Obama and Racism: Can't we all just get along?

The elephant in the room: That's the only way I know how to describe the racial tension that permeates the majority of black and white relations. There is something present of which no one dares to speak.

I wish I could write off the recent drama involving President Obama, Professor Gates, and Sargeant Crowley as mere miscommunication or foolishness. Unfortunately the root lies closer to ignorance, intolerance, and self-righteousness.

This issue requires much thought and dialogue. In lieu of a post I am not ready to write, I leave you some words from political commentator Andrew Breitbart. His entire column can be read online at WashingtonTimes.com.

Less than a month after being confirmed as the nation's attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. called out the American people as "essentially a nation of cowards" for refusing to talk openly about race....

Americans, especially nonblacks, are deeply fearful that [racial interaction] is predicated on an un-American premise: presumed guilt. Innocence, under the extra-constitutional reign of political correctness, liberalism's brand of soft Shariah law, must be proved ex post facto.

Think not? Ask the Duke lacrosse team, which had 88 of the school's professors sign a petition that presumed their guilt before their side of the story was known. Even though the white athletes were exonerated and the liberal district attorney who pushed the case was dethroned, disbarred and disgraced, the professoriate that assigned guilt to its own students still refuses to apologize.

Those signatories constituted 90 percent of Duke's African and African-American Studies Department, the subject-matter domain of Mr. Gates, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West and other tenure-wielding, highfalutin, iambic-pentameter-filibustering race baiters, and 60 percent of Duke's women's studies department, another hotbed of victimology posing as intellectualism....