Is this that post-racial world I’ve been hearing about?
Tavis Smiley, the bestselling author of the “Covenant With Black America,” is in a world turned upside down. He said he’s being “hammered,” “barbecued,” and is “catching hell” from black Americans for suggesting that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) made a major mistake by declining to speak at the State of the Black Union event that Smiley plans to host next week in New Orleans.
“There’s all this talk of hater, sellout and traitor,” Smiley said to me in a telephone interview. Smiley even mentioned getting death threats, but wouldn’t elaborate. He said his office has been flooded with angry e-mails. “I have family in Indianapolis. They are harassing my momma, harassing my brother. It’s getting to be crazy,” Smiley said.
I think your blurb is misleading. The hell he is catching appears, at least from the comments mentioned in the article, to be from people who are criticizing Smiley for being unrealistic in expecting Obama to leave the campaign trail to speak at a conference in a state that has already voted. Which is different from what you were suggesting, i.e., that he was being attacked simply for criticizing Obama.
Then there are the comments that haven’t been reprinted which are too vicious for the WaPo to reprint. That hardly sounds like news — for whatever reason, the internecine Clinton-Obama flame wars on the blogs have been pretty harsh, so whatever names are being called over there are probably not much worse than what you’ll find elsewhere where the two camps meet.
Unnecessary disclaimer: I share all your doubts about the candidate and how he will perform if elected. And I share, to a degree, the concerns about the uncritical enthusiasm of many of his supporters. But I think the African-American community — some of whose leaders are still campaigning for HRC — has been a lot more high-minded and open-minded on the issue of race than, let’s say, the white community, at least if Ed Rendell is to be believed.