The backlash against Obama's blackness
From Arizona to Ground Zero via birthers, the Republicans are riding a wave
of white resentment. It's reckless and frightening.
By Dan Kennedy
The Guardian/UK: August 24, 2010
The August madness into which America has descended is about several things.
It's about the still-sputtering economy, of course, and the fear it
engenders. It's about xenophobia, never far below the surface. And it's
about a rightwing media-political complex that plays on the public's
ignorance.
But there's a unifying theme that few wish to acknowledge. What we are
witnessing at the moment is the full, ugly furore of white backlash, aimed
directly and indirectly at our first black president.
The case was made, inadvertently, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last
week by Republican congressman-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey, the godfather of
what might be called the Tea Party movement's corporate wing. Armey and his
co-author, Matt Kibbe, proudly dated the birth of the Tea Party to 9
February 2009.
Barack Obama's $800m stimulus bill was not approved until three days later.
Which is my point. The most notorious political movement of the Obama era,
grounded in racial fears if not flat-out racism, sprung into being within
weeks of Obama's inauguration, before he'd had a chance to do anything,
really. If Obama was for it, they were against it.
The Tea Party winter and spring of 2009 led to the "death panels" of summer,
and to rightwing hero Glenn Beck's declaration that the president harboured
"a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture". Minor issues
involving Acorn, a heretofore obscure agency that helped register urban,
mostly minority voters, became a cause célèbre. A little-known African
American bureaucrat, Van Jones, was hounded out of office for having
allegedly expressed offensive views about the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 - views he later said he had never voiced and did not hold.
Protesters spat upon and directed racial epithets at African American
congressmen as the healthcare debate reached its climax.
And now we come to the full fruition of all this race-baiting. According to
the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 18% of Americans - and
34% of conservative Republicans - believe Obama is a Muslim, proportions
that have actually risen since the 2008 campaign. Another poll, by
CNN/Opinion Research, finds that 41% of Republicans believe Obama was
definitely or probably not born in the United States.
Far worse is the racial, ethnic and religious hatred that has been
unleashed, starting with the proposed Islamic centre to be built in New York
several blocks from the devastated World Trade Centre site, which Obama
endorsed and then (to his discredit) unendorsed, sort of, the next day.
Yes, we've all heard Newt Gingrich draw an analogy between Muslims and
Nazis, and we all know that more than 60% of the public has expressed its
opposition to what is inevitably, and inaccurately, referred to as the
"Ground Zero mosque".
But to experience the pure fury, you have to watch this video of a black man
who had the temerity to walk through a group of people protesting the
centre. It is a terrifying moment.
There is more - so much more. The anti-immigration law approved in Arizona,
which made a star of Republican governor Jan Brewer, notwithstanding the
inconvenient truth that illegal immigration across the Mexico-Arizona border
is at its lowest level in years. The political crucifixion of Shirley
Sherrod. The continuing phenomenon of Sarah Palin, who, at long last, feels
empowered enough to reach inside the deepest, darkest recesses of her tiny
little heart and embrace a fellow rightwinger's repeated use of the N-word.
It's a frightening time to be an American and to watch this insanity
unfolding all around us. There's a sense that anything could happen, none of
it good.
What's all too easy to forget is that though Obama was elected with the
strongest majority of any president in recent years, he received only 43% of
the white vote. Now, it's true that no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964
has won a majority of whites. But it's also true that 100% of voters who
would never support a black presidential candidate cast their ballots for
someone other than Obama. Now they're roaming the countryside, egged on by
the Republican party and the Tea Party and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh,
looking for new objects on which to unload their bitterness.
The traditional media, built as they are on the notion of fair-minded
coverage of equally responsible, equally reasonable political forces, can
barely process what's going on. You literally cannot understand the current
moment without watching the political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert. But, hey, they're only comedians.
Not that there's anything new about the Republican party's playing racial
politics. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on the basis of his infamous
"southern strategy", designed to appeal to white voters alienated by the
historic civil-rights legislation shepherded through Congress by Lyndon
Johnson. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign against the incumbent
president, Jimmy Carter, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three
civil-rights workers had been murdered, by invoking the toxic phrase
"states' rights".
As the economy slides into another trough, with no prospect of another
stimulus passing political muster, it's only going to get worse.
Strangely, there are virtually no political observers who hold out the
prospect that the folks whom the right has alienated will turn out to vote
against the Republicans this November. George W Bush, after all, worked
mightily to appeal to Latino voters. That's gone. Bush even won 70% of the
Muslim vote in 2000. That's long gone.
The Republicans hope to ride the white backlash back to power, and perhaps
they will. But they may also find that the hatred they have embraced will
come back to haunt them this November - and well beyond. For the rest of us,
though, the consequences of that hatred have yet to play out.
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