ColorLines editor Kai Wright takes a hard look at Andrew Breitbart's so-called last hurrah, which was supposed to create another Jeremiah Wright scandal for President Obama. Instead, it only made people speak ill of the dead — Breitbart himself.
Suggested Reading
From his grave, Andrew Breitbart threw one last (hopefully) stink bomb into the public square this week. It started as an effort to create another Jeremiah Wright scandal for President Obama. When that failed, it morphed into rightwing media’s latest anti-academic rant, this time targeting one of the most well respected scholars in the history of race studies.
Now, it’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead, but I’ll risk it, since that’s precisely what Breitbart’s own post-humous smear hoped to do, too. Before his sudden death last week, the professional hit-job artist vowed that he had explosive, damning video that would redefine the public image of Obama. Yesterday, as Breitbart.com prepared to finally release the film, BuzzFeed scooped them. What was it? A video from the archives of WGBH in Boston that showed Barack Obama being, well, Barack Obama.
In 1990, Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review and spoke at a Harvard protest that demanded diversity in hiring. Specifically, those gathered were concerned about the low number of black women who were offered tenure at the law school. The late Derrick Bell, who is considered the intellectual father of critical race theory, had announced an unpaid leave of absence from his own job as an act of protest. Bell was by then a celebrity in the world of academia; he was Harvard Law’s first tenured black professor.
Read Kai Wright's entire blog entry at ColorLines.
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.