The morning after Election Day, 2008, The New York Times proclaimed that Barack Obama’s victory had swept “away the last racial barrier in American politics.” However, as the President’s first term draws to a close, a case can be made that the historic election was anything but post-racial; rather, it has been the most racially polarizing presidency in modern times.
This is not a surprise, however, to those familiar with Obama’s background and thinking on racial matters, nor to those who have studied the role played by Communist Frank Marshall Davis in raising him as a young man in Hawaii during his critical coming of age period. Davis was not only a slavish follower of Joseph Stalin, but a black racist who saw sinister white plots in the foreign policies of the United States and other Western nations.
Davis, a poet and writer, had written a controversial poem, “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” dismissing the object of the Christian faith as “another New White Hope.”Young_Barack_Obama
Obama’s own book, Dreams from My Father, talks about asking “Frank” for advice when his white grandmother had been accosted by a black panhandler. Davis told Obama that his grandmother was right to be scared and that “She understands that black people have reason to hate.”
Paul Kengor’s new book, The Communist. Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, examines the Davis mentality and ideology which shaped Obama in more detail. As Kengor’s book documents, Davis:
Considered American racism a “disease” that “Red Russia” had solved
Wrote in a column on July 20, 1946, that the Soviet Union had, “in less than a generation,” abolished “discrimination and racism”
Wrote that “the only people” Winston Churchill cared about were “the white people of the British empire”
Labeled the Marshall Plan for Western Europe after World War II a form of white imperialism, designed to “help maintain European empires at the expense of exploited dark colonial peoples”
Considered anti-communism a form of racism
