Opinion: Neighbor Obama elected, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn denounce white supremacy

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Now that the United States has freely elected an African American as president, two of his friends, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, have come out against white supremacy.

In a new book, coincidentally titled ‘Race Course: Against White Supremacy,’ the two South Side Chicago neighbors of Barack Obama’s argue that the United States was built on white supremacy and, despite the November election, ‘the edifice of white supremacy is firm and still in effect.’

The couple, now both university teachers (she, on the right in the photo on the left, is at Northwestern, he’s at the University of Illinois-Chicago), were notorious radicals in the 1960s and co-founders of the radical Weather Underground that promoted violent protest.

‘I was on the 10 Most Wanted List,’ Dohrn boasts, ‘and I didn’t get shot. If I was black, things might have been different.’

During the recent presidential campaign, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain described Ayers as ‘a washed up terrorist’ and tried to associate the couple with Obama, whom they hosted for a fundraiser during his early state Senate election days.

With the campaign over, Third World Press is publishing the tome. “Part of the problem,’ Ayers explains in an interview in Ndigo magazine, ‘is that in this country and culture, we tend to remember only the good things and want to push the ugly stuff of our past under the rug. But if you don’t come to terms with it, then the legacy lengthens and comes with you. So we carry into the modern era all the baggage of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the selling out of human rights.

“What we wanted to do in this book is re-stir that legacy and talk about history.’

--Andrew Malcolm

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