On Sean Hannity's Fox News show last night, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin claimed that Barack Obama wants to return American to discrimination similar to that of the days "before the Civil War."
ThinkProgress captured the video from the show, which delved into the supposedly unseemly college years of President Obama. So far, the response to a much hyped-old video of a speech in which Obama praises Derrick Bell, the pioneering and controversial law professor — which included a hug between the two — has yielded a collective shrug.
Here's Palin on the Obama/Bell connection:
Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that that gravity, that mistake, took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.
The controversy around Obama's support for Derrick Bell posits that the president was a supporter with Bell, a staunch and influential advocate of affirmative action and diversity in hiring. Bell was a pioneer of critical race theory, which examines the way the relationship between law and power. At the rally, Obama compared Bell to Rosa Parks.