First off, I predict that it will be necessary to establish from the outset that I am not claiming that anyone who doesn't support Barack Obama is a racist. The people I'm discussing right now are not those who take perfectly legitimate issue with Obama's stance on any of the policy decisions that comprise today's political landscape. What I'm talking about is the faction of the population who believe that the President is not an American citizen, or that his presidency represents a threat to uniquely American values.
Secondly, I'm aware of the irony of upholding the phenomenon of the first black presidency as an indicator of the racial injustices coursing though our society. I'm also aware that we've come immeasurably far from the days of "coloured only" water fountains and regular unpunished lynchings. I appreciate as much as anyone that African Americans can vote without being threatened with death, that prejudices in housing or employment are punishable by law, and I am moved beyond words that our predominantly white society elected a black man to be their leader. There's no question in my mind that the 2008 election is the most significant civil rights-related event that will happen in any of our lifetimes. Nevertheless, today's racial problems by and large stem from the morally bankrupt notion that there simply is no more racism in America, and if we choose to ignore these problems on the grounds that things are better off than they were, we do ourselves disservice that has the potential to hold back decades of future social development.
Third, I am aware that racism is not a uniquely white-on-black phenomenon. As a white American, I'm not privy to the private hateful thoughts of those who use my race as a reason to distrust me. White racism is what I'm the most intimately familiar with, so white racism is what I'm the most comfortable discussing.
Anyways, now that all that's out of the way.....
Not in recent history has there been such a fearful, demonstrably irrational backlash against a president as what we're seeing come out of the extreme factions of the anti-Obama crowd today. Despite an agenda that is almost indistinguishable from those of past Democratic administrations, Obama has been accused of intentions so absurd that the accuser would have lost all professional credibility 10 years ago. Furthermore these accusations are not coming from extreme partisan activists and weirdos on Youtube with user names like "ronpaul6669," but from respected journalists and elected officials. Even the backlash against George W. Bush, who won a contested election and has been the subject of his share of conspiracy theories and accusations of fascism, is not comparable in this regard because Bush's less reasonable critics were never really given a mainstream outlet for their hatred.
Lou Dobbs questions Obama's citizenship in front of an audience of millions of Americans on CNN. Republican Representative Paul Broun says of the president,
"I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.“ Texas Governor Rick Perry started talking about seceding from the US barely after Obama had taken office. Right wing talk show host and bestselling author Michael Savage devotes much of his radio show to various predictions in which conservatives are systematically arrested and thrown into concentration camps for their beliefs, and he paints these scenarios without a hint of irony. Of course, if I have to explain to you how all these notions are completely unsubstantiated and paranoid, I'm amazed you're even smart enough to have been able to read this far. Nevertheless this mindset is increasingly legitimate in mainstream political dialogue. For some reason, these people are absolutely terrified of Barack Obama, and have no idea how to express their fear constructively. Why? Why is this democratically elected leader being compared to Adolph Hitler, one of the most brutal racial oppressors in the history of the world, after two months on the job with the same agenda that this country had throughout the '70s and '90s? To be succinct, I cannot accept that there isn't a racial undercurrent.
To understand how to arrive at this conclusion, we have to examine modern racism in America, which of course has to be redefined in a post-Obama world. It is absolutely true that it is no longer acceptable to say
"I hate you because of the color of your skin," in mainstream discourse, and indeed, people who actually believe that are most likely in too small of a minority to have an impact on our cultural landscape. But now that that milestone has been crossed, we have to view it as the beginning of the process of mending race relations, not the end. Even if openly racial hatred is no longer prominent, the history of racism in our country is as defining a factor in people's lives today as it ever has been.
Today you will often hear (provided you are a white person who occasionally spends time alone with other white people) arguments such as,
"there are African Americans and then there are niggers. Niggers are just the ones who use and sell hard drugs, live off welfare, join gangs etc. This isn't racism, this is a basic observation, and the fact that I have perfectly functional friendships with black people will support this." For the sake of argument (and only for the sake of argument), let's assume that in a world that has moved past blatant racial hatred (
"I hate you because your skin is black"), this is a legitimate observation, and by proxy, conclusion to arrive at. It still either ignores or downplays the long history of racial injustice in this country to incorrectly ascribe a racial solution to non-racial problems (as I'm sure you've all noticed that impoverished white people also commit muggings and destroy themselves with crack).
I am 26 years old, and my parents were both in school during desegregation. What this should tell to you is that
African Americans from a single generation older than mine were the first in the history of this country not to be legally barred from receiving a proper education. It should also tell you that this same generation of African Americans came from families whose financial standing and social status has been defined by the systematic denial of opportunity on the basis of skin color alone. What we end up with is an entire demographic of Americans whose cultural history as victims of oppression has placed them at a social disadvantage, and the time frame of one generation is not enough to correct this. American individuality ethos aside, the achievement gap between whites and blacks can not only be attributed directly to racial injustices that occurred 50 years ago, but the steps though which one arrives at that conclusion are so logical and easy to follow that there shouldn't be anybody who refutes it. To claim that street crime in urban areas is a race issue rather than a poverty issue is an act of intellectual dishonesty.
So ultimately, what constitutes modern racism is not necessarily overt hatred based on race, but rather an irrational fear of or hostility towards other cultures whose pretense is not grounded in an understanding of what their cultural experience as Americans has been. Racism in this twenty-first century form is as alive and acceptable as any form of bigotry since Birth of a Nation. Therefore to act as if racism is completely dead and irrelevant in America, and to use that standpoint as an objective, observational neutral from which to interpret racial matters directly contributes to the problem. For example, it is counter-productive for a white person to claim that,
"I don't inherently hate Mexicans, therefore when I tell Pedro that I think all illegal immigrants should be deported and he gets angry, he's the one being racist against me." It is equally counter-productive for a Mexican American to accuse a white American of racial bigotry for expressing fears over the potential results a spike in immigration will have on his ability to earn a living.
This is where the Obama presidency becomes relevant to this discussion. The modern racist will respond to the Obama presidency with delusions of isolation and excessive suspicion (meaning beyond the degree of suspicion that it's both healthy and necessary to hold our elected leaders to), because
rather that hating Obama's skin color, he believes that there is a deeper meaning embedded in it. It should immediately raise a red flag to hear Obama compared to Adolf Hitler because what it indicates is that Obama's ethnicity invokes questions, and more importantly, makes him threatening (remember that neither Clinton nor Carter, with their similar agendas, were subject to similar comparisons). To people like Rep. Broun, there isn't an important difference between being led by a man of a different ethnicity and violent racial oppression, thus it is both reasonable and warranted to view the manner in which he goes about his opposition as being racial in nature.
The most blatant example of how this president is shoehorned into a racial context is the belief that his US citizenship is fraudulent. This characterizes the president as something alien just convincingly enough to validate people's basest racial biases and cause them to begin asking themselves questions, while staying acceptable in mainstream discourse by operating safely under the pretense of concern for the law. So while shouting,
"he's a NEE-GAWR! Let's git 'im!" would backfire spectacularly in today's society, painting Obama as something mysterious and unlike "us" is more than enough to convince people to view his policy proposals through the lens of the human tribal instinct.
What is really scary (if unsurprising) is the fact that this technique has largely been successful. People who have never paid attention to politics until three months ago have been effectively convinced to be so terrified (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXMYYFdHGw) that they have no idea what to do with their fear. The reason that, for example a 3% tax increase for the richest 5% of Americans is being defined as an act of Socialism/anti-Americanism is because once you convince people to fear the source, the act itself suddenly becomes without precedent. In his debate with Walter Mondale, then-president Reagan strongly emphasized that he had no intention of changing the degree of progressivity in the taxes, yet when Obama restores the progressivity to pre-2000 levels, we get the spectacle of people receiving tax
cuts from the new administration and taking to the streets and the news to complain about how disgusted they are about higher taxes. It's too early in this presidency to see how far this will really go, but as of yesterday there have been reports that the administration is considering dropping the public option from the heath care plan because of the unreasonably violent backlash against it at the town hall protests, which indicates to me that whatever the status of racism in America, people who are disturbed by the president's ethnicity, or can be manipulated into being disturbed by the president's ethnicity, comprise too great a segment of the actively political population to be dismissed as insignificant.
To anticipate a potential response, I hear some people saying,
"but aren't Republicans historically efficient at redefining the terms of debate in this country? John Kerry was slandered every bit as ruthlessly as Obama, and he was a standard white politician. Aren't racial scare tactics just the current variable in the strategically fluid right-wing PR campaign?" Absolutely. But I think that in this instance, the issue raised is of particular importance because what it touches on holds a disproportionately adverse impact on our political mindset, and indeed highlights why I choose to be a liberal.
As a liberal, I believe the core principal from which all my convictions can be said to be derived is essentially, "people with money tend to exploit people without money." When the issue of race ceases to be a matter of systematic oppression, it becomes another way for the powerful to manipulate people into voting against their own interests.
As a liberal I wonder, what would the American population do with their democratic power if they were able to put the issue of race in it's proper context? What if, for example, all Americans stopped putting their energy into arguments like,
"there are African Americans and there are niggers, niggers are the ones who abuse welfare, sell drugs, etc," and replaced it with the only passable alternative,
"as long as there are people struggling to get their basic human needs met, it's simply a given that I'm not going to be safe in certain lower class areas after certain hours"? Would Americans continue to demand the social safety net be the first thing dismantled at the first hint of economic turbulence if they thought it would jeopardize their safety in some way? What if instead of,
"the Muslims hate us because of our freedom," Americans recognized terrorism as the logical result of an energy policy that both encourages a disproportionate degree of consumption and requires subjugation of other nations to maintain? Would people oppose funding research for alternative fuel sources if they saw their SUV, rather than another culture with an inherently violet mindset, as directly responsible (albeit through a chain of steps) for acts of terror? What if instead of getting angry about illegal immigrants having access to the emergency room, Americans got angry about the fact that
their access to doctors is determined by corporate bean counters who are paid to prioritize the profits of a handful of wealthy businessmen over their physical well being? Now, I wouldn't dare suggest that all of our problems can be solved through racial understanding alone, but if Americans chose to view their problems without the tint of race, I can't help but think that a shockingly high number of America's problems would begin to be addressed after decades of neglect.
In the end what it comes down to is that for years Republicans have won the support of a certain piece of the population by convincing them to be afraid of people weaker than they are. In 2008, the weaker people became stronger. The people who were afraid before feel that much more violated, and we have seen the results in the despicably boorish behavior at McCain rallies, the vitriolic diatribes of talk radio personalities and the delusional accusations of those who believe that their freedom is at risk without understanding the policy proposals that bring about the fear. Even with a black man having been elected to the most powerful position of leadership in the world by a majority of Americans, it is not political correctness to point out the racial nature of methods used by the opposition when nothing else will explain them adequately. There's too much promise in Obama's presidency to allow it to be defined in its infancy by either the small mindedness of those who inherently distrust the leadership of a man they find culturally mysterious, or the moral bankruptcy of those who want a quick, cheap way to exacerbate hatred for their political opponents. If you keep yourself educated about the true nature of Obama's policy, the dividing line between destructive, racist paranoia and the type of political disagreement that has helped democracy flourish in America for two centuries will remain clear. But we cannot fail to recognize that the racist paranoia is there.
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