on Donald Trump if he selected a presidential portrait painter who
expressed racial hatred through his work.
This is not simply a racial double-standard, either. If a black Republican ever sought out an
association with an artist who found “kill whitey” to be a valid genre, it
would matter. Yet Obama, whose past is
riddled with hits of racial animosity, especially toward women, has not had to
answer for a thing.
Even under the extremely generous assumption that
Obama had no knowledge that he’d hired a hate-artist, it should be expected
after the fact that he disavow Wiley, and find a more responsible artist to
paint a new portrait. If the media don’t
demand this of him, at least the Smithsonian should.
But no, Obama has not been held to account for this
incident, much like he’s never had to explain why he attended Louis Farrakhan’s
“Million Man March,” or been pressed on how he could have possibly been
ignorant of the racist, anti-Semitic and anti-American fomentations of his
pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright. Just
imagine how much different most Americans’ impressions of Obama would be, if
only we had news reporters in this country, who might have asked him questions
like these:
* Do you live in a world where “the kill whitey thing”
is a thing? If so, please describe it.
* Wiley’s characterization of his paintings as “sort
of a play on” the kill whitey thing suggests that he was making a joke about
it. Do you get the joke, and if so,
would you care to explain it to the rest of us?
* You once chided Americans over the use of incendiary
rhetoric. Do you think “kill whitey”
qualifies as incendiary?
* While distancing yourself from Jeremiah Wright’s
racist tirades, you said you could no more disown him than you could your own
white grandmother, “who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic
stereotypes that made me cringe.” You
later said you did not think your grandmother was racist. So why did you think it appropriate to equate
her with Rev. Wright?
* You called your grandmother a “typical white
person.” Are there “typical” people of
other races as well? If not, why not? If so, please provide examples.
* In your memoir, you created a composite character to
represent your white female acquaintances, and depicted a falling-out between
yourself and this character over a disagreement about race. In what way does a composite character that
is defined by race differ from a racial stereotype?
* You have said that when a black man gets on an
elevator, it “happens often” that white women clutch their purses nervously and
hold their breath until they get off.
Have you ever actually held your breath the whole time you were on an
elevator? You know this doesn’t really
happen often, if at all, right?
* Why would you even notice how women are holding
their purses on elevators, let alone how they’re breathing? Have you considered that the odd behavior is
yours, and not theirs? If a woman is
made nervous by undue attention from a strange man, why must you assume that
race is a factor?
* Has it occurred to you that purse-clutching might be
a natural reaction to the presence of an aspiring politician? Might it have assuaged these women’s fears if
you’d promised them, “If you like your purse, you can keep your purse”?
* Would it be fair to refer to these breathless,
purse-clutching women as composite characters, like the one in your book? Do you understand that composite characters
don’t really exist, which means that your interactions with them never
happened?
* Are you aware that store employees often keep an
uncomfortably close eye on their customers, incessantly asking them if they need
help, and that this is a common experience that annoys many people of all
ethnicities? Don’t you ever ask people
about these things before making rash assumptions? Must imputing racist motives always be the
first option?
* What in the world possessed you to eulogize Sen.
Robert Byrd, a.k.a., Exalted Cyclops Robert C. Byrd, as “a voice of principle
and reason,” and “an unparalleled champion of the Constitution”? Don’t you think a drug store clerk, about
whom you know nothing, is more deserving of the benefit of the doubt than a man
who built his own chapter of the KKK from the ground up? Or must somebody share your political
persuasion in order to be given a pass?
* You have claimed that your parents met, and
therefore that you were born, as a result of the protest marches in Selma,
Alabama, which took place in 1965. You
were born in 1961. Based on that
standard of accuracy, why should we believe any of these unverifiable anecdotes
of yours?
* Which political party committed the racist “Bloody
Sunday” atrocities against those marchers in Selma? You have two guesses, and your first one is
going to be wrong.
* Are you now, or have you ever been, a composite
character?
* If someone doubted the validity of your birth certificate
on the basis that it says you were born four years before the event that
created you, just how would you go about setting him straight?
If only somebody were to pose these questions to our
ex-president, his answers, and even his evasions, would paint a far more
accurate and indelible picture than that impudent, eleven-fingered doodle that
now hangs in the Smithsonian.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press
Mailbag . Issue
Index
. Politimals
. College
Football Czar