Dr. Red Eye

“It doesn’t get any better than this. You know, a historic day like we have today — first black president.”

So said Chicago Bears head coach and alleged Christian Lovie Smith. He had more to say:

“It’s hard to really put it into words,” Smith said. “When you grow up, you always hear you can be anything that you want to be. But you need a visual sometimes to see that. And now we have it. The most powerful man, period, is black. Young kids coming up today, now they really do know that you can be anything you want to be. You think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his dream as he talked about it of someday seeing someone like Barack in this position. When you have a first like that, it’s just big. You don’t know exactly how to act because you never have been in that situation. … To say you have a black man who’s the president of the United States, talk about the land of opportunity. All those things go through your mind.”

Can you figure out what Smith’s recurring theme was?

Indeed, the first black president was the dominant theme throughout the nation. Even some family members admitted that it’s nice to see blacks have this day come. While a few mentioned rejoicing because of the generic word “change”, the overwhelming majority rejoiced strictly because Obama is black.

But is race supposed to be the trump card, the only thing that matters?

Is Obama’s victory supposed to “assuage white guilt” or allow whites to pat themselves on the back and declare how progressive they’ve become?

No.

The true assurance that we’ve transcended issues of race is when people become color-blind and look instead to measures of a man’s godliness. For what good is it to celebrate the first black president if that first black president is a baby-holocaust-supporting, traditional-family-ripping, economically-feeble-minded, government-expanding, socialist president with unscrupulous ties to a myriad of shady characters? As Rev. Voddie Baucham, a black pastor, put it: do you think Jews would be proud that Hitler hired the “first Jewish doctor in Nazi history” when that “first Jewish doctor” was doing human experiments on Jewish prisoners?

As I’ve stated before, Martin Luther King Jr. said it perfectly in his famous quote from his “I Have A Dream” speech:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character [emphasis mine].

And indeed, the Associated Press confirmed in an article yesterday that none of the criticisms of Obama’s character mattered to voters. The tragic irony is that millions of people today rejoice because they have judged the 44th president of the United States strictly by “the color of his skin” rather than by “the content of his character”. It’s almost a “reverse racism”; I imagine that a white senator with only 100+ days on the job with no real legislation leadership to speak of, Marxist philosophies and highly liberal policies would have been laughed out of the primaries. But because he’s black and whites want to relieve their guilt…

Even though I’m a minority myself, the most important factor in a president that should cause tears of joy is the person’s godliness. I don’t care if he’s black, white, Asian, hispanic, or North Polian (yes, I made that up). If that God-fearing president also happens to be black (or Filipino or whatever), that’s great but that would just be a footnote in the celebration, not the focal point.

What’s more, you can be certain that the race card will be pulled out often in discussing or criticizing President Obama’s policies and actions. This is the nation coming “full circle”?

The fact that celebrants zero in so prominently on the victor’s race simply emphasizes the irony of race in this election: Obama’s victory didn’t heal racial differences; it only continued them.