Filed under: News, President Obama, Race and Civil Rights
Mike Huckabee is officially on a roll.
At New York radio station
WOR on Monday, the former governor of Arkansas and candidate in the 2008 presidential election added flames to the
Birther Movement by claiming that President
Barack Obama's upbringing in Kenya skewed his views of the British:
"One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, (is) very different than the average American," said Huckabee.
While he later claimed that he "mis-spoke" his thinly veiled accusation of
Mauism, which is anti-colonial-or anti-white sentiment, it was a clear attempt at describing Obama as "not one of us."
His asinine statement was an echo of
Newt Gingrich in 2010:
"Obama is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president."
"I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true," Gingrich continues. "In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve. ... He was authentically dishonest."
On a radio show on Wednesday, Huckabee told host
Bryan Fischer that "most" single Mothers are "poor and uneducated," calling out actress
Natalie Portman for "glamorizing" illegitimate pregnancy:
"One of the things that's troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, 'Hey look, you know, we're having children, we're not married, but we're having these children, and they're doing just fine.'
"But there aren't really a lot of single Moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that, yes, not everybody hires nannies and caretakers and nurses.
"Most single Moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that's the story that we're not seeing, and it's unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-children wedlock."
Ironically, he had no problem supporting Bristol Palin's "brave choice" in 2008, when she became pregnant at 17 years old, but the political backlash for actually chatising her for "glamourizing" teen pregnancy would have been too severe - better to stick to Obama-loving Hollywood, right?
Huckabee further underscores who he's actually referring to when he references the statistic that more African-American children are born out of wedlock than any other ethnicity.
Translation: Natalie Portman is a wealthy, Hollywood actress, with an Ivy League education, who can afford to take care of her children, while the rest of these Welfare Queens will be milking the government:
"Stop it, Natalie! You're making the Negroes think they can live this way, and they can't!"
When Barack Obama was elected the 44th POTUS, I knew the United States would continue to face the racial stratification within our society that became even more evident during the election process.
What does amaze me, though, is the level of scorn, condescension and undiluted bigotry that has come to the surface, as all things "black" continue to be examined under a microscope.
It is true that 69 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock , and while not the 75 percent Huckabee claimed, it is still exorbitantly high. It is also true that 90% percent of TANF recipients are single mother households.
That's where the grain of truth in Huckabee's message ends.
Though the highest percentage of funds were distributed to African Americans (34.2%), white Americans received 31.5%. According to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, 25.8% of African-Americans and 25.3% of Hispanics live below the poverty line, compared to 12.5% of Asians and only 9.4% of whites.
What this proves is that while the media is quick to point out the disproportionality in the percentage of African-American women receiving abortions, and having children out of wedlock, the fact that white women are financially more secure, yet receive the lion's share of federal funds, flies largely under the radar.
Former assistant Labor secretary, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," predicted in a memo to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that an increase in fatherless children would result in increasing school failure, criminal delinquency, and joblessness. Sadly, all these have come to pass; however, Huckabee smoothly blends truth and stereotypes to suggest that black single mothers are draining the system, when that is a blatant lie.
Not only that, Moynihan noted that marriage is also declining among whites, and that white children born out of wedlock is increasing. Startling information that could easily be missed behind all the prejudicial propaganda Huckabee felt compelled to share with America. Even more interesting is that while the rate of African-American children born out of wedlock is high, white children in the same familial structure are more likely to be disadvantaged than black or Hispanic children.
"The consequences of family disruption are
smaller for disadvantaged black and Hispanic children than for disadvantaged white children, both in terms of percentage points and in terms of proportionate effects," write Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur in their 1994 book, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps.
"The chances that a white girl from an advantaged background will become a teen mother is five times as high," the authors continue, "and the chances a white child will drop out of high school is three times as high, if the parents do not live together."
So let's see here: More single white women abusing the system, and more white children facing adverse consequences as a result of absent fathers and poverty, yet Huckabee felt the need to put the lives of African-American women and children underneath the microscope.
Again, single Mothers, specifically African-American Mothers, are being
dissected on the table of social science, and for nothing more than political capital.
We can evaluate the statistics and discuss the disproportionate ratio of single black Mothers vs. married Mothers, but the fact remains that by sheer virtue of their number, white Americans are the major recipients of the social programs that conservatives would like to see cut.
Yes, it makes it easier to put a black face on poverty, but it is dishonest. It is not a race issue, it is a class issue, and the fact that Mike Huckabee has resorted to race baiting and pandering to further his own political agenda speaks volumes of his character.
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Little does he know that there's a higher force, with several men known as 'The Adjustment Bureau,' who feel that David is destined for greatness, and that his relationship with Elise will compromise that path.
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste."
Professor Christopher Chambers is the author of the Angela Bivens series of mystery novels, and has published short fiction and comic books, including a graphic anthology. Chambers is also a contributor to 
One of the most important events in my early life as a photographer occurred in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1965, when I chanced upon a clutch of over 280 5"x7" glass plate negatives. Glass plate negatives? Before digital images and even before film, images were often captured on plates of glass coated with photographic emulsion.Stumbled upon at a garage sale, the negatives contained a number of city views of Lincoln including some circa 1915 construction photos. I made a few selected prints of the city scenes and sold them to people in Lincoln. Thus, my first sales as a photographer were from someone else's negatives. Further inspection of the glass plates revealed that most of the photographs were of people and most of the people were African American.
For years, Kevin Frazier has lent his reporting to two of television's biggest entertainment shows, 'Entertainment Tonight' and "The Insider.'
