Video: Palin Links Obama’s Derrick Bell Speech to Pre-Civil War Racism

For those still wondering what the big deal is behind the newly-surfaced Barack Obama video from 1991 – touted by the late Andrew Breitbart as “a bombshell” that would undermine Obama’s reelection efforts – Sarah Palin thought she’d enlighten everyone Thursday night during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

The video clip released earlier this week showed Obama, then a student at Harvard Law School, praising late professor Derrick Bell at a rally in support of the university hiring more minority faculty. [Scroll down to watch.]

According to the former Alaska governor, the clip shows that the president is “bringing us back…to days before the Civil War” when racial discrimination was prevalent.

“He is bringing us back…to days before the Civil War, when unfortunately too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal,” she said. “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.”

Earlier in the show, Palin accused Obama of “trying to divide” the country, “based along lines of gender, of religion, of income, even of race,” citing the president’s association with Bell.

“Look at his embracing of Derrick Bell, the radical college racist professor whom he…embraced literally and figuratively asking others to open their hearts and minds to the radical agenda of a racist like Derrick Bell who believed that white men oppress blacks and minorities,” she said. “And Barack Obama, evidently at least at the time, believed what Derrick Bell believed.”

The 1991 clip was touted as game-changing by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart at CPAC, weeks before he unexpectedly passed away. However, the clip was also included in a 2008 PBS special, and has made few waves outside of conservative circles. [Scroll down to watch.]

At the time of the video, Bell had announced he would take an unpaid leave from Harvard until the school brought a woman of color onto the law school’s tenured faculty. Bell was also a strong advocate of critical race theory, which posits that racist beliefs underlie many of the country’s legal foundations.