When I read the new allegations by Donald Trump about President Obama it brought back painful memories. It's an old story. Trump says he heard the President was a terrible student then wonders how a terrible student could get into Columbia then Harvard. He doesn't offer any proof that the President was a terrible student, just puts it out there. To add to the insult, he says he has friends with good, smart sons who can't get into Harvard.

Here's why this hit so close to home for me. I went to what I would call a pretty good high school. I got good grades. I was accepted to some pretty high end schools. I ended up going to UCLA. I got in because of grades. I wasn't an athlete, but the assumption was, by many of the students, both white and black, was that I got there either because of some minority scholarship or I was on an athletic scholarship. They didn't know anything about me, where I had come from, but in looking at my black face the first thing they thought was there must be a special reason I was in college.

I got that at orientation, got that in classes, got that from counselors. Just because I didn't fit the mold of a black student they had in their minds.

It was my experience at UCLA that got me radicalized. I knew racism, experienced it, but the racism I got was in spurts, in little incidents that I could easily say was someone's personal issue. When I was at UCLA I hit institutional racism, and the sad part was no one thought of it as racism. It was always I assumed, or considering statistics you could see how a certain conclusion could be made. No one bothered to ask before assuming, or taking it at face value I earned the right to be there, not that it was some 'gift'.

I'm going to be as assuming to Donald Trump as I was treated so many years ago. Donald Trump is saying a black guy from Hawaii didn't have the breeding to be in Harvard or Columbia. Since he got into those universities, it must have been under an affirmative action program, meaning by putting this non deserving black man into the university it prevented a well deserving white student from getting in. It's more proof that this black man is getting a pass on things a white man would never get away with. That is what Donald Trump is saying.

Pundits need to stop giving Donald Trump a pass when he says racist and bigoted words. He needs to be called out, he needs to be embarrassed. We have to stop treating him like some quaint, cranky neighbor who is endearing and harmless. He's not. If you want to say what he is doing is an act, OK, it's an act, but by the polling out there people are listening and like what they hear. They don't see what he says as a joke.

It's the same thing when you have Beck or Limbaugh making crazy comments on their shows. While you may be able to listen and figure they are doing it for shock value, or doing it to line their pockets, there are people out there who believe what they hear. Forget the extreme cases where people have taken up arms because of things said on those shows. The people they most influence are the Archie Bunker types; people who look at their job prospects, the national depression and wonder what happened to the country. They want someone to blame and these guys gives it to them. It's the Jesse Helms commercial with the white man crumbling up the rejection letter because some minority, some illegal alien, some 'darkie', took a job that was rightfully theirs. They become examples to other unemployed people who don't like the idea corporations are squeezing out their jobs by taken them overseas or making use box stores which hire lots of people but in numbers hire less than hundred of small mom and pop and local shops would. They figure it's not easy to fight the corporation but it's easy to blame the guy in the same condition you are but happens to be of another color who got the one job available.

That's what rants like Donald Trump fan into a raging racial fire.