From Benghazi to Obamacare and a staggering array of things in between, President Obama appears invulnerable when it comes to the potential disasters that have marked his presidency. That the vast majority of those in the media share his left-wing politics partially explains this—but only partially.  

For the full story behind the Teflon nature of Obama’s administration, it is to David Horowitz and John Perazzo that we must turn.  And once we do, there can no longer remain any doubt that it is the President’s share of melanin that accounts for his seeming impenetrability to the sort of scrutiny and criticism to which a white president, regardless of party affiliation, would have been subjected.   

But it isn’t principally upon Obama that Horowitz and Perazzo set their sights. In 35 short pages, their Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream (BSP) enlists every syllable into the service of proving its thesis: contemporary American (and other Western) blacks are simply held to a vastly lower standard than whites.

The phrase “black skin privilege” is a play upon “white skin privilege,” a standard leftist buzzword that has long since functioned as the explanatory key among academics for accounting for the world’s evils, “for everything that was racially wrong  in America beginning with its constitutional founding.” 

Horowitz and Perazzo expose this for the drivel that it is while proving that if there is any “skin” that is privileged in today’s America, it is black, not white.  The authors are blunt: “In fact, for decades, at the hands of progressives white males have been the prime villains in the nation’s classrooms, and the principal targets of disapprobation and presumptive guilt in the general political culture as well.”

The authors of this powerful little pamphlet remind us of the swiftness with which the media rushed to convict “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman in the shooting death of black 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, as well as the white Duke University lacrosse players who were bogusly charged by a black stripper with rape. They also revisit the deafening silence with which these same media figures met the rapturous eruptions of blacks nationwide when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of double homicide.

Yet these are far from the only exhibits that Horowitz and Perazzo submit to substantiate the ubiquity of black skin privilege.  Demolishing one sacred Politically Correct idol after the other, the authors take down names and unveil facts that are as ugly as they are suppressed.

The degree to which American life is soaked in black skin privilege can be seen not just in the fact that Americans have now twice elected a black man to the presidency who is not only singularly unaccomplished professionally, but, “with an unrepentant terrorist [Bill Ayers] and a racial bigot [Jeremiah Wright] as his close collaborators,” gravely challenged ethically.  That ostensibly Christian clerics and some of the most reckless race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—high priests of what I have called the “Racism Industrial Complex”—can continue to command exorbitant fortunes and lofty praise by politicians and the media alike confirms this as well.

Horowitz and Perazzo even show that black skin privilege transcends continents.  Alluding to South Africa’s Bishop Demond Tutu, they write: “What white spiritual leader could support the torture-murders of South African blacks, compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and still be regarded as a moral icon? A black cleric like Bishop Desmond Tutu can.” (Indeed, as occasional Front Page Magazine contributor and former South African resident Ilana Mercer amply demonstrates in her, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, the new South Africa is black skin privilege on steroids.)

However, Horowitz and Perazzo don’t offer just a rogues’ list of well known names in their treatise on black skin privilege. By way of meticulously resourced statistics, they expose readers to the most inconvenient truths regarding the obscene levels of black-on-white crime—truths, that is, that will never spring from the lips of the professional “anti-racists” in the usual precincts of our culture.  And they disclose what promises to be a revelation to many Americans: within just “the last few years” (after Obama’s inauguration), “there have been hundreds of black race riots in more than fifty American cities” in which roving mobs of blacks “have targeted whites for beatings, shootings, stabbings and rapes [.]”

There is much more to be reaped from BSP.  Needless to say, those who benefit from black skin privilege will blast its authors as “racist” for just mentioning any of this. In contrast, people of good will, regardless of their color, will understand and appreciate that far from being animated by any racial animus, Horowitz and Perazzo are rather inspired by a vision of a common humanity and an American ideal rooted in the rule of law—not racial favoritism.

They deserve to be commended for their courage in daring to speak these truths. 

And the rest of us, of all races, owe it to ourselves and our posterity to give them a hearing by reading Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream.