Black America, Barack Obama, and the racial backlash
OPINION - Many, including whites and blacks, are pointing to Obama’s ethnicity as a deciding or at least informing factor—albeit for different reasons. Ironically, both groups point to racial prejudice as the culprit...
An Associated Press poll, released Oct. 27, tells a much different story. Rather than ebb, our racial tensions have flared. According to the study, “The number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”
Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who co-developed the survey said, “As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time…it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago.”
Regrettably, white poll respondents attributed stereotypical terms like ”violent” and “lazy” to blacks and Hispanics.
“When we’ve seen [racial] progress, we’ve also seen backlash,” said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Some believe that backlash could cost Obama the election. In fact, if John Sununu and Donald Trump are any gauges, Republicans are still banking on “white fear”— the same fear that drove Reagan Democrats to the polls in 1980. The late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the infamous “Hands” ad during his 1990 campaign, to stoke white fears of losing employment opportunities to blacks because of affirmative action.
Unfortunately, history tells us that those campaign tactics can be successful — especially in an economic downturn when everyone is scrapping for a job.
However, if early voting lines this year — some five hours long and largely populated by African-Americans — are any evidence, that gambit may pay off in ways they may not expect.
The hateful bumper stickers, watermelons-on-the-lawn cartoons that deride Obama and the First Family as monkeys and billboards depicting the president as a modern-day Hitler have their costs. So do t-shirts demanding that we “put the white back in the White House” and empty chairs dangling from trees.
A dog whistle, I’ve long said, does not discriminate. The dog that appears on your doorstep may well lick you in the face agreeably. Or it may be the one that bites you in your proverbial behind. In this case, that “bite” is coming in the form of a ballot. African-Americans have begun to show their displeasure for cheap political antics with a renewed enthusiasm.
They are not alone.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, said on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, “My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people, not all of them, but most of them, who are still basing their decision on race.”
“Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists. And the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin. And that’s despicable.”
It must be said that racial prejudice is not party neutral. The poll found that although white Republicans are much more prone to express racial prejudice, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans and about half of political independent held anti-black feelings.
Do African-Americans harbor racial prejudice? Does it inspire some to vote for a reasonably palatable black candidate whenever possible? Surely. Much of it comes as a result, not of feeling superior, but from generations of fighting for basic human rights. It comes from being locked out of opportunity, then being expected to embrace the American Dream with our whole selves as if it were ours all along. As human beings, we all carry some level of bias—whether it is about food, soap or each other. But it is fool’s gold to conflate racial animus with voting motivated by intra-cultural gratification.
“President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history,” said vaunted GOP strategist Ed Gillespie. He is not alone in his thinking. Republican talking heads and Fox News pundits have been spewing the same vile. Sununu painted him as “lazy,” “unengaged” and “not that bright.” Trump thinks he plays too much basketball and may not put in the necessary work to earn his Ivy League degrees.
To his credit, the president has not succumbed to vicious stereotypes.
“We may not be able to stop all the evil in the world,” Obama said as he eulogized the victims of the Arizona shootings in January 2011. “But I know that how we treat one another, that is entirely up to us.”
Goldie Taylor is an MSNBC contributor and editor of The Goldie Taylor Project. Follow Goldie on Twitter at @GoldieTaylor.
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