Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, after winning the Democratic primary on Tuesday for city council in Ward 8, ranted against Asian small business owners in the District and said, “they ought to go.”
“We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops,” Barry, a liberal Democrat, said in remarks that were captured by a local television station. “They ought to go…and we need African-Americans to take their place.”
On Thursday, Barry did not back down from his comments, saying he singled out Asians because they own “ninety percent of all the small restaurants in Ward 8, at least.” According to the Washington Post, this percentage has not been verified.
Barry then went on Twitter and tweeted, “My comments were taken out of context & construed as disparaging 2 entire Asian biz community. We DO deserve our bizs t/b nice places in W8!”
It is hard to see how Barry’s comments were taken out of context, to say the least.
Barry’s rhetoric is anti-capitalistic, and his idea that African-Americans need to take the place of Asian small business owners represents liberal social engineering at its worst.
More disturbing, though, is the failure of liberal leaders and the mainstream media to highlight Barry’s overt racism and resoundingly condemn it, especially when one considers that the liberal elite and the mainstream media joined together to do everything they could to nationalize and fabricate Trayvon Martin’s tragic death into a white-on-black hate crime, even though George Zimmerman is Hispanic and evidence suggests he was acting in self defense.
If liberal leaders like Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson want to shine a light on racism and prejudice, should they not shine a spotlight on Barry’s words?
Shouldn’t the mainstream media, which painstakingly edited tapes and videos to manufacture racism to exploit Trayvon Martin’s death, blanket the airwaves by playing Barry’s comments over and over again so they can continue to remind America that racism and prejudice are wrong? They would not even have to make any edits to make Barry’s words racial. All they have to do is play his words.
And shouldn’t Washington, D.C. resident President Obama, who has weighed in on every conceivable issue in which he saw potential political gain (he said the cops who arrested Henry Louis Gates acted stupidly; called Sandra Fluke; told the national press corps that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon; and even had his spokesman, Jay Carney, say that he thought a woman should be given membership at the private, Augusta National golf club) use Barry, a prominent leader in the city in which he resides, to spotlight the ills of such prejudicial words?
It could even be a “teachable moment.”
Obama, after all, came onto the national scene in 2004 with a Democratic convention speech that called for a uniting of an America that was neither red or blue nor African-American, Hispanic, or Asian.
And yet, most of the liberal community and mainstream press, which often goes out of its way to see racism even when there is not, has stood silent and ignored the prejudicial words of a liberal Democrat.
This type of rhetoric is not new to the infamous Barry, who is associated more with crack cocaine and prostitutes than his governing record. In 2010, he accused a white D.C. administrator of racist hiring practices despite not having any evidence to back up his assertion.
Also not new is the double standard of liberal groups and the mainstream media in not shouting down overt, unmanufactured racism and prejudice from leaders on their side of the political aisle.
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