The Five Hosts Agree That Morgan Freeman’s Comments About ‘Mixed-Race’ Obama Are ‘Race-Baiting’
On Friday, Fox News Channel’s hosts of The Five weighed in on comments made by actor Morgan Freeman who said that President Barack Obama cannot be considered America’s first black president because he is half-white. In a rare moment of agreement between co-hosts Bob Beckel and Greg Gutfeld, Beckel said that he thought Freeman’s comments were “unhelpful” and Gutfeld agreed that they were “race-baiting.”
RELATED: Morgan Freeman: Obama Isn’t America’s First Black President
After playing a clip of Freeman making those comments on National Public Radio, Beckel said “that’s true.”
“I’m not allowed to call him mulatto, right,” Beckel asked to which The Five hosts responded that he could not in near unison.
Gutfeld disagreed with Freeman who also said that President Obama has had to deal with unprecedented obstruction from Republicans, citing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who said that it was his party’s objective to see that Obama only served one term in the White House.
“That’s what opposition parties do,” said Gutfeld. “I don’t see that as an insult. That’s just how you play the game, right?”
“It’s not like he said that on inauguration day, he said it a week before the midterm elections in 2010,” said co-host Dana Perino.
Beckel asked Eric Bolling if he thought Obama was the first black president to which Bolling replied “that’s not for me to decide.”
“My question is, now that Morgan Freeman says he is not, does that mean the 87 percent support amongst the black community erodes,” asked Bolling.
“Why are we even doing this,” asked Kimberly Guilfoyle. “It’s ridiculous and it’s demeaning. I find this to not be helpful. I don’t know why Morgan Freeman is doing this because he is being racially divisive. This is race-baiting. I don’t like it at all.” Guilfoyle said that she encounters racial parsing herself as a person of Puerto Rican and Irish heritage.
Gutfeld says that the media has helped the United States to be the “most obsessed about race of any country in the history of the world.”
“The average American doesn’t think about race very much,” said Beckel. “If some people are raising it to divide for the Democrat’s side of this, that is a very small percentage of liberals who are doing that. But it’s not helpful for sure.”
Gutfeld said that Freeman’s point, albeit roundabout, was that Republicans – who do not like Obama because he is black – should like him because he is half-white. “It was, again, a different kind of race-baiting,” said Gutfeld.
Watch the segment below via Fox News Channel:
