Warren Ballentine's Disgusting Comment to Juan Williams

Last night, Juan Williams appeared on the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News. One of the other guests was a radio talk show host named Warren Ballentine. The topic was the Rush Limbaugh controversy. The tone of the debate was that Ballentine was blasting Limbaugh for past racial remarks while Williams was pointing out that many of the alleged remarks have been undocumented at best and shown to be made up at worst. When Ballentine brought up Limbaugh's use of the song parody, "Barack the Magic Negro", Williams correctly pointed out that it was a parody on LA Times writer David Ehrenstein, who wrote an article entitled, "Barack the Magic Negro". At the conclusion of the discussion, Ballentine essentially told Williams to "go back to the porch".

This reference hearkens back to the days of slavery when so-called house slaves would sit on the porch while field slaves would do the back-breaking labor in the fields. It is akin to calling someone an "Uncle Tom".

As for "Barack the Magic Negro", this started a couple of years back when Ehrenstein wrote a piece by the same name in the Times which described candidate Obama as a "magical negro" who would assuage white guilt. The resultant song parody-to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon" featured a voice imitating Al Sharpton lamenting the rise of Obama though he didn't have the same "background" as Sharpton. When Williams pointed out the history of the song parody, Ballentine closed the discussion with the "porch" remark.

Unfortunately, this is all too common when certain blacks fail to toe the politically-correct line when it comes to racial debates. Williams is actually a liberal, but he is intellectually honest and unafraid to speak his own mind. He previously wrote a book whose theme was that it was time to for blacks to stop following the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Williams agreed with O'Reilly that the Limbaugh controversy was a "witchhunt".

That is the type of treatment people like Williams get from people like Ballentine. It is disgusting. The truth is that ten Warren Ballentines could not make one Juan Williams.