What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We've been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge's mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country's transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.
Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.
It's against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre "birther" movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.
Obama's election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American - or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a "real American." The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a "foreign, exotic place," in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.
Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter have condemned the birther brigades and likened them to "the truthers" who accused the Bush administration of engineering the 9/11 attacks. But those conspiracy theorists couldn't find 11 congressmen willing to sponsor a bill supporting their claims. Even Liz Cheney has publicly refused to dispute the libels on Obama's citizenship.
One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.
As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today's variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can't adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates - Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.
Some question why Obama isn't stepping in and showing his real birth certificate and ending this nonsense. Does he mind the Birthers? Does their paranoia help or hurt Obama's popularity outside of Southern white voters? Of course, answering them directly gives them credibility.
Bottom line: Rich is dead on. There's a hysteria to the tea-baggin' nativist crowd that's similar to the desegregation era. Forget buses, lunch counters, and water fountains, desegregation opened up economic opportunities and government financial assistance that hereto was reserved for whites, opening whites to competition for jobs, housing, loans, and grants. That's a good thing if we want to better be an egalitarian democracy, but it sure burns the britches of lots of folks, many of whom are just barely getting by as it is.
Western Montanans recently entered the debate over a congressional resolution formally apologizing for the way the U.S. government has treated Native Americans. The Missoulian's Gwen Florio wrote a news story detailing the fact that a key phrase having to do with the federal government's mismanagement of tribal funds held in trust had been dropped from the resolution.
But few of the comments posted online with that story concerned this facet of the discussion. Instead, many provided a stark reminder that racism runs rampant through our community.
Gwen Florio ran a followup on the Missoulian blog, "The Buffalo Post," in which she posted a letter from Patrick Weasel Head. It's worth a read in its entirety, but essentially Weasel Head wonders what the Native American community can do to soften its image, yet ultimately calls to task all of us who tolerate racism in everyday life:
There are sensitive individuals that bridge the cultural gap between indigenous peoples and the community, and I applaud them for their effort and true feelings of diversity and inclusion. They are truly the kind of people I want to interact with and to grow a sense of community for all. Yet, I feel that society expects, and tolerates, this insensitivity toward indigenous peoples and that it is so easy to 'pick on' the Indian community (or individuals) without any reaction from their statements. I think this has to end. Too often I hear that indigenous peoples are seen as the easiest to disparage, to make fun of and to chastise without any level of sensitivity or compassion or better yet, repercussions. That too has to stop.
I challenge all to make a difference, to see what they can do to dispel this insensitivity to the indigenous populations and remember, that respect goes in both directions. Are these few comments as listed in the Missoulian article representative of the community and that rampant racism exists? If not, speak out.
I couldn't agree more.
But it is surprising that the Missoulian sounds surprised by all of this, and is essentially calling for others to decry racism when they see it, because the newspaper, frankly, doesn't have such a great track record when it comes to criticizing those who engage in racist rhetoric.
Take the recent kerfluffle over a racist letter (pdf) sent to former Missoulian reporter, Jodi Rave. The Electric City Perfesser defended the letter, agreeing there was too much coverage of Native Americans in the paper. Instead of supporting Rave, explaining why it felt Native Americans should be included in the news, and decrying Natelson's ignorance on race matters, the Missoulian said...nothing.
And while Jodi Rave wrote about the racist rhetoric in the state OPI campaign, the paper's editorial board said...nothing.
(One wonders how the paper will handle anti-Native-American rhetoric now that Rave left the the Missoulian...)
And given the numerous questionable statements that both Dave Berg and Dave Rye have made - and will no doubt continue to make - instead of questioning whether Taylor Brown - the man who hired them both for his radio network - was fit for public office, the Missoulian said...nothing.
When Corey Stapleton made racially insensitive remarks on the floor of the state legislature, the Missoulian...said nothing. Matt Singer did, and was slammed for it by the Choteau Acantha, which wrote a puff piece about Stapleton and slammed blogs, and the Missoulian...said nothing.
And let's not forget that not too long ago the Missoulian editorial board endorsed racial profiling.
Whether those that pen the editorials want to admit it or not, neglecting racism from prominent public figures implicitly encourages such rhetoric. So, yeah, I think it's a bit hypocritical for the Missoulian to sound shocked or outraged at all of the racist comments engendered by a recent report...but the paper has essentially been complicit with the racism for years. Perhaps instead of a treacly editorial pointing out the ickiness of racism, the paper could instead make a vow to do better at singling out prominent racists and denouncing racist rhetoric when made by public figures...
Three months ago, our Congressman wrote on Twitter about his lunch with Thomas E. Woods, a dude who had all sorts of connections to the neo-Confederate movement.
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are. (Emphasis added, obviously)
It seems that Wal-Mart is on a settling kick. Fresh off their announcement that they will settle 63 wage and hour class action law suits, Wal-Mart has decided to settle a class action suit on behalf of African Americans who felt they were being discriminated against in Wal-Mart's trucking fleet. The settlement calls for Wal-Mart to pay $17.5 million and improve their hiring practices. Among their new practices will be appointing a diversity recruiter, hiring minorities proportionate to applicants, and stepping up recruitment for African Americans.
So. Obama responds - thoughtfully - and we get this as a response:
The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: "But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now."
As soon as I heard that, I knew what we'd have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!
...The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race....
Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn't necessary to end what Obama calls the "racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years" - because we're not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren't stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King's injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
Over the last several decades, we've done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won't make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.
(A) So...Kristol's pals invoke race at every corner, Obama responds...and Obama's at fault here? Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
(B) Apparently Kristol missed out on this column, worth quoting again, and somehow evocative of the general tenor of right-spawned race rhetoric about the Obama campaign, if a little more bald-faced:
It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves"... Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities[?]...
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?....
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?
Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
What you'll notice in all this, of course, is that all these folks really aren't concerned about black people at all. They're talking to white people, and basically reinforcing the stereotypical view that there's just something wrong with those black people. Why else can't they see that conservatism is really about their greater good?
(Wow. Somehow I failed to post this to the frontpage. Oops. - promoted by Matt Singer)
I haven't had a chance to watch a video of the delivery, but the written speech is simply incredible and all of the things that our politics too often lacks: honesty, intelligence, a sense of history.
I was worried at some point that Barack Obama would succumb to pressure to disown Reverend Wright, not because Wright's statements didn't deserve disowning, but because if the man himself did, it was a situation of colossally bad judgment on Obama's part to be so closely tied to the man for years.
Fundamentally, I think it is interesting the desire to view Wright's speech through a political lens rather than a religious one. Wright's angry language is actually a Hallmark of America's religious movements, dating back to Jonathan Edwards and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Portraying a God angry at our nation for various sins, whether inequality, racism, slavery, or abortion -- well, that's actually as American as apple pie.
Beyond that, Obama did what he does best -- he reminded us fundamentally that we are one nation, united more by common concerns than we are divided by our distrust.
A number of political minds I've seen respond are noting that we have yet to see whether his speech works politically -- that he's on uncharted ground here. He is, but it's the space he's fundamentally put himself and his campaign into.
I wrote months ago that Obama was running a uniquely Obamian campaign for President, largely predicated on the same ideas espoused in his rhetoric. Today, he proved that again.
His methods may fail. Our nation may prove that it will choose division, rancor, and distrust over faith, unity, and trust, but if that is the case, I think we'd be hard-pressed to accuse Obama of the failure.
We've all heard the recent odious attacks from the right on Obama for his association to his church and pastor, indicting a man without bothering to investigate or understand. That's not terribly surprising; in politics, ideology colors everything.
From the right, you do often see Democratic candidates assailed for their ideological impurity, their "thought crimes." Such a strain of attack has been common from the Republican party in recent years, and culminated in the 2006 election. Remember this New York Times editorial?
Since he can't defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies....
It was a crass attempt to balance allegations made against Allen -- that he used racial epithets, that he stuffed a deer's head into the mailbox of an African-American family, that he threw his brother through a sliding-glass door and dragged his sister up the stairs by her hair, that his staff assaulted a blogger -- allegations about Allen's actual misconduct. In other words, Allen presumed that his actions would be balanced by Webb's "thought crime," his imagined world.
So Obama - doing the right thing - faced his critics head-on with his his speech, "A More Perfect Union." (See the video, too.) And it was a doozy, even by Obama's already lofty standards.
