Written by Walter Hecht   

As defined in Microsoft Encarta Dictionary, racism is:

"animosity toward other races: prejudice or animosity against people who belong to other races.
belief in racial superiority: the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior."
I am my brother's keeper, but I don't have any black brothers. That attitude is held by too many Americans today. It accounts for the constant, vile criticism of President Obama, which is based neither on fact nor logic.

In 1901, President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for advice and a meal. Washington was the Martin Luther King of his generation. He was at least 50% white, but the criticism that meal invoked was based, not on his white father, but on his mostly or all black mother. Roosevelt did not invite a black to the White House for a meal for the remaining seven years of his presidency.

108 years later, on the night of Barack Obama's inauguration, a group of white men sat down to dinner and decided to oppose EVERYTHING that the President would propose. Why did they do that and how did they think that they could get away with it? Barack Obama is half black and has a foreign sounding name. The constant criticism of the man and his agenda is not based solely on the fact that he is a Democrat in a country dominated by the GOP. Nor is it based on the fact that he had a white mother. Rather it is based on the fact that his father was a foreign black man, who Barack hardly knew. Thus racism is still alive and well in America today.