Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has taken on Sarah Palin for her attack against Michelle Obama.
In Palin’s book “America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag,” she rips the First Lady for her remark from the 2008 campaign: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
Palin says that President Obama believes that America — at least America as it currently exists — is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country.
“Certainly his wife expressed this view when she said during the 2008 campaign that she had never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections,” Palin writes. “ In retrospect, I guess this shouldn’t surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church listening to his rants against America and white people.”
Below is an excerpt from Cohen’s column…
Richard Cohen
It’s appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand … so many facts of American history. They don’t offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle’s case, her ancestors were slaves — Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the back of the bus, the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself.
It was the government that oppressed blacks, enforcing the laws that imprisoned them and hanged them for crimes grave and trivial, whipped them if they bolted for freedom and, in the Civil War, massacred them if they were captured fighting for the North. And yet if African Americans hesitate in embracing the mythical wonderfulness of America, they are accused of racism — of having the gall to know more about their own experience and history than Palin and others think they should.
Why do politicians such as Palin and commentators such as Glenn Beck insist that African Americans go blank on their own history — as blank as apparently Palin and Beck are themselves? Why must they insist that blacks join them in embracing a repellent history that once caused America to go to war with itself?
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