Byron Allen is a TV personality and entertainment executive turned concerned citizen, and he wants you to know that he is not happy with the way Obama’s presidency has affected the well-being of the black community.
In a street interview with TMZ, Allen lashed out at President Obama, saying that he hasn’t done enough to give black people in America a leg up.
Via the Hollywood Reporter [emphasis mine]:
“Black people have fallen further behind under President Obama,” said Allen, who also criticized Obama for having referred to the looters and arsonists in last month’s Baltimore riots as “thugs.”“President Obama is, at this point, a white president in blackface,” Allen said. “Black America would have done much better with a white president.”
Watch:
In their coverage on this, Mediaite remembers that Allen isn’t exactly new to the race game. He recently filed a lawsuit against Comcast, claiming that the company paid off Al Sharpton, and accusing Comcast of having a policy of not dealing with “real African-American-owned companies.”
Allen may be a perpetual race-baiter (in his comments about Comcast’s dealings with the black community, he likened the relationship to, “just give him 50,000 and a bucket of chicken and we’re good,”) but we can still glean a nugget of wisdom from this interview. As a country, we will never know how things may have been different under a white president; that decision has been made, and now we’re left to deal with the consequences of our actions. What we do know is that, since Obama was elected, we’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the number of people who are willing to publicly focus on race as the deciding factor for…just about everything.
Maybe that’s the problem. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that that’s the problem. We’ve become so focused on race that every other piece of information is either shunted to the side, or added on to the analysis as a footnote. What happened in Baltimore isn’t just a black problem; it’s a human problem rooted in ignorance and poverty, and something that everyone should be paying attention to.
People like Allen, however, can’t focus on anything beyond the skin-deep differences of the people in the streets.
In Obama’s America, there’s no such thing as black and white, living and breathing and succeeding and hurting together; there’s only division, and a battalion of lieutenants tasked with maintaining that division.
The narrative depends on it.
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