The morning after Election Day, 2008, The New York Timesproclaimed 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.”