With Jimmy Carter saying that racism is the reason behind relentless attacks on President Obama, and Obama proclaiming that racism has nothing to do with, today's New York Times has many Op-ed pieces on the issue.
Among those are Bob Herbert's piece "The Scourge Persists" where he argues that racism is a large part of the attacks on President Obama.
More than three decades later we have Sherri Goforth, an aide to a Republican state senator in Tennessee sending out a mass e-mail of a cartoon showing dignified portraits of the first 43 presidents, and then representing the 44th — President Obama — as a spook, a cartoonish pair of white eyes against a black background.
When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in Columbia, S.C., a longtime Republican activist, Rusty DePass, described it on his Facebook page as one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors.
Among the posters at last weekend’s gathering of conservative protesters in Washington was one that said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.”
I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not an out-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may have made progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still with us. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve been wandering around with your eyes closed.
And then there is David Brooks, who in his piece, "No, Its not about race" argues that well it is not about race!
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.
I agree with Brooks when he says that the President's big changes and plans for big changes will surely spark a backlash. And hence I agree it may not be entirely about race. But racism is surely a part of it. Perhaps not on some purely primordial level- but thanks to a carefully crafted modernist agenda of tapping into the primordial. In other words- it is quite easy to enrage people about issues of race, if you know how to do it right.
1 comments:
sure, i agree with herbert that racism is alive and thriving, and that people blindfold themselves and refuse to see it's there. But does racism come into the healthcare debate? Hilary Clinton brought healthcare into the limelight long before Obama did; had she been elected President, would the furore not have taken place? Isn't this more of a political issue than a social one?
Or is it that the republicans are trying to bring in the element of race to mould (prejudiced) public opinion in their favour?
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