By Rex Murphy - from the National Post
Princeton University professor Cornel West is as much a celebrity as scholar. He also happens to be African-American, and claims to be a friend of Barack Obama.
But if what West has taken to saying about Obama is coming from a friend, as the proverb hints, he doesn’t need enemies. West, for all his liberal atmospherics, has a very ugly mouth. In interviews and TV appearances lately, he’s been beating up on his “friend” with a kind of invective that would shame the darkest Republican.
Particularly, in a recent interview with Chris Hedges, he refers to Obama as a “black mascot” of Wall Street, then offers a variation that he is a “black puppet” of “corporate plutocrats.” Note the stress on “black” in both slurs. Racial designations are very important to how West views America.
For the professor, it’s not enough for Obama to be merely a mascot or a puppet of this or that: It’s the skin colour that carries all the sting.
West allows himself such judgments because he sees himself as a gatekeeper of what is black and what is not. In doing so, he plasters his comments with faux-friendly reference to “brother Barack Obama.” Such gestures are hollow. He clearly has a deep, personal grudge against the President. As his statements to Hedges show, it stems from the purest vanity: Having worked for Obama’s election, he finds his phone calls to the President unanswered. He didn’t get extra tickets for Obama’s inauguration. And when he learned that a bellhop at the Washington hotel he was staying at for the event had tickets, the great progressive was mortified.
Imagine: lower class black bellhop has tickets; Princetonian brainiac’s family entourage does not. The pettiness behind West’s diatribe is, nonetheless, the very least of the man’s offences.
Obama, deep Dr. West tells us, “has a certain fear of free black men.” Also, this: “[Obama] feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want.”
What’s “Jewish” doing there?
The emphasis on white is just the mirror of West’s race fixation on black. But why the need to expand to “white and Jewish?” Because “Jewish” is the final brush stroke of what West perceives as his indictment of Obama’s sellout. And because anyone who looks to race as the deep answer to anything is always going to brush up against, or slyly invoke, the “Jewish” stereotype along the way. It is, for such minds, ineluctable.
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