by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/em>he Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0informs us of the presidential visit to Latin American with a headline \u201cRace a Dominant Theme at Summit.\u201d It then goes on to describe how Obama resonates with those leaders of \u201cindigenous\u201d heritage in Latin America.<\/p>\n Something here is not quite right. Our president ran on a platform of racial transcendence, but he now heads south to talk race (“The president put it [race] on the table very explicitly” at the opening ceremony, said a senior Obama administration official who participates in closed-door meetings with the president.\u201d) with some leaders who have explicitly employed racially charged stereotypes, such as Chavez\u2019s use of \u201cGo to Hell, Gringos,\u201d or Brazil\u2019s president Lula’s reference to \u201cwhite blue-eyed\u201d bankers who caused the financial meltdown.<\/p>\n Yet rather than discouraging such racial polarization, the president of a racially diverse, melting-pot America, finds the emphasis on racial identification useful for his global transnational agenda (or as the Post put it more mildly, \u201cObama has mentioned his race as part of a Latin America agenda broader than the Bush administration’s, which focused primarily on promoting an economic policy of free trade, government privatizations and lower public debt. The mix became known as the Washington Consensus, a term used as an epithet in much of Latin America.\u201d)<\/p>\n What does \u201cbroader\u201d mean? Many of us do not see the likes of Chavez, Ortega, Morales, et al. as victims of much of anything, but rather savvy autocratic would-be dictators bent on using stale tropes like colonization and racism to explain away their own miserable failures as leaders, and to advance their own agendas of personal aggrandizement. The more they see an American president apologize abroad, the more they rant about the U.S. past in search of more apologies.<\/p>\n A common denominator with Obama’s easy emphasis on racial divides \u2014 when juxtaposed to past evocation abroad of his Muslim sensitivities and middle name, serial apologies about American sins and pathologies, and constant denunciation of his predecessor \u2014 is a sense that the past tradition of America is culpable and therefore not his own \u2014 made explicit in his response to Daniel Ortega’s diatribe that he was just three months old during the Bay of Pigs troubles, and by extension not responsible for American transgressions. Again, separately all these new approaches are in themselves understandable, but in the aggregate they form a disturbing pattern seen earlier with the off-handed remarks about “typical white person,” the stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians along lines of class and race, and the 20-year long patronage of a clearly racist preacher.<\/p>\n At some point, Obama needs to take a hiatus from this racialist identification, and, like a Sec. Condoleezza Rice, transcend race, let achievements and policies speak for themselves, and thus rise or fall on the content of his own character.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner The Washington Post\u00a0informs us of the presidential visit to Latin American with a headline \u201cRace a Dominant Theme at Summit.\u201d It then goes on to describe how Obama resonates with those leaders of \u201cindigenous\u201d heritage in Latin America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[722],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-JI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1484,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-racial-mess\/","url_meta":{"origin":2834,"position":0},"title":"The New Racial Mess","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Weren't we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of President Barack Obama? His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters \u2014 not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1067,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-racial-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":2834,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Racial Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried \u2014 as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":151,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-racial-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2834,"position":2},"title":"The New Racial Derangement Syndrome","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services There is a different sort of racialist derangement spreading in the country \u2014 and it is getting ugly. Here is actor Jamie Foxx joking recently about his new movie role: \"I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1982,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-racial-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":2834,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Racial Crisis","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In the current racial circus, the president of the United States, in addressing an assembly of upscale black professionals and political leaders, adopts the style of a Southern Baptist preacher of the 1960s. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3300,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-race-card\/","url_meta":{"origin":2834,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Race Card","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The liberal media are in full Captain Renault mode, \u201cshocked, shocked\u201d to find race injected into the presidential campaign by a \u201cSwift-boating\u201d John McCain. How shameless can you get? The Obama campaign\u2013\u2013indeed, the whole of Obama\u2019s public existence\u2013\u2013is about nothing other than his perceived\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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