Touré: Herman Cain Is Nothing More Than a Black 'Minstrelsy' Entertainer

The liberal media are clearly in a full-scale panic over the possibility that a black conservative could either win the Republican presidential nomination or become the eventual victor's running mate.

On MSNBC's The Last Word Monday, left-wing author Touré went on a racially charged attack on Herman Cain referring to him as a black "minstrelsy" entertainer (video follows with transcript and commentary):

O’DONNELL: Joining me now is Touré, Time.com contributor and author of "Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, What It Means To Be Black Now," a work of "unsparing honestly," according to Harvard Professor Orlando Paterson’s "New York Times" review of the book. Touré thank you very much for joining me tonight.

TOURE, AUTHOR, "WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS": Thanks for having me.

O’DONNELL: I want to refresh the memory of some of our younger viewers, or actually introduce it to them for the first time, where this phrase high-tech lynching entered Republican politics. Let’s listen to Clarence Thomas at his Senate confirmation hearing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLARENCE THOMAS, SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: This is high-tech lynching. I can not shot shake off these accusations because they play to the worst stereotypes we have about black men in this country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’DONNELL: Touré, what did -- there’s just this blender of Republican racial politics that’s gotten mixed up together. I can’t make any sense of it. Guide us through this.

TOURE: Well, one thing I see -- saw Rush Limbaugh talking about, we see who the real racists are. And Clarence Thomas is using that same sort of bazooka to fire back -- is that when we point out moments of racism or moments of minstrelsy in Herman Cain’s example, they just fire back and they just use the words racism; that is racist; you are racist.

So it becomes this sort of negating tool, that we will just say racism wherever we see any racial politics taking place. We will say the race card is being played anytime anybody points out a moment of racism. And that just sort of muddles the conversation to where a lot of people are like, I don’t want to be part of this at all. It seems that two people are fighting, and I don’t understand what is going on.

But I think that Cain, interestingly, does not exist without Obama preceding him. He sort of rights the ship in a lot of people’s minds, or rights the scales. Because Obama is alpha. He is brilliant. He’s a man that you had to take seriously. He’s a constitutional law professor that you had to take seriously when he spoke. Cain sort of reasserts the scales the way people want it to be, in a lot of ways. He’s charismatic, but he’s a lightweight. His ideas are not serious. They’re not well thought out.

Cain is a lightweight?

I guess Touré missed the part of Cain's biography wherein he graduated with a Masters degree in computer science from Purdue.

That might not be considered as all that impressive in 2011 given the number of these given out in today's high-tech world, but in 1971, that was quite a feat, especially for a poor black man from Atlanta.

Touré must also have missed that while Cain was working towards this degree, he was a ballistics analyst for the Department of the Navy making him in today's parlance a rocket scientist.

Of course, despite running numerous major corporations, Cain was also the chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, a position requiring economic and financial acumen Barack Obama could only dream of.

But none of that impresses the author of "Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, What It Means To Be Black Now" as much as someone teaching constitutional law.

Please also note the racial overtones in, "He sort of rights the ship in a lot of people’s minds, or rights the scales." This was the same nonsense spoken by Democratic strategist Karen Finney last week when she told MSNBC's Martin Bashir, "I think [Republicans] like [Cain] because they think he's a black man who knows his place."

But Touré wasn't done:

TOURE: There is this constant minstrelsy aspect that he keeps bringing up. This is not something that we’re just making up out of whole cloth. He is the one who says he wants the Secret Service to call him Corn Bread. He is the one who says things like "oh, shucky ducky" when he starts.

This is deep black slang that he is using, that we have not seen on a national public stage before. And even in the yellow flower ad that you brought out on your show a few days ago, isn’t he the one who gets punched in his own ad? Do I remember that correctly?

What sort of man, who presents himself as alpha and wanting to be the leader of the free world, would get punched in his own campaign ad? It doesn’t make any sense.

And yet Cain allows the GOP to have this sort of force where it’s like, well, we’re not racist; we are supporting this black man. Even at the same time that he sort of admits this myth of black facility (ph) and just sort of self abnegation, and like you don’t have to take us seriously sort of thing that Obama threw completely out of whack, because you had to take him dead seriously.

O’DONNELL: Yes, he -- he seems to present himself more as an entertainer. Today he actually at the end of his speech to the National Press Club, he sang. He turned to song. He is more of an entertainer, in many ways, than he is a candidate, isn’t he?

TOURE: Yes. I mean, this way that Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, the blacks who are running for president have presented themselves as serious intellectuals. We are not entertainers. We may have a little fun now and then. But we are not here to entertain you. We are here to lead you.

And here comes Herman Cain, reasserting the scales. Yes, I am an entertainer. I’m here to entertain you.

It's tough to believe this is going on in the year 2011.

One could argue that as it pertains to civil rights, America took a huge leap forward in 2008 when it elected its first black president.

Sadly, liberals - even black liberals - are not yet ready for a black conservative.

How many years will it take for this prejudice to be eradicated? 

(H/T Breitbart TV)