Morgan Freeman on Obama

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American Thinker:

Last Friday, while on Michel Martin's NPR show, "Tell Me More," Hollywood titan Morgan Freeman informed his host that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Barack Hussein Obama is not America's first black president.

He is the country's "first mixed-race president." The first black president, Freeman continued, has not as yet "arisen."

So, one wonders, whence stems the popular misconception that Obama is black? Freeman has an answer ready at hand: the president's opponents.

Obama's rivals want to fuel the flames of racial bigotry by emphasizing his African ancestry while ignoring his white background. Yet they conveniently "forget that Barack had a mama" who "was white, very white American, Kansas, middle of America."

Some commentators, particularly those on the right, think that Freeman's remarks should have been met with more outrage. I personally think that incredulity is a more fitting response.

At the 2009 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the black comedian Wanda Sykes quipped that while she was "proud" that she could characterize Obama as "the first black president," her pride would endure only as long as he didn't "screw up." Once that happened, however, then she would be asking: "What's up with the half-white guy?"

It is difficult indeed not to think that Freeman -- a long-time Democrat and supporter of the president -- isn't animated by the same impulse over which Sykes joked.

Obama, after all, long ago fell hard -- and fast -- from the peaks at which he stood in November of 2008. His unpopularity continues to increase as more and more Americans come to understand the disastrous toll that his policies are taking on the nation. This consideration in and of itself should suffice to legitimize the theory that Freeman is now revising Obama's racial identity so that "the first black president" isn't remembered by his contemporaries and history as an abject failure.

But there are other considerations that make this thesis that much more plausible.

First, it stretches credibility to the snapping point to suggest that it is Obama's opponents who are alone, or even primarily, responsible for accentuating his blackness. If anything, the president's critics twist themselves into proverbial pretzels doing their best to avoid invoking race to any extent. Their dread over being accused of "racism" dictates this as the safest course of action (or so they think).