Devin Reiche wrote an article which I am re-posting because if I tell him to get a blog he'll call me a dumpsterslut or something.
I feel that any one of the one-in-three or so Brits I've heard recently who have adopted a "Wow Americans are so much dumber than I had believed for the past eight years, never mind that the reactionary masses with media attention are now necessarily in opposition to my and most of Britain's pro-Obama stance" mentality needs to read this immediately.
Obama And The Issue Of Race
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
Today you will
often hear (provided you are a white person who occasionally spends
time alone with other white people) arguments such as, 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. "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 imply 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 Pedro 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
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 (or for my righty friends, politicians in general)
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?"
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.
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 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.
Devin Reiche
