Obama and the Bell Curve

Last night the spirit of Breitbart lived on with the release of a video showing Harvard law student Barack Obama celebrating the radical “critical race theorist” Derrick Bell.  Bell can’t be written off as “some guy in my neighborhood” as Obama did with William Ayers, or sloughed off like Rev. Jeremiah Wright with the “I-didn’t-really-listen-to-his-sermons” excuse.  Obama used to assign Bell in his class on “race and the law” at the University of Chicago.  Now we know Obama has an affinity for Bell.  Let’s see if the mainstream media asks about this the way the media used to ask Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan about their supposed ties to the John Birch Society.  I’m not holding my breath.

The case of Derrick Bell is quite useful not so much in illuminating that Obama is not so secretly a radical, but as yet another example of the utter bankruptcy of the liberal imagination.  One of Bell’s best-known works is his supposed moral fable about American racism called “Space Traders.”  The story, later made into an HBO short film, features outer space aliens coming to the United States and offering to exchange gold and other natural resources in return for taking America’s black population back to the cosmos.  We’re all supposed to feel guilty because the story ends with the Power Structure of the nation agreeing to the deal, forcibly detaining African-Americans and handing them over to ET.  The story doesn’t exactly pack the moral force of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to be sure, but we are meant to take it seriously anyhow.

Who would believe such a ridiculous story?  Ask yourself this clarifying question: who is it that believes that human beings are a liability, that overpopulation is a crisis, and that physical “natural resources” are the larger asset than human beings who come with two hands and a brain?  It is liberals who believe this most fervently, not the advocates of free markets and individual liberty.  Liberals have long hooted at Julian Simon and others who argue that people are the “ultimate resource,” and not physical matter, especially not gold.  Only a liberal would find “Space Traders” to be a plausible scenario.  No pro-life president would ever make Bell’s deal; it would require a liberal president like . . . Barack Obama!  (Is that so far-fetched?  He’s shown he’ll sell out just about any of his core constituencies when it’s in his political interest.)

Derrick Bell unwittingly reveals who the real racists are these days, and along the way reveals why it is that liberal guilt exists.  Bell curve indeed.

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