On July 25, 2015, I published a post, “Obama calls for banning of American Revolution flag,” using an article from Washington Weekly News (WWN) as my source. That article, with no author, claimed that in his speech to the NAACP convention on July 21, 2015, Obama called for the Confederate and the Gadsden flags to be banned. From the WWN article:
In a 45-minute speech, Obama called for reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, reviewing the use of the solitary confinement and banning of Confederate and Tea Party Flags on public property, among other things.
“Any system that allows us to turn a blind-eye to hopelessness and despair, that’s not a justice system, that’s an injustice system,” Obama said Tuesday. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression, it’s the absence of racist, divisive symbols in our public discourse.”
The Gadsden flag — a yellow flag with a rattlesnake above the words “Don’t Tread On Me” — is the symbol of the American Revolution for Independence. The contemporary Tea Party movement adopted that flag as their banner.
While Washington Weekly News, by all indications, is a legitimate news site, that article carried a dateline of “Washington (ONN).” I should have known that ONN is the satirical Onion News Network that publishes entirely made-up pseudo news that are believable precisely because they are plausible.
In this case, given the anti-Confederate flag hysteria stirred up by the media and the Left, it is entirely plausible that Obama would propose that both the Confederate flag as well as the Gadsden flag be banned. But it is not true.
Please accept my apology.
I am grateful to a reader, Stosh64, who brought the hoax to my attention.
However, what Obama actually said in his speech to the NAACP bears our attention because he still insists that America is racist (albeit a more subtle racism), that Blacks in America are treated unfairly by the legal system and others, and that their lower achievements are due to the “legacy” of slavery (even though slavery ended 152 years ago).
Note: On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — an executive order that, in a single stroke, changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from “slave” to “free.” By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and had liberated all of the designated slaves.
Not once in his speech did Obama place the responsibility of Blacks’ life circumstances (low educational achievements, unemployment, crime, imprisonment, broken families) on Blacks themselves. And his solution for their problems is more spending, more welfare and bigger government, now called “investments in our communities.”
Here are quotes from Obama’s NAACP speech, from the White House’s transcript:
“We made progress, but our work is not done. By just about every measure, the life chances for black and Hispanic youth still lag far behind those of their white peers. Our kids, America’s children, so often are isolated, without hope, less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to earn a college degree, less likely to be employed, less likely to have health insurance, less likely to own a home.
Part of this is a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequalities that compounded over generations. (Applause.) It did not happen by accident. (Applause.) Partly it’s a result of continuing, if sometimes more subtle, bigotry — whether in who gets called back for a job interview, or who gets suspended from school, or what neighborhood you are able to rent an apartment in….
There’s a long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America…. [In too many cases, our criminal justice system ends up being a pipeline from underfunded, inadequate schools to overcrowded jails….. African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates. About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now. Among white men, that number is one in 214.
The bottom line is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law. (Applause.) …A growing body of research shows that people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained. African Americans are more likely to be arrested. They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime. (Applause.) And one of the consequences of this is, around one million fathers are behind bars. Around one in nine African American kids has a parent in prison.
…we have to stand up to those who are determined to slash investments in our communities at any cost — cutting preschool programs, cutting job-training programs, cutting affordable housing programs, cutting community policing programs.
~Éowyn