The frank comments of unapologetic anti-Obama racists across the country have recently gained a wide national audience. As Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter from Mobile, Alabama, told a New York Times reporter, "He's neither-nor. He's other. It's in the Bible. Come as one. Don't create other breeds." Another denizen of the GOP's "real America" shared his spiritual insights with the same interviewer. Glenn Reynolds, of Martinsville, Virginia pointed out, "God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry." Such shameless declarations of prejudice reveal something obvious but easily overlooked: It is not Obama's blackness that disturbs these pious bigots, but his grayness.
Ideas that now seem like crackpot notions of race were, not long ago, regarded as common sense, and found themselves codified in law. The "one-drop rule" asserted that a single drop of black blood in an otherwise white citizen rendered that person black. Blackness was widely viewed as a contaminant that sullied white purity. (In antebellum America, white slave owners got around this problem by either denying the ordinary practice of raping and impregnating black women, or by justifying this predation as a racial improvement of the population of black slaves.) The rule was adopted by numerous state legislators in the first third of the 20th century, and used as the basis for Jim Crow laws.
In 1924 Dr. Walter Plecker, a public health advocate who worked for Virginia's Vital Statistics Department, said, "Two races as materially divergent as the White and Negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher." It wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the one-drop rule unconstitutional. This decision, which eliminated the ban on interracial marriage, bore the wonderfully apt title of Loving v. Virginia.
Sadly but not surprisingly, such legal victories have not kept Plecker's sentiments from being embraced by contemporary guardians of racial boundaries. And, Barack Obama, the child of a black African father and a white American mother, is for these folks the very embodiment of what must not be brought together.
As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has succinctly observed, "We hold ourselves together by keeping things apart." While legally sanctioned racial segregation in public life may be moldering in history's dustbin, a corresponding segregation in our inner lives continues to structure our thoughts and emotions.
Some people consciously, most unconsciously, hold on for dear life to the pure and invariant categories of "good" and "bad." Keeping them apart and unambiguously distinct helps us retain a reassuring infantile fantasy of safety, order and certainty. "Race" lends itself well to this process of splitting. Imagined as fundamentally unlike us, the racialized other becomes the perfect receptacle into which we are free to project all the wishes, impulses, and longings that we cannot bear to see in our ethnic group or ourselves. In other words, racism allows us to be all-good because there is someplace outside of us to put the bad.
Of course, this ruse we perpetrate on ourselves only works if we can sustain the delusion of absolute difference. Those who are more consciously racist rely on what Erik Erickson called "pseudo-speciation," viewing other racial groups as separate species. "Inter-breeding" thereby becomes a psychological, as well as a theological abomination.
Speaking of spiritual matters, we should not be too surprised that most openly racist people are religious fundamentalists. This is not just because so many Biblical fairy tales endorse slavery, ethnic warfare and genocide, and inveigh against "race mixing," but because the structure of fundamentalist theology and racism are the same - they both rely on splitting. A recent example of this symmetry is the fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University, which didn't overturn its ban on interracial dating until 2000. (This was done with considerable reluctance, and primarily to save George W. Bush from political embarrassment after having given a campaign stump speech in their chapel.) Such racist thumpers of holy books literally as well as metaphorically think in black and white terms.
Thus, the very visibility of Barack Obama - let alone his candidacy for the most powerful and, before Bush, the most esteemed job in the world - creates a category crisis of epic proportions. He not only mouths a rhetoric of transcending division, but is himself a seamless genetic integration of what should be immiscible. The decent, God-fearing racist must be plagued by unanswerable questions: What is this incomprehensible hybrid of badness and goodness? How can the same person contain that with which I identify and which I despise? What does that make me?
In the course of the presidential campaign, we have heard Republican ads and seen GOP viral emails that pose more rational-seeming derivatives of these questions: Who is Barack Obama? Do we actually know him? Doesn't he sound kind of uppity and elitist? Is he a Christian or a Muslim? Is he really like us? Didn't he grow up in one of those anti-American parts of America, like Hawaii?
By way of concluding, I want to emphasize that most Americans are not consciously racist, and would abhor the prejudice and ignorance manifested by the good white Christians cited above. But as Drew Westen and other researchers have shown, the majority of people - black as well as white - harbor an unconscious negative bias against anyone perceived as black. At a deep level, most of us make use of racial categories to navigate the world, manage its vague and unseen threats, and define our worth.
And why should we expect otherwise? Every person in this country is embedded in a culture and history founded on racist beliefs, practices, and emotions. There is no place to stand outside this psychological and social reality. It saturates our national sense of self and structures our neural networks.
What is possible, however, is to acknowledge and remain mindful of this ugly and disturbing legacy so that we can minimize its influence on how we treat others, and how we elect leaders to public office. And, as the enthusiastic throngs of citizens, here and abroad, attest, it is even possible to move beyond "tolerance" - to embrace and celebrate the fluidity of categories, cultures, and identities that Obama's candidacy has come to symbolize.
And these weak characters are to be found in any country. The right political system is structured in such a way that these people do not get into a position where they gain enough political influence to make a difference. The sad thing is that Republicans routinely call upon the sentiments of these weak characters to get their numbers right. On the upside, the country is demographically moving into the right direction and no Republican can stop that trend.
To speak with Blue Mink: “What we need is a melting pot” and Barack Obama, his parents and many others, including myself, have contributed actively to this trend. And remember folks, once you’ve made your melting pot contribution no one can take it away from you, not even in the 10th generation.
Watch the Crowd Yell the N-Word at a Palin Event
http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/crowd-yells-the-n-word-at-palin-rally/
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The ATF says it has broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree.
In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target an unnamed by predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SKINHEAD_PLOT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-10-27-16-23-21
During the feel good fog of the Reagan years we were fed daily doses of the "Evil Empire", the OTHER. We can't live without an " OTHER ". We MUST despise the OTHER. They are evil and WE are GOOD.
When our current president, the Dim Reaper, said on tee wee "Yur eether with us or against us" we all sighed and thought to ourselves, "here's a guy in control. He’ll take care of that evil OTHER".
This all goes to the heart of why the Conservative Masters have waged all out war on intellect, education, science, and all forms of critical thinking. The do not want thinkers in the electorate to think except in the most zombie like assigned group think.
The point is we have to understand our need to see life as an either or proposition. We need to understand our proclivity embrace a hatred of the OTHER and learn to live with it and keep it in check. If we don’t we may find ourselves voluntarily voting and acting against our own best interests.
The world is changing, and so are the neo-cons even if they don’t see it. Sure, they will dig their heels in the ground, kicking and screaming the whole time, but they will be unaware of their own migration. Unfortunately, we will also move consistently left and will still be baffled at the rights inability to look to progress.
I say with confidence that in my lifetime I will see constitutional protections for Homosexuals. We will look back on this period in time as a dark mark against our country for withholding civil rights to these individuals, much as most of the country now looks at segregation as a black mark.
Continued...
You people fail to realize, this is a one issue race and that issue is competence. Competence trumps race, gender, age, religious and sexual preference. We're voting for our jobs, our homes, our retirements and college funding for our kids.... and nothing trumps survival.
Scariest words this halloween "President Palin."
I'm voting a straight democrat ticket for the first time in my life. We've had enough republican gridlock.
Neither of those groups is without racism but one is a very active and hateful version and the other is ignorance without malice. Thankfully each generation racism gets scrubbed a little bit more out of our national subconscious.
voting for someone because of their race is just as bad as voting against someone because you don't like their race.
Could you honestly tell me where you get that? ( Im black by the way)
So do you also feel the black people that did not vote for Allen Keyes over Obama where they racist? Or did they feel Obama was a better candidate? What about the white people that are voting for Obama are they reverse racist?......................Could you please elaborate.
Is that really what you got out of this story? What kind of glasses do you wear, that would distort your interpretation like this? Read it again. Read it slowly. . It says that some people (some) are against Obama because he comes from an inter racial relationship. It doesn't say nor even imply that anyone who votes for McCain is ra ci st.
Read this again, slowly, and then post exactly where in the article it says that anyone who votes for McCain is a ra cist.
crazy.
Relax people, rather than be afraid of racists we need to be afraid of complacency in our own voters. Get out the vote.
Who are you taking with you? Call your friends, make a party out of it. Let's enjoy saving our country and our world.
Obama/Biden '08 & '12
and NOT
President Palin '08 destroying the USA.