The attacks on the Tea Party should be viewed in the context of the political views of our "post-racial" President.

Before the presidential election of 2008, I had predicted that, far from ushering in the post-racial era to which his supporters (on both the left and the right) swore Obama's victory would lead, allegations of "racism" would only increase under an Obama administration. There is more than one reason for why I was as certain of this as I have ever been certain of anything, but the key reason — and the most obvious — is that "the Race Card," I knew, given the immense power that it has amassed over the last several decades to simultaneously destroy the reputations and livelihoods of those against whom it was played while bestowing economic and political benefits no less immense upon those who played it, Obama and his supporters would treat as an indispensable weapon in deflecting criticism while advancing their agenda.

Indeed, for however poisonous it is, this prediction is now bearing much fruit as a relentless, systematic, effort on the part of Democrats in Congress and the media to besmirch "the Tea Party" movement as "racist" is being waged.

Although it is to the great credit of representatives and apologists for "the Tea Party" movement that they have (thus far) refused to be intimidated, unfortunately, they have gone to great lengths in adopting precisely that posture of defensiveness into which the Left unfailingly and, hence, artfully, manages to corner all of its opponents. If we had more than the word of a tiny handful of Democrat politicians to corroborate the claim of John Lewis and his cohort to have been bombarded by an array of racial slurs, then, along with unequivocal condemnation of those who would employ such degenerate and uncivil tactics to further the objectives and aims of "the Tea Party," a defense of some sort would certainly be in order. But because, as things currently stand, not only is there not a shred of evidence to substantiate it, there are several considerations that militate powerfully against it, the adherents of "the Tea Party" movement and their sympathizers need to go on the offensive.

The time is now to do what John McCain failed miserably, and shamefully, to do, to inform the American public of the virtually categorical priority that President Obama himself has made of racial considerations throughout his own life. If the President and his devotees in Washington and the media are as remotely desirous of discussing the extent to which racial motivations underlie the political movement(s) that has arisen in opposition to their beloved party, then, "Tea Partiers" everywhere should demand, they had better be prepared to discuss, at long last, the degree to which such beliefs underlie their own.

The perfect place from which to launch this inquiry is the first memoir of the President himself — Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. It is here that Obama banishes any room for doubt about the heightened state of his racial consciousness, as well as where his racial allegiances lie. Most whites fail to understand that for many blacks, race is not merely a biological phenomenon; it is as well cultural. Yet in addition to being both biological and cultural, race is understood by black leftist intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals as being ideological. This explains the narrative framework within which Obama positions the events of his life that he relays, a template of sorts for all stories dealing with black self-discovery that perhaps Alex Haley, more than anyone else, helped to pioneer with, first, his autobiography of Malcolm X, and then, ten years later, Roots: this is the epic tale of a long and painful odyssey from the wilderness of a condition of racial self-ignorance, a condition inflicted by (who else?) whites, to the Promised Land of racial enlightenment, "Authentic Blackness." It begins in "racially oppressive" America and terminates in a journey, either literal or figuratively construed, back "home" in the Motherland, Africa.

Obama's is an account of his lifelong struggle to become Black. He is black by birth but Black by choice. "Away from my mother, away from my grandparents," Obama informs his readers, "I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant" (94 emphasis mine). Though no one may have known "exactly" what it meant for him to be Black, Obama knew that Blackness requires an unadulterated identification with Black Suffering as well as the conviction, too obvious to be to questioned by anyone other than a white person, that whites are "racist."

In the opening pages of Dreams, so as to disabuse anyone who may entertain them of any doubts regarding his "authenticity," Obama sets the tone for his book when he admits to harboring a mild resentment toward whites at the early age of "twelve or thirteen," when he was even "too young to know that he needed a race." It was then that he "ceased to advertise" his "mother's race" for fear "that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites…."

This subtle distrust that the young Obama felt toward whites would be stoked a few years later at his private Hawaiian high school, where he "would meet Ray and the other blacks close to my age who had begun to trickle into the islands, teenagers whose confusion and anger would help shape my own." It is worth quoting Obama's account of the "crash course" in race relations with which his new friends provided him, for it supplies us with profound insight into the manner with which our current president regards the vast majority of Americans over whom he presides.

"'That's just how white folks will do you,' one of them might say when we were alone. Everybody would chuckle and shake their heads, and my mind would run down a ledger of slights: the first boy, in seventh grade, who called me a coon; his tears of surprise — 'Why'dya do that?' — when I gave him a bloody nose. The tennis pro who told me during a tournament that I shouldn't touch the schedule of matches pinned up to the bulletin board because my color might rub off; his thin-lipped, red-faced smile — 'Can't you take a joke?' — when I threatened to report him. The older woman in my grandparents' apartment building who became agitated when I got on the elevator behind her and ran out to tell the manager that I was following her; her refusal to apologize when she was told that I lived in the building. Our assistant basketball coach, a young, wiry man from New York with a nice jumper, who, after a pick-up game with some talkative black men, had muttered within earshot of me and three of my teammates that we shouldn't have lost to a bunch of niggers; and who, when I told him — with a fury that surprised even me — to shut up, had calmly explained the apparently obvious fact that 'there are black people, and there are niggers. Those guys were niggers.'"

This review of "a ledger of slights" that he personally experienced, accompanied by a consideration of the abuses to which blacks generally have been subjected, leads Obama to the epiphany that there was something unique, and uniquely evil, about white cruelty.

"That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you were deserving of their scorn" (80).

Obama explains that during these critically formative years of adolescence, he "learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning," and while he hoped that "with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere," he couldn't escape "the feeling that something wasn't quite right . . ." This feeling was "a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder," or "a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball," or "the school principal told me I was cool." He didn't know it at the time, but Obama knew that these seemingly innocuous comments made by his white friends and acquaintances were the function of a "trick." "There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp" (82).

This suspicion of a "trick" was all but confirmed one night when Obama drove his two white friends, "Jeff" and "Scott," to an otherwise all black party at the home of "Ray," a black teenager from Los Angeles who apparently exerted a considerable degree of influence over Obama in the latter's quest for Authentic Blackness. Obama explains that after only about an hour or so, and after having displayed signs of discomfort — "They kept smiling a lot. They huddled together in a corner. They nodded self-consciously to the beat of the music and said 'Excuse me' every five minutes" — "Jeff" and "Scott" asked Obama to take them home.

In the car, "Jeff" put his arm on Obama's shoulder while expressing his evidently new found ability to empathize with the uneasiness he imagined (rightly, if Obama's recollections throughout this book are to be trusted) his black friends must experience being surrounded constantly by mostly whites. "'You know, man,' he said, 'that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties . . . being the only black guys and all.'"

Had he known, "Jeff" no doubt, like most whites, would have been shocked to learn of his friend's response to what was intended as nothing more than a gesture of good will and compassion. Obama writes: "I snorted. 'Yeah. Right.' A part of me wanted to punch him right there" (84).

Upon dropping off his friends, Obama states that, "…I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules."

He elaborates: "If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher . . . wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his."

Although he doesn't use the language of "institutional" or "structural racism," it was at this moment that it dawned upon the young Obama that there was such a thing, and that it was just as pervasive, and pernicious, as his future mentors would say it is.

"Whatever he [the White Man] decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning" (85 emphasis mine).

Obama concludes:

"Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger" (85).

Such is how our "post-racial" president, during adolescence, began to view the American racial landscape. So deeply embedded into the very fiber of the nation, its most fundamental and long-standing institutions, is white "racism" that individual whites, however benevolent their intentions, however much good will they express and even genuinely feel toward blacks, can't but perpetuate it, for underlying and informing their conscious thoughts, utterances, and conduct concerning race relations are unspoken, and, admittedly, often unconscious presuppositions regarding white superiority and black inferiority. Thus, for our president, it is exactly because this "institutional racism" "preceded and would outlast" whites' "individual motives and inclinations" that "any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning."

Although time and space restrictions preclude it, to this list of quotations from Obama betraying his deeply rooted, powerfully felt prejudices against whites, many more could effortlessly be added. Just a few, however, may suffice to demonstrate how thoroughly ingrained they actually are.

Shockingly, not even those whites who raised him are exempt from his contempt. Upon seeing a black, Brazilian film from the 1950's with his mother, Obama claims to have had another one of those revelatory moments of which his journey to "Authentic Blackness" is studded. Witnessing "the wistful gaze" on his mother's face as she enjoyed "the depiction of childlike blacks" on the screen, Obama realized that it was "a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different." This recognition repulsed him: "I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me." It was then and there, thanks to his mother, that Obama recognized that "The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart" (124).

So, in spite of the moving dedication that he writes to his mother in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope — which, not coincidentally, he authored over ten years later, after he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention of 2004 that catapulted him onto the stage of national politics, after, that is, he began to position himself for a run at the presidency — it is clear from his reflections throughout Dreams that Obama believed that even she was a captive of the omnipresent, omnipotent "institutional racism" that, as he said, renders all differences between "good whites" (like his mother) and bad whites "negligible."

The grounds on which prosecutors who have justly secured convictions for murder defendants have not been nearly as strong as those that exist to substantiate the case for Obama's allegiance to what I have here described as "ideological Blackness." Only those who choose to ignore this mountainous pile of evidence could think to deny it.

The election of a black person to the office of the American presidency has all but revoked "the Race Card" as a credible tactical device for leftists to employ in overcoming impediments to their agenda. And the election of this black person, a Black racialist who has spent nearly his entire life harboring what may aptly be called an animus toward whites, has given "the Tea Partiers" and their supporters a perhaps unprecedented opportunity to respond to the unfair charges of "racism" to which they have been subjected by Obama and his polemicists in the media with an invitation, an invitation to a dialogue that is long overdue: a genuinely honest, open discussion of race and "racism."