Obama Mentor: “I Live To Harass White Folks”

President Barack Obama’s connections to the radical left go beyond his close friendships and association with black liberation preacher Jeremiah Wright and communists Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who planted bombs that killed a police officer and others in the 1960s.

Last week, Breitbart.com released a videotape that shows Obama is also a devotee of the late radical black lawyer Derrick Bell, (left) the creator of the Critical Race Theory of law, which views all legal problems through the prism of white oppression.

Bell, who died last year, was apparently something of a mentor to Obama. Bell’s objective, he admitted in an interview, was “harassing white folks.”

The Tapes

Last week, Breitbart’s websites released a short tape of Obama uttering kind words for Bell. A young Obama introduces the radical Bell to an audience with these words: “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”

The tape then depicts Harvard lawyer Charles Ogletree, another of the leftists at Harvard’s law school. “Of course, we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now,” Ogletree laughed. That Obama was close to leftist Bell, Ogletree said, “just told you his growth had been astronomical in terms of his sense about race in a very complex world … trying to deal in the world of Harvard Law School, etc.”

But critics find Obama’s view of race quite troubling given an interview in which Bell described what his role as a lawyer was. An interviewer asked Bell the question of “what keeps you going if you’re so pessimistic” about solving the race problem in America. Bell replied that while he had been working as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, he met a black woman put upon by whites. Bell said he asked her why she was fighting back, and her reply became his “motto”:

“I’m an old lady. I lives to harass white folks.” … She lived near whites who were supportive of her. … It wasn’t a racial thing. But she knew that those people who were oppressing her were white. She knew that … she didn’t have their power, she didn’t have their money, she certainly didn’t have their guns. But she saw her life as giving them trouble, being on their case all the time. And, I’ve accepted that as my motto: “I lives to harass white folks.” So those at Harvard and some of the other places need to be on guard.

Bell’s Theories

Bell is the inventor of the Critical Race Theory. According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs, “Critical Race Theory was developed out of legal scholarship. It provides a critical analysis of race and racism from a legal point of view.”

Since its inception within legal scholarship, CRT has spread to many disciplines. The theory has basic tenets guiding its framework, which are interdisciplinary and can be approached from different branches of learning. UCLA’s School of Public Affairs continues,

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

Intersectionality within CRT points to the multidimensionality of oppressions and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disempowerment. “Intersectionality means the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings.”[1] This is an important tenet in pointing out that CRT is critical of the many oppressions facing people of color and does not allow for a one-dimensional approach of the complexities of our world.

In other words, Critical Race Theory applies not only to race but also to “gender” and, now, of course, “sexual orientation.” Through the lens of CRT, life is a never-ending legal power struggle against the “white power structure.”

As for Bell, during his career as a law professor he was little more than a grown-up student radical, as the New York Times reported in its obituary: “In 1980 he left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in 1985 when the school did not offer a position to an Asian-American woman. After returning to Harvard in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.”

Harvard refused to hire the pair, it said, because they were incompetent. Bell claimed Harvard wouldn’t hire them because of their ideology.

Obama’s Other Radical Ties

But Bell is hardly Obama’s only radical connection.

The first was Frank Marshall Davis, a pot-smoking sexual pervert and child molester. According to London’s Daily Telegraph, Davis “had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s.” He was a friend of Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham.

The second two connections are with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who planted bombs in the 1960s. Obama launched his political career at their home and many observers say it is likely that Ayers ghostwrote Obama’s biography, Dreams from My Father.

Dorhn was an admirer of mass murderer Charles Manson and a potential mass murderess herself. As The New American reported three years ago, Ayers, Dohrn and their Weather Underground comrades are likely responsible for the bomb in San Francisco that killed police Sgt. Brian McDonnell.

As well, Ayers is thoroughly unfazed by the killings he and his fellow criminals perpetrated. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers told the New York Times in a story published Sept. 11, 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

And for all his claims of innocence now, he spilled the beans to neoconservative David Horowitz, a radical leftist in the 1960s. “I interviewed Ayers ten years ago,” Horowitz wrote at his website, Front Page magazine, “in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children.”

Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

The third radical Obama connection is that with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the black liberation theologian who became, briefly, a campaign liability for Obama when his “goddamn America” sermon surfaced.

Though a member of Wright’s church and despite Wright’s officiating at Obama’s wedding and baptizing Obama’s daughters, the candidate actually claimed to know nothing of Wright’s radical views.