Hearty perennial crank and occasional academic Cornel West continues his scorned lover's feud with the president.
West is one of Obama's most vociferous critics on the left, previously having condemned Obama as a "war criminal," a "Republican in blackface," and unworthy of being sworn into office with Martin Luther King Jr.'s Bible. (Audio after the jump)
In the wake of last week's Supreme Court decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, coming little more than a year after Obama unsurprisingly announced that he flipped in favor of gay marriage, West took a sideways swipe at the chief executive by claiming that gays are getting ahead in the "age of Obama" while blacks are relegated to second-class status.
Here is what West said while talking with Tavis Smiley, co-host of their weekly radio show (h/t, audio, Brian Maloney at mrctv.org) --
WEST: We're living in an age where we black folk are just being pushed to the back of the bus (West pronouncing it "buth") in terms of our visibility, of our suffering, in terms of the intensity of our exclusion, especially our poor black youth, especially with ...
SMILEY: Right.
WEST: ... the new Jim Crow and so on. And we have to be honest about that. Again this has something to do of course with what history books will say, the irony of the age of Obama in which black folk found themselves pushed to the back, our gay brothers and lesbian sisters more and more pushed to the center.
Of course, it's gotten tougher making the case that blacks have been consigned to the back of the bus when a black guy is driving it and he's been doing that for several years now.
