Race and Political calculations in America

Thomas Sowell writes and insightful article in National Review Online about the current Administration strategy to push racial anger as the source of opposition to Administration policies.

One recent incident quoted by Sowell; When a few African-American Democrats walked into the Capitol the weekend of the vote, they passed through a crowd of citizens expressing their anger. According to some Democrats, these expressions of anger included racial slurs.

This is a serious charge — and one deserving of some serious evidence. But, despite all the media recording devices on the scene, not to mention recording devices among the crowd gathered there, nobody can come up with a single recorded sound to back up that incendiary charge. Worse yet, some people have claimed that even doubting the charge suggests that you are a racist. (emphasis mine).

As Sowell correctly points out, Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.

You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.

Yet as he also points out, "race hustling" for whatever purpose is something that a lot of powerful vested interests can't let go of because it is through this mechanism that they retain considerable power and clout on the national stage.

A shame that the President of the United States stokes these flames rather than trying to tamp them down.