For Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency was nothing less than the final end to the Civil War:

“…..despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism - despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act - the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.”

This statement sadly reflects more of Friedman’s liberal pathology than a true understanding of this country’s attitude towards people of color. For the past sixty years, white people have fought and died for the civil rights of blacks, ensuring that nowhere else in the world did they have the same opportunities as they obtained right here in America. In our “all white” Republican party, there have been two black secretaries of state. Black people have been elected congresspersons, senators, mayors, governors and judges; two have been appointed supreme court justices, many have become generals in the Armed Forces.

There are black CEO’s of multi-national corporations; a black billionaire who is the most powerful talk show host in the history of television; a black movie star who has consistently been number one at the box office - all in a country where blacks represent twelve percent of our population. Our new first couple elect both attended Ivy League universities and Harvard Law School a generation ago. The advances made by the black middle class in the past fifty years have been remarkable; their achievements in politics, the military, athletics and the arts have been similarly outstanding and yet, for Mr. Friedman, there could be no closure to the Civil War until Obama time.

What should other minorities make of this statement?

There has still been no president who is Jewish, Chinese, Japanese or Hispanic, despite all these groups’ long and solid representation in our population, and in some cases, their proportional over-represenation in fields of higher learning and accomplishment. Should this be interpreted as prolonged evidence of deep-seated discrimination against all these groups? Will Mr. Friedman lobby for a candidate from each of these minorities to become president before he can erase the stigma of this country as a bastion of racism?

Or is racism reserved for the sole use of the black community in order to perpetuate the myth that white society alone is responsible for the plight of the black underclass.

In reality, Friedman’s statement is condescending and insulting to the achievement of Mr. Obama in winning this ultimate victory. It suggests that other whites like Tom Friedman, voted for the man for reverse racist reasons - simply for the color of his skin, and not for his own accomplishments. When Geraldine Ferraro suggested that there was an element of truth to this early on, she was banished from the Clinton campaign and upbraided by Mr. Friedman’s newspaper as well as other media sources.

We need to remember that Tom Friedman is the journalist who in 2002, floated the Saudi Peace Initiative calling for Israel’s withdrawal from all occupied territories in exchange for full Arab recognition of Israel and peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately, Friedman did not understand that this also implied the full return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel, a move that would have effectively cancelled the Jewish state completely. Similarly, today Friedman does not understand that black achievement in the United States has not been hampered for lack of a black presidential role model.

It would be miraculous if this milestone could cure the deep-seated failures that account for black illegitimacy, high school drop out rate, addiction, poverty and criminality. That civil war within the black community has still not ended and will take more effort on the part of the black brotherhood than witnessing the ceremonial inauguration of our fourty-fourth president.

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