…and Why Black Power Could keep Obama out of the White House
By Philip Delves Broughton
From the moment Barack Obama appeared on America’s national political stage, he was always going to be a controversial figure.
A half-white, half-black man with the poise and rhetorical flights of a Kennedy. A Harvard graduate abandoned by his Kenyan father to be raised by a single white mother. A man with the middle name Hussein running for the White House in post-9/11 America.
Yet, what few could have imagined was the degree of animus he would stir within America’s own black community – and, in particular, its African-American leaders.
This week, it was revealed that the Rev. Jesse Jackson, for decades the dominant voice in black politics, had made an off-the-cuff remark into a TV microphone he thought was turned off that Obama was ‘talking down to black people – telling n*****s how to behave’.
Jackson’s remarks were prompted by a speech the Democrat Presidential candidate had made to a black church in which he dared to criticise young blacks for not completing school and being poor fathers.
‘Too many fathers are Missing In Action. Too many blacks are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it,’ Obama had said.Jackson, a former Democrat Presidential candidate himself, has suddenly detonated the race issue which has stalked Obama’s every step towards the White House. His use of the explosive N-word – commonplace among young blacks in rap music and entertainment – is extraordinary in a political context, and sent America’s liberal commentators into paroxysms.
News bulletins carried warnings that viewers were about to hear a dreadful racial epithet.
Had any white public (or even private) figure used the N-word, they would have been destroyed overnight. Ironically, Jackson has made a career out of demanding the heads of anyone guilty of even the slightest racist language.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036175/The-N-word-black-power-Obama-White-House.html