If I said “the World Trade Center was built by red haired men”, would that be a true statement? We all know that the wording intends more than “red haired men helped build the World Trade Center”; it intends sole focus on the red haired workers.

Let’s stop being coy about this. Obama intended to emphasize specifically the slave labor, and to do so for effect. There is nothing wrong with that; given the circumstances, it is understandable. We all know why it was done.

Where the Left goes off the rails is the vehemence with which they subsequently denounced anyone who said “some of the workers who built the White House were not slaves”. Bill O’Reilly gives the historical facts in context of slave contribution to the White House, all true and verifiable, yet he is denounced on political grounds, thus confirming that Obama’s statement was intended politically, not historically. Politifact judged the statement historically, not politically. Not the same.

The Left is incensed that anyone would not allow the emphasis on slave labor alone to pass without comment. Mere comment itself is denounced. Fuller context is criticized as somehow anti-black. Other viewpoints are shut down, and done so forcibly. They come close to the line of calling anyone who comments in that manner racist.

From the nature of that blowback, even here in Medium, it becomes clear that blacks wish to have a separate truth on the subject, based on the subset of facts they choose, free from the confines of historical fact, and immune from all comments based on larger facts.

In that context, Politifact ought to qualify their judgement of Obama’s statement as “true, within the separate black truth on the subject”.