The idea of finding video of Barack Obama speaking when he was a student is something that has seemingly been a dream of many on the right for four or five years now. Presumably, they believe that there’s some video evidence out there of a 20-something Barack Obama unveiling his secret plan to move to Chicago, become a Senator, run for President, and turn us all into Kenyan anti-colonialists or something.
Well, Buzzfeed scored something of a coup today in uncovering video of Barack Obama speaking in 1991 when he was President of Harvard Law Review:
It was perhaps Barack Obama’s most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell’s dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.
Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.
Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.
Here’s the video:
Nothing much here that’s likely to be controversial, but of course I’m sure someone will try to make something of it. It is interesting for historical reasons, though, and many commentators have noted how much the young Obama sounds like the guy who run for President some 17 years later.
Update: Take it for what it’s worth, but the Breitbart folks are claiming there’s more to this video:
Earlier today, Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith announced on Twitter that video researcher Andrew Kaczynski had released “the mysterious Harvard/Obama/race video that the Breitbart folks have been talking about.”
The video, which Kaczynski says was “licensed from a Boston television station,” shows a young Barack Obama leading a protest at Harvard Law School on behalf of Prof. Derrick Bell, a radical academic tied to Jeremiah Wright–about whom we will be releasing significant information in the coming hours.
However, the video has been selectively edited–either by the Boston television station or by Buzzfeed itself. Over the course of the day, Breitbart.com will be releasing additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia.
Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollak and Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro will appear on The Sean Hannity Show to discuss the tape. The full tape will be released tonight on Fox News’ Hannity.
What did I tell you?
