Jonathan Zimmerman: Newt Gingrich is Right: Obama Shares Anticolonial Values—American Values

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”]

By now, you’ve probably heard about Newt Gingrich’s weird comments last week linking President Obama’s worldview to “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior." But here’s something you probably haven’t heard: Mr. Gingrich was right.

President Obama was influenced by anticolonialism. So were you, if you’re a child of the civil rights era. The battles for independence in the Third World profoundly affected the black struggle for freedom in the United States, and vice versa. And that’s what Gingrich doesn’t want you to know.

Nor does Dinesh D’Souza, whose Forbes article prompted Gingrich’s remarks in the National Review Online. According to Mr. D’Souza, a well-known conservative commentator, anticolonialism “is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America.” D’Souza attributes this doctrine to Obama and his father – who came to the United States from Kenya – and contrasts it to the “color-blind ideal” of Martin Luther King, Jr....