Last Friday, Michelle Obama was the speaker for Topeka, Kansas’ districtwide high school graduation. She used that speech to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Reminding them that this landmark case began in Topeka, Michelle issued a ringing call to the assembled graduates to continue the fight against discrimination in our society.
Well, that didn’t sit well with Selwyn Duke, a columnist for Alan Keyes’ right-wing news site, Renew America. In his latest column, Duke said the First Lady should have used her speech to praise Western civilization, not engage in what he saw as race-baiting.
Duke was especially displeased that Michelle said that many of the graduating students were enjoying an experience “that would have been unimaginable in 1954.” Duke snaps that this experience “would have been unimaginable in 1554 or 554” because the institutions that made it possible didn’t exist at the time–“those institutions created by European/European-descent civilization.”
He claimed that Michelle was tacitly condemning a civilization that made her what she was when she should “kiss the ground trod by our ancestors and thank God for our civilization’s existence.” To his mind, Michelle had no business condemning injustice “while living a life of silk, satin and Sidwell Friends and dining on Kobe beef.”
Duke then appears to suggest Michelle was being a hypocrite for speaking out about situations where people are “still stopped on the street for the color of their skin,” while remaining silent about a white Atlanta-area family being attacked by a black mob in Savannah over Mother’s Day weekend. There’s one problem with that–all available evidence suggests that this incident wasn’t racially motivated.
I did a search for more information on this story, and the only sources trying to turn this into an incident of reverse racism are The New American–the mouthpiece of the John Birch Society–and WorldNetDaily. Yeah, those are REALLY reliable sources.
In Duke’s eyes, Michelle’s speech amounted to focusing on society’s evils while ignoring its achievements. To his mind, her speech was a classic example of how “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Apparently Duke expects us to live in a fantasy world while ignoring those evils.
Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
edited by tw
