Let me get this straight -- It has been all well and good for Rush Limbaugh to play on the radio a fun little ditty called 'Barack the Magic Negro' and it is wrong and race baiting for President Jimmy Carter to call people out for it? It is fine for Glenn Beck to call President Obama a racist, and Jimmy Carter should be rebuked? The right wing has gone so far as to intimate that electing Barack Obama has inspired black people to be thuggish. Really. Larisa Alexandrova puts it together fantastically.

So what we've learned is that it's OK to be racist. It's OK to accuse Obama as being a racist. It's NOT OK to call anyone out on the real racism we're seeing. THAT is playing the race card. What the hell is wrong with this picture?

I read this article this morning in the NYT and I must admit that I was dismayed that the White House has had to deflect away from President Carters statement on race. I was angry that the press and the conservative pundits have decided to pin this on the White House. I heard the speech that candidate Obama gave on race. He knows that what is happening now is indeed a racial thing. What has me upset is that he literally can't say anything about it because of the insanity of right wing radio and television. These hate talkers have whipped a segment of our population into such a frenzy that anything said from the White House would only make things worse.

And therein lies the hypocrisy. Jimmy Carter - a fine and decent man - speaks aloud what many people have been thinking and suddenly he is playing the race card. Michael Steele has asked the White House to denounce President Carter, which I would find funny if it were not so hypocritical. It was less than a week ago when the Teabaggers made clear that it was their right to free speech to carry signs depicting the President as any number of offensive images -- in particular an African witch doctor -- and now a former president doesn't have that same right to free speech? Of course not - this is the hypocrisy of the conservative movement. White people are objecting to the race card, and somehow it's being spun that Jimmy Carter is the newest in a long line of democratic racists.

To these people, the rights in the constitution are selectable and only for a few privileged folk: Them. I might be more reluctant to call them out for what it looks like if they had been around for the past 8 years when we actually saw our civil liberties getting torn to shreds. They were nowhere to be found as our bill of rights was being disassembled. The silence was deafening right up until we elected a black man as President. I can't see it any other way. They were silent when the previous administration threw hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking industry with no oversight-- they said nothing. They were silent when their retirement funds dried up as the market went into a downward spin last year. They were silent when the previous administration gave the auto industry a 17 billion dollar loan and now they scream it's socialism. What else would explain it?

I believe one thing about these people. When they say 'they want their country back', they mean it. This I believe. What these people need to learn -- everyone of them from Rush, Steele, Beck & Hannity - to every marcher at the tea parties is how to share. It's not like people of color are going anywhere. They are here to stay in the United States. What they don't seem to understand is ALL Americans got the country back on January 20, 2009. Until they learn that this country does not belong exclusively to THEM, they look like a bunch of bigots and angry fools fanning the flames of hate. Ooh. I called them out. I guess that makes me a racist now too.

If calling out racism makes me a racist - fine-- I am proud to be a racist like President Carter.

'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest,
and in the joy of a new beginning,
we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back,
when brown can stick around --
when yellow will be mellow --
when the red man can get ahead, man --
and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.'
Rev. Joseph Lowery, January 20, 2009

and
Raine