Obama Victory Triggers Racist Backlash: At Least 200 Incidents Reported

Atlanta - In rural Georgia, a group of high-schoolers gets a visit from the Secret Service after posting "inappropriate" comments about President-elect Barack Obama on the Web. In Raleigh, N.C., four college students admit to spraying race-tinged graffiti in a pedestrian tunnel after the election. On Nov. 6, a cross burns on the lawn of a biracial couple in Apolacon Township, Pa.

The election of America's first black president has triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center -- a record in modern presidential elections. Moreover, the white nationalist movement, bemoaning an election that confirmed voters' comfort with a multiracial demography, expects Mr. Obama's election to be a potent recruiting tool -- one that watchdog groups warn could give new impetus to a mostly defanged fringe element.

Most election-related threats have so far been little more than juvenile pranks. But the political marginalization of certain Southern whites, economic distress in rural areas, and a White House occupant who symbolizes a multiethnic United States could combine to produce a backlash against what some have heralded as the dawn of a postracial America. In some parts of the South, there's even talk of secession.

Keep reading

-or-

HuffPost's Greg Mitchell -- Racial Incidents and Threats Against Obama Soar: Here Is a Chronicle

Comments

[NoSillyName]

Sad and sickening.

The Palin Camp Bigots. McCain did little to discourage them.

Must Fade Away.

[gwpriester]

If you added the collective IQ of all these deluded people together, it would fall short of Obama's IQ.

[Indie2008]

Maybe keeping some of these punks and their families on a "watch list" for a few years will change their tone.

[pixy242a]

These are the people who lapped up Palin's and McCains divisive rhetoric. McCain says it was a 'tough' campaign. Wonder if he considers the effect it had.

[Sandy248]

And we're supposed to believe that racism no longer exists???

[MrT3]

glad that myth can finally be debunked..­..what most of us already knew anyway....

he hasn't even been sworn in yet...how weak is this kind of behavior???