By Lee A. Daniels

Don’t you just hate it when blacks are this good?

The Obama Presidency is less than a year old, but by now many of us are accustomed to the perverse, racist notions that have oozed from the moldering, pathological psyches of some Americans since the majority of voters elected Barack Obama president. Nonetheless, as in the days of blacks’ struggle for basic civil rights, something new always occurs to remind us of racism’s ugly, imaginative resiliency.

Washington Times columnist Wesley Pruden’s November 17 opinion piece excoriating Obama for his trip to China offers a revealing example of that truism. For those who’ve read his arch-conservative ramblings over the years, Pruden’s column, saturated with racist condescension and hypocrisy, will bring to mind the withering assessment Yale Law scholar Charles L. Black applied to the infamous Plessy decision. Prudent’s argument is one in which “the curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”

Pruden is aghast at the respect Obama has shown for the traditions of sovereignty of other countries and other heads of state, especially those countries whose populations are not white. He’s one of that school of pundits who from the safety of their armchairs demand that the U.S. play the bully-boy with those they deem our “inferiors” on the world stage. Obama’s behavior, Pruden declares, traduces the standards the Founding Fathers set for America’s relationship with the rest of the world.

“Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about,” he fulminates. [Obama’s presidential predecessors] learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye.”

It’s hard to believe that even an arch-conservative could pretend that in fact the Founding Fathers did not also establish a noxious un-freedom – namely, Negro Slavery, and a lack of liberty for so-called free blacks – on an equal footing with the freedom they so boldly asserted for white men like them.

But Pruden wasn’t finished. Declaring Obama’s respect for other traditions of sovereignty “a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority,” Pruden opined that “It’s really no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of ‘the 57 states’ is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.”

Now that, I thought to myself upon reading it, is a sentence worthy of a man well-known for his neo-Confederate sympathies, and whose father, Wesley Pruden, Sr., was a leader of the racist opposition in Little Rock, Arkansas to the 1957 integration of Central High School. Pruden’s “natural instinct or blood impulse” leads him to find black Americans – be they of mixed parentage like Barack Obama or not – intolerable. This is especially so with Obama, of course, because Obama, superbly credentialed in traditionally American terms, crafted a multiracial coalition which persuaded millions of Americans of all backgrounds to select him to lead the nation through these perilous times.

If you’re one of the Wesley Prudens of America, don’t you just hate that?

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.