April 29, 2011: News Stories, Bloggers Attempt to Paint Obama’s Father as Black Predator on ‘Innocent’ White Women

The progressive news and opinion magazine Mother Jones examines what columnist Adam Weinstein calls an attempt by Fox News and conservative bloggers to besmirch President Obama by attacking his father, Barack Obama Sr. Since the “birther” controversy has been conclusively proven to be groundless, he writes (see April 27, 2011), “the anger stage has kicked in: Birtherism has given way to fear-of-a-virile-black-man-ism.” Weinstein cites a lead story on Fox Nation, the blog of Fox News, titled “‘A Slippery Character’: New Details Emerge About Obama’s Father” (see April 28, 2011). The story is a “hatchet job” based on a British tabloid report that uses a newly released Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) file to slander and besmirch Obama Sr. The article “confirm[s] what President Obama had already stated in his memoir: His dad wasn’t the greatest of guys,” Weinstein writes. “But it’s all in how the article conveys that message: ‘With a father like this, it is little wonder President Obama did not want to release his full birth certificate.’” Weinstein says the way the Fox Nation article paints Obama Sr. “has it all: polygamy, the suggestion of illicit interracial sex, and the predatory sexual appetites of a dark-skinned African man. In fact, this theme’s got a name, or a couple of names, in popular Western culture: ‘Black beast,’ ‘black buck,’ ‘Mandingo.’ It’s the theory that black males are more animal than human, with an insatiable predilection for defiling white (read: virtuous) women.” Weinstein quotes Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint as writing in 1972: “There is little doubt that our white countrymen have been in a chronic state of paranoid fear over black male sexual power. ‘N***er’ jokes and pornographic literature abound with stories testifying to the black male’s sexual appetites and attributes. The preoccupation is evident in much white folklore.” Fox and conservative bloggers piggybacking on the story (see April 29, 2011) are attempting to say that “we, the people, elected the offspring of an unholy union between a bestial sexual predator and an innocent Kansas girl… a union that’s proven by the existence of the birth certificate!” [Mother Jones, 4/29/2011]