Juan Williams on Liberals’ Hate for Black Conservatives

Nothing like a dose of reality to wake up a liberal.

Have you heard the news?

Condoleezza Rice lacks “moral authority.” She fails to meet the standards of “exemplary citizenship” and she does not have what it takes to “inspire” graduating college seniors.

That crazy thinking comes from the New Brunswick Faculty Council of Rutgers University. They voted last week to ask university leadership to cancel Rice’s invitation to be this year’s Commencement Speaker and receive an honorary degree.

Yes, apparently the first African-American woman to serve as National Security Adviser and the nation’s Secretary of State doesn’t have what it takes to be honored by Rutgers.

Rice holds a Ph.D. in political science. She has taught college for decades. She was Provost of Stanford University. She worked her way up from a working-class family in the segregated South to the highest echelon of world power and politics.

But according to the Rutgers faculty council, all of that is negated by her service in President George W. Bush’s administration.

……Rice is smart, disciplined, hard-working and the model of an inspiring modern American. She personifies the American Dream. She is living inspiration for a young person trying to accomplish great work no matter what the barriers. And in Rice’s generation there were some serious barriers starting with her race and gender.

That is why New Jersey Republican State Assemblywoman Mary Pat Angelini called the Rutgers faculty’s wrongheaded decision “appalling and an embarrassment to our state.”

“This is nothing more than a political firestorm fueled by their hatred of an opposing ideology, and President George W. Bush in particular. Dr. Rice and the people of New Jersey deserve better,” Angelini said.

There is an added element at play here. There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.

We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).

……I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.

Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.

Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

I’ve experienced some of this vitriol firsthand when I have veered by liberal orthodoxy. I wrote about it in my book “Muzzled – the Assault on Honest Debate.”

This shunning of Rice is especially troubling coming from a great American university. This is the place where debate and dissenting views are to be valued as sacred.

Congratulations, Juan. Your article is a refreshing example of common sense, even though you’re not conservative.

The hate and physical assaults leveled at black Tea Party conservatives is regularly ignored and in some cases, excused by the leftwing media. Black Republicans like Mia Love, Kenneth Gladney, James T. Harris, Bill Randall, Condoleeza Rice, Tim Scott, Stacey Dash, and Allen West, are often treated with obscenities and horrific violence by so-called “tolerant” lefties. Their sin is choosing substance over pigment; which the Left finds intolerable.