Major Kudos to Soledad O'Brien [View all]

[cali]

She really lit into Breitbart editor Joel Pollak this morning. It was majorly satisfying to watch. She didn't countenance his lying, racist crap or dignify it in any way. In fact, how she dealt with him should be a template.


From Think Progress:

Breitbart.com and Fox News believe that President Obama’s affiliation with the late Harvard professor Derrick Bell, as evidenced from a hug they share in a video from 1990, is some kind of “smoking gun” for his perspectives on “racial division and class warfare.” Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard University and helped establish the study of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This morning, Breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak appeared on CNN to repeat this claim, but Soledad O’Brien was quick to point out that he had absolutely no understanding of CRT and that the clip presented no “bombshell” for the President:

O’BRIEN: What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it, I don’t get it. What was the bombshell?

POLLACK: Well, the bombshell is the revelation of the relationship between Obama and Derrick Bell—

<snip>

POLLACK: That’s correct. And Derrick Bell is “the Jeremiah Wright of academia.” He passed away last year, but during his lifetime he developed a theory called Critical Race Theory, which holds that the Civil Rights Movement was a sham and that White Supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown. Barack Obama was—

O’BRIEN: I’ll stop you there for a second and then I’m going to let you continue, but that is a complete misreading of Critical Race Theory. As you know, that’s an actual theory and you could Google it and someone would give you an good definition, so that’s not correct.

Watch the full exchange at the link:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/03/08/440585/breitbarts-bombshell-the-president-still-fights-for-racial-equality/