Obama Is The Other Within

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard and noted author, throws down an editorial in the Times today on why Hillary's "3 a.m. red-phone call" ad reminds him most of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of A Nation": I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat. Read it here.