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Sunday, November 16, 2008

We shouldn't kid ourselves that the election of Barack Obama means racism is over
Posted by Jill | 7:14 AM
Last night I started preparing a "Saturday cartoons" post in which I was going to post the banned Warner Bros. cartoon Clean Pastures, part of the cartoon studio's oeuvre that hasn't been seen outside of video stores since the Thalia in New York stopped running its cartoon festivals for geeks, highlighted by "Sex, Violence, and Racism" night. Clean Pastures, like the equally banned Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, boasts some of the most rollicking music ever seen in cartoons. But then I thought about how I'd feel if a Christian posted cartoons or other films featuring hook-nosed caricatures of Jews (other than those done by the Fleischer Bros., which are OK under the "It's OK to Knock Your Own Team" rule), and asked myself, "Would Lower Manhattanite post this?" And then I scrapped it, because while I may want to take them with the context of their time and focus on the music, I also realized that these images, which played in movie theatres prior to movies featuring mostly-white casts all over the country, helped foster the environment that produced Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other atrocities dealt to black people well into my lifetime.

It's tempting to think we've come a long way since then, and it's tempting to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment as a country that we elected a black man before any other western country. But as much as the election of Barack Obama shows that enough of the population is willing to vote for a black person to clean up the mess left by a spoiled scion of a wealthy white family, there is still a sizable population of bigoted squirming white maggots, egged on by Sarah Palin during the campaign, for whom the election of a black president has allowed them to feel safe coming out from under the rocks where they've lived relatively silently until their greatest fear came true. And now they are showing their true selves:
Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.

"I can't say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property because one or two idiots did it," said Millner, who is black. "But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

"If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries."

"Someone once said racism is like cancer," Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission."

If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

Like many other Americans who voted for Barack Obama, I simply adore this family. I love the affectionate, witty repartee between Barack and Michelle Obama that reminds me of nothing so much as William Powell and Myrna Loy in the "Thin Man" movies. I can't wait to see them in the White House. I can't wait to have my head explode from the sight of the sheer adorableness of Sasha Obama with a puppy. Aside from the delicious irony of the name of the presidential residence, this happens to be the most appealing American family we've seen on the natonal stage in decades. Some are calling them the New Kennedys, which I hope isn't true, because the Jack/Jackie marriage wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and we all know what happened to Jack Kennedy. What I see is a distinctly modern American family, trying to juggle careers and kids and still make a difference in the world.

I simply cannot understand how anyone can see anything threatening in this family. Unless that for the people leaving turds in their black neighbors' mailboxes and burning crosses (sanctioned for Christmas festivities at the American Family Association) see the Obamas, who seem to have their lives together more than most Americans who didn't start off with the disadvantage of being black, feel like a reproach.

Ever since the Reagan years, as this move towards an economy that puts ever more wealth into the hands of ever fewer people got started under the name of "supply-side economics", conservatives have played these people like violins, pointing their fingers DOWN the socioeconomic ladder and saying "Look! HE's the reason you have less than you did before!" -- while the wealthy are lifting the meager contents of their wallets out of their back pockets. The welfare queen in the Cadillac. The lazy black man who'd rather sit on the steps with a Colt 45 than work. Now it's the illegal immigrant. Republican politics for the last twenty-eight years has been about ascribing an extraordinary amount of power over the lives of working people to those lower on the economic ladder. And these people have bought it hook, line, and sinker -- and now wonder when they're going to get their piece of the pie that Ronald Reagan promised them nearly three decades ago. To these people, government = welfare, and black = welfare, and as far as they're concerned, a welfare family is going to be living in the White House.

THIS is what Barack Obama was talking about during his one campaign gaffe, when he talked about people becoming bitter and clinging to guns and religion. His words may have been uncharacteristically inartful, but he was spot-on right. That's probably why the 24 x 7 news cycle worried it like a terrier with a bone for weeks on end. For too many Americans, the pie isn't getting bigger, and all they know is that their piece is getting smaller. They're aware that there isn't enough to go around for everyone else when a very few people insist on amassing more and more for themselves. Whether they don't see that or if acknowledging that the entire country has become rigged entirely for the corporations and the wealthy is just too big to deal with remains to be seen. What they do know is that theirs is a world in which white people are by birth entitled to have more than black people. And when the President of the United States is a black man, the very laws of the universe seem to have been upended.

Barack Obama is either a very brave man or a very foolish one to think he can change this mindset by going to the White House. But if he can manage to make the lives of even those who in their fear and loathing are calling for his murder a bit better, then some real progress will have been made.

Until then, there's no time, and no room, for self-congratulation.
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1 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
It's like boils or pimples: one of the best treatments is to lance them, but before you can do it, they have to achieve a certain level of nastiness. Here's hoping that we can lance these boils without too much damage, and without too many reoccurrences later.

Unfortunately, I don't believe it can or will be painless.
11/16/08, 11:06 AM  
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