There’s nothing ‘racist’ about Boris Johnson’s Obama comments

Nick Cohen is predictably over-the-top in his response to Boris Johnson’s piece about President Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in today’s Sun.

He begins by claiming he’s approaching this subject ‘with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey’. He then goes on to reprimand Boris for suggesting Obama has an ‘ancestral dislike of the British empire’ on account of his ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage and links this to his support for the Remain campaign. We’ll come to that comment in a minute, but Cohen goes on to conflate these remarks with the worst excesses of the birther movement:

I’m not someone who throws accusations of racism around – it’s too serious a charge to devalue. But, come now, the fantasy that Obama is the heir of the Mau-Maus with no right to govern is a racist lie that appeals to deep, dark traditions in the US. From slavery, through the Civil War, the backlash against Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, the argument has been the same: blacks have no right to vote, and black politicians have no right to rule.