"...Austin Hill...you just a racist; you just can’t handle the black man bein’ in charge..."
Those remarks were left for me in a voicemail message about six weeks ago. The call was placed to my Blackberry one weekday morning while I was on-air hosting talk radio in Phoenix, Arizona.
I don’t know who the woman was that made the call (the "caller i.d." was blocked), and I didn’t recognize the voice. But somebody who had access to my personal mobile number left that message for me at a very strategic time – a time when I was obviously not going to answer (because I was hosting a talk show!).
The call also seemed to correlate in a timely fashion with remarks I was making on the radio about some of President Obama’s policy proposals.
At about the moment that I was questioning the economics of Obamacare – President Obama has not explained how our government can possibly supply a greater quantity of a higher quality healthcare service to more consumers for less money than is currently spent on healthcare, and he can’t explain that because it is economically not possible – someone hurled the old familiar accusation at me. I dared to question, and even criticize the policies of our President – yes, America's "First Black President" – so, therefore, I was declared to be a "racist."
I’m well acquainted with the "racist" accusation. During the 2007 – 2008 presidential campaigns, I was doing daily talk radio in Washington, D.C., a metropolitan region with a large Black population. When then-Senator Obama would emerge as a topic of conversation (which he did most every day), at least a couple of the callers to my show were obliged to declare me a "racist" for disagreeing with the Senator.
I suspected at the time that there was a coordinated effort among some (not all) Obama supporters to infiltrate talk radio with the "racist" accusations, because I heard it on other talk shows. I observed this happening with local talk show hosts throughout the country, while national hosts Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mike Gallagher all got an ear-full of the "r-word" as well.
In light of this routine pattern of Obama contrarians being automatically declared "racists," it may be a shock for some to learn that one of my most popular and most-read national editorial columns was a piece I wrote praising Barack Obama, a piece that was published here at Townhall.com