It IS About Racism

Josh Marshall cites a new column by Maureen Dowd in which she “goes there” in labeling the behavior of a couple of white, southern congressional Republicans as either overtly racist or with heavy racist undertones:

"It's no accident that both comments came from white men from the Deep South in their early to mid-60s. I won't say because I don't think this is all the GOP, just as I don't think that all the opposition to Obama is rooted in atavism and paranoia."

Dowd:

"I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

"But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it."

Ta-Nehisi Coates goes there too:

"If we concede, as most reasonable people do, that racism is a factor--not the factor but a factor--in resistance to Obama, then in fact, what we've seen this year is, by the very nature of an Obama presidency, unprecedented. Put simply, we've seen the crazy-tax, of which race is a portion, before. But we've never seen the crazy-tax intensified by race. We have not seen it accompanied by watermelon jokes, by Congressmen referring to him as boy, by clucking heads claiming that the president 'has exposed himself as someone with a deep-seated hated of white people.' We've never seen the whitey tape, before."

During the presidential campaign, I met an otherwise very pleasant white woman, a real estate agent in her 60s, who worried out loud to my face that an Obama election would mean that blacks would take over the government and that blacks would move to the front of the government handout line. Oh, if she’d only had that crystal ball and seen all those blacks faces of executives at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bank of America, General Motors, and Bear Stearns, I’m sure she would have satisfied that racist paranoid streak.

And, you may recall, this blog post from last year, where I related what one (now former) reader wrote to me in an email:

"Have you considered why polls predict that 90% of Blacks will vote for Obama? It cannot be racist because Blacks vote in almost the same ratio for Liberal whites running against Conservative whites. Can it be that there is a seldom recognized and never discussed cultural tradition that Blacks need a Master to provide for and direct them?"

Because the Republican Party has by and large become the Southern White Party, the current spate of vitriol against Obama (and I say "current" because it most certainly will continue, ad absurdum, until 2017 when he leaves office), is most certainly rooted in racism. This is not to paint all white southerners as racist, but let's be real and acknowledge that the region of the south where the flag of the Confederacy flew over the state house as recently as 2000 is the region most likely to retain most of the racist elements of segregationism, anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow, and the KKK.

I don't disagree with Obama's decision to accept the half-hearted apology of Joe "You Lie" Wilson. Nancy Pelosi was right when she said that it was time to talk about healthcare and not Wilson. Let the media spin out about this issue; there is a lot of work to be done, and this issue distracts from that work. That is how I want my sons to understand this.