The latest proof that whites are racist: they tend to see Obama as “less American” than other politicians

A blog I haven’t seen before, Unamusement Park, takes apart an article in USA Today, “Study: racial prejudice plays role in Obama citizenship views.”

USA Today asks:

Does racial prejudice play a role in questions about Barack Obama’s citizenship, a topic much in the news given today’s birth certificate news conference? Yes indeed, suggests one recent psychology study …

The blogger, Unamused, goes through the various answers by the respondents in the study which the study authors claim show white racism at work, and he logically and amusingly demolishes the claims one after another, a project to which I would now like to add my own contribution.

USA Today tells us:

Overall, as expected, White participants tended to view Obama as less American, says the study, as well as worse-performing….

Moreover, Whites higher in prejudice rated Obama as less American, and as performing more poorly as president.

Now what possible reason could whites, or human beings generally, have for seeing Obama as less American than, say, Vice President Biden, the “control” in the study?

• Could it be the fact that Obama’s father was not an American, but a Kenyan?

• Could it be the fact that Obama wrote a celebrated memoir in which he treated his Kenyan, socialist father as his spiritual lodestar?

• Could it be the fact that Obama’s mother, his only parent who played a role in raising him, never resided in the United States from the time her son was six years old, but spent the entire rest of her life living in the Third World and devoting herself to Third World concerns?

• Could it be the fact that Obama does not have an American name, but an African and Muslim name, Barack Hussein Obama?

• Could it be Obama’s remark that the call to Muslim prayer, which he heard every day in Indonesia for four years as a boy, is “the sweetest sound I have ever heard”?

• Could it be Obama’s twenty years as a devout follower of Reverend Jeremiah (“God damn America”) Wright?

• Could it be Obama’s disparaging reference to his grandmother as a “typical white person”?

• Could it be Obama’s wife, who famously declared that she had never felt proud of being an American in her entire life until her husband began doing well as a presidential candidate?

• Could it be Obama’s pledge during the 2008 campaign that as president he would “fundamentally transform America”?

• Could it be Obama’s statement in Cairo in 2009 that he would in effect enforce the Islamic law against anti-Islam stereotypes wherever they appear?

• Could it be Obama’s disconcerting habit of bowing deeply to non-Western monarchs?
  

• Or, finally, could it be Obama’s vast network of African and Muslim relatives, including his half-brother Abongo Malik Obama, shown here at Barack’s wedding in 1993, where Abongo was the best man?
  

Again, what possible reason, other than racism, could anyone have for sensing or feeling or thinking that Barack Obama is somehow less American than anyone else?

* * *

The photo of Abongo and Barack appears in today’s New York Post, in a piece about Abongo:

Obama’s half-brother runs questionable charity

May 8, 2011

President Obama’s half-brother runs an off-the-books American charity that claims to support poor Kenyans—but it lies about its federal status and no one knows how it spends its money.

The group, the Barack H. Obama Foundation, was named after the president’s father and founded by his sibling Abon’go Malik “Roy” Obama, a 53-year-old polygamist who recently made headlines by adding a third wife—who’s still in her teens.

Its Web site claims to have provided drinking water in Kenya’s Siaya District, which includes the Obama clan’s ancestral village. The organization also says it has completed a madrassa, or Muslim school, and is building an imam’s residence. A photo of the tidy little school building is displayed on the site.

That and other photos on the site are the only purported evidence that the nonprofit has accomplished any of its mission.

A group of Missouri State college students who visited the Obama family village of Kogelo in 2009, and who met the president’s half-brother, felt something was amiss. They sensed he was an “operator” and decided to give their donation of 400 pounds of medical supplies directly to a local clinic.

“We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” said Ken Rutherford, a former Missouri State professor who led the trip and who shared in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to ban landmines.

Rutherford said the Obamas’ relatives are the only Muslims in a village of 4,000 Christians and that Malik has a private mosque on his property.

Malik started his charity the year his brother ran for president.

The foundation claims to be a tax-exempt, federally recognized nonprofit. It is not.

Nor are there any filings of its expenditures, which the IRS requires of larger charities.

Alton Ray Baysden, a former State Department employee at whose Virginia home the charity was founded in 2008, admitted the organization has not even applied for tax-exempt status.

“We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise to do this,” he told The Post. “We are informally scouting for an executive director, someone who knows how to register the charity.”

The charity is not even registered in Virginia, a requirement for soliciting donations in that state.

The foundation’s Web site includes a donation form that says it has nonprofit status. Charity expert Marcus Owens said knowingly telling donors contributions are tax-deductible if they are not could amount to fraud. “If they haven’t applied for exemption, they can’t promise their donors that contributions are deductible,” said Owens, a lawyer and former IRS official.

The National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington, DC, watchdog group, made a formal complaint to the IRS and US Post Office last week alleging fraud.

Malik Obama, reached in Kenya, said the foundation has a budget of $250,000. When asked about why it wasn’t a registered charity, Malik, an accountant by trade, said that he was “in process” of changing that. The White House did not return a message seeking comment.

Malik is the oldest son of Barack H. Obama Sr. His father left Kenya for the US in 1959 when Malik was a toddler and his mother was pregnant with his sister, Auma. He enrolled in the University of Hawaii where he met and married the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

The president didn’t meet his older half-brother until the 1980s. Malik—whom Obama calls Roy—was living in Washington, DC, and was married to an American Peace Corps worker. He now splits his time between Kenya and Virginia.

President Obama, in his book “Dreams From My Father,” describes arriving at a DC airport expecting to be greeted by his half-brother, but being stood up. Malik tells him he’s had a fight with his wife and asks him to get a hotel room.

Malik later served as the best man at Obama’s wedding and attended the president’s inauguration.

He claims the foundation is entirely his idea “and is not dependent on the endorsement of his brother.”

But the foundation seems to be capitalizing on the Obama name. A California-based company is selling T-shirts with the president’s image and the phrase “Yes We Cannabis.” It promises half of the proceeds will go to the Barack H. Obama Foundation.

PRESIDENTIAL ‘BRO’-HAHAS

* The Secret Service had a code name for Bill Clinton’s half-brother, Roger—“Headache.” Roger spent a year in an Arkansas jail for selling cocaine while Clinton was governor. He was also accused of taking bribes from Gambino crime-family member Rosario Gambino, a convicted heroin trafficker, as well as other criminals seeking presidential pardons.

* Billy Carter, brother of Jimmy Carter, famously smoked pot on the roof of the White House and once urinated on an airport runway in front of the press. The self-described redneck, who touted—and drank—his namesake “Billy Beer,” once tried to work as a DC lobbyist for the Libyan government.

* Lyndon Baines Johnson’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson, lived in the White House. But he was such a bad drunk that any time he headed to the bars, he had to be accompanied by the Secret Service to keep him from bad-mouthing his brother in public. He wrote a memoir called “My Brother Lyndon,” all about how he couldn’t stand him.

* James Polk’s younger brother, Franklin, was only 28 when he died of alcoholism. Another younger brother, Samuel, was so wild he incited a riot at Yale University and was thrown out.

* Ulysses S. Grant had a younger brother named Orvil, who lined his pockets with kickbacks from the sale of trading-post franchises.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2011 05:43 PM | Send