Breitbart’s Site Got Barack and Bell Wrong

Let’s hope they have more video, because hug-gate just shows that once upon a time, Obama was black.

I have a confession to make to the folks at Breitbart.com: I’m a biracial lawyer married to a black woman who is both better looking and more popular than I am. I’ve never served in the Illinois state Legislature, but I was in North Carolina on Wednesday. I’ve never hugged, or even met, the late former Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell. But I have heard of him. Sound familiar?

If I were taller, richer and smarter and killed Osama bin Laden last year, I could be Barack Obama.

Alas, I’m not. But if you factor in attendance at a few college diversity rallies in the ’90s, I could be almost any middle-class black person you know.

Which is where Breitbart.com went wrong this week with its breathless release of archival video showing then-law student, now-President Obama introducing the controversial but well-respected Bell at a campus protest in 1990.

The question isn’t “What’s Obama doing there?” — it’s “If you weren’t there, then what were you doing?”

Forward to the 6:33 mark and judge for yourself.

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The video, which shows Obama warmly praising Bell and later hugging him, is meant to reignite a Rev. Jeremiah Wright-like controversy — portraying Obama as the closet radical and reverse racist that the far right always told you he was. After all, Bell, a tenured Harvard professor, once wrote a civil rights parable (later made into an HBO short film) that had space aliens, Jews and slaves in it. Surely, then, Obama is racist.

Maybe the best way to understand just how unnewsworthy the hug video is is to imagine how Obama’s two best-known liberal black detractors, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, might react to it. I can’t say for sure, but they’d probably rip Obama for showing up to give a speech without having demonstrated any genuine commitment to the issue of faculty diversity. After all, Obama was busy studying and editing the Harvard Law Review. Surely, then, Obama is a sellout.

Again, judge for yourself.

Read this article in it’s entirety by Attorney David Swerdlick on The Root