The manipulation of the public image of Obama as a subversive presence who hates the nation rests on racially coded inferences about unreliable blackness as it tinges the face of American politics. — Michael Eric Dyson
By: MICHAEL ERIC DYSON Professor, Georgetown University
Race Has Affected the 2008 Presidential Election
There is little question that race has affected the 2008 presidential election, though often through inference and innuendo.
Initially, Barack Obama’s historic quest for the highest political office in the land was rife with suspicion from white and black quarters.
Eventually, millions of black voters signed on to his campaign after relinquishing skepticism about his being black enough and after he proved in Iowa that he could win over white voters.
Educated white voters followed suit, though Obama has had a far more difficult time effectively wooing working class white voters.
That has to do in large part with the effective, if cynical, effort of conservative activists to falsely paint Obama as an unpatriotic figure who pals around with terrorists because he is secretly a Muslim.
The manipulation of the public image of Obama as a subversive presence who hates the nation rests on racially coded inferences about unreliable blackness as it tinges the face of American politics.
Few quarters in American life have been tolerant of the complex black identities that constitute African American communities.
Republicans — Backward, Bigoted, Racist and Nativist FILTH of America
As a result, a punishing and narrow range of stereotypes have obscured the fact that black struggle for social equality and racial justice was never antithetical to the best interests of the nation.
Because black people loved the nation so much, they fought hard to make sure that it lived up to the true meaning of its creed, as Martin Luther King said.
Barack Obama represents both the maturing of black American politics, and the increased willingness of significant portions of the white population to embrace a worthy black presidential candidate.
Whether that is sufficient to propel Obama to the presidency remains to be seen. Still I am cautiously hopeful that it is.
[Enlarge] About The Author: Michael Eric Dyson (born October 23, 1958, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American writer, radio host, and professor at Georgetown University.
Dyson has a Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University. He is an ordained Baptist minister.
Since 2007, Dyson has been University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University, teaching courses in theology, English, and African American studies. A University Professorship is said to be the highest position that a faculty member can have at Georgetown.
From January 2006 to February 2007 Dyson was the host of a daily syndicated talk radio program, The Michael Eric Dyson Show, which aired on weekdays from 10AM to 1PM (EST) on the Syndication One Radio Network (owned and operated by Radio One). He is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio, CNN, and the HBO TV program Real Time with Bill Maher. Dyson is best known for his commentary on American culture, particularly as it pertains to African Americans. Dyson uses the terms “Afristocracy” and “Ghettocracy” to describe a bifurcation in American black society. He is also a leading scholar on hip-hop music and the culture that surrounds it, as well as its roots in African and African-American cultures and influence on American popular culture. Dyson is well known to repeat his famous line, “Go Ahead. Axe me a question.”
During one of John McCain’s ““Neo-Klan” Lynch Mob Rallies,” last week, a black man very conspicuously positioned himself in the front row, within easy reach of McCain.
His name is James T. Harris, a self-proclaimed expert in cultural change, societal trends, awareness, motivation, enlightenment.
This master of “multi-tasking” is also a Milwaukee based radio talk-show host, and fashions himself as a great “Black” thinker.
In a “Neo-Nazi” meeting jam-packed with white Republicans, frothing and wriggling bitterly with “Hate and Bigotry” like “dogs in heat,” Mr. Harris took great umbrage in begging McCain to “HIT” Obama. [see video below]
“I am begging you sir, I am begging you — take it to him,” pleaded the Mr. Harris, earning himself a standing ovation!. “We have the good Reverend Wright. We have [the Rev. Michael L.] Pfleger.
We have all of these shady characters that have surrounded him,” Harris bellowed. “We have corruption here in Wisconsin and voting across the nation. I am begging you, sir. I am begging you.
Take it to him.”
The “We” instantly reminded me of Malcolm X’s “Message To The Grassroots” —- “If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick!
He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself.
And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?”
That was that house Negro.
In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here……”
Malcolm X - Field Negro vs House Negro
That was James T. Harris — one solitary black man in a sea of stinking bigots, urging John McCain to “Lynch” Barack Obama, so to speak!
“KILL HIM!”…. “TREASONER!”…. “NIGGER!”…. “NOBAMA!”…. “SOCIALIST!”…. “COMMUNISM!”…. “SOCIALIST SWINE!”…. “OBAMA IS A MUSLIM TERRORIST!”…. “SLEAZY SCUM OF THE EARTH!”…. “OBAMA REGISTERS DEAD PEOPLE!”…. “BARACK ‘HUSSEIN‘ OBAMA!”…. “OFF WITH HIS HEAD!”…. “OBAMA WILL PAINT THE WHITEHOUSE BLACK!”…. “OBAMA IS A BLACK MUSLIM TERRORIST!”….
What a courageous brother this James Harris is!
In a country where some small towns are still off limits to blacks, this man has the courage to jump into the middle of a “Saturday Evening Lynching Party.”
I suspect this slithering Uncle-Tom! was PAID and planted in the crowd by the McCain campaign — to be used for effect and to justify their scumbag campaign.
McCain knows he is running a racist campaign, and what better than thrusting a black man to the TV cameras, carrying his shit!
I lifted this opinion from the web:
October 13th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I am white and like all of my friends, laughed so hard when I saw this black man say this. The whites in the crowd would never invite him to their dinner tables. Nor would a white man in that room hire him over a white guy.
White women in that room will still cross the street and hold their purses tighter if he approaches them. If he came home with any of their daughters, they would round up every boy in the family to whip him and send him away.
John and Sarah do not mix with, dine with, work with or embrace blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Mexicans or Indians.
They just don’t spend time with non wasps. So I feel bad for this man. His life is pretty much ruined now, and he’ll be shamed for the rest of his life because the internet will see to that.
McCain voted against the holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because as all of white America knows, he is pro white.
The only reason Mr. Harris was allowed in the room and given the mike is because he is the “off spring blessing” of Dr. King’s marches and fight for equality, which would break his heart if he saw this video - the man lost his life and left his children and wife behind, for Mr. Harris to shame himself, family and the entire black community.
We are laughing at you Mr. Harris.
You should go on the news and say you changed your mind before you become a national joke.
Vikky
Well said — Vikky!
Mr. Harris says he’s received a flood of hate mail, even death threats.
Here is why:
Mr. Harris’s claim that Democrats have done nothing to blacks is moot. They have done something….or appear to be doing something. Republicans on the other hand have done nothing I can think of off-head, and in this particular instance, McCain and Palin have been inciting what amounts to “Racial Violence” against Obama, and James Harris has been outsourced to “legitimize” it.
Arguments such us: “Republicans ended slavery,” are irrelevant, because in the sixties the two parties just re-invented themselves, by switching sides on issues affecting blacks. Using The Southern Strategy — Republicans began doing exactly what BOTH were doing pre-1960 — exploiting racism among white voters, to put down blacks.
Racism exists in both Democrat and Republican whites, but Democrats have generally embraced African Americans much more than Republicans. Republicans are diametrically opposed to civil rights and black interests.
They don’t even attempt to hide it!
My conclusion after many years dealing with both, is that Democrats are more racially tolerant in as much as they dislike Republicans. But given the racial divisions in the Democratic Primary between Clinton and Obama, I may need to rethink this.
It is therefore not surprising that minority blacks tend to gravitate to the lesser of two evils, so to speak.
I have also encountered whites who have no racist bones in their bodies, and I am sure there are many more out there. I really doubt whether they are Republicans, for to be a Republican, you have to subscribe to Republican Ideology, which is despicably intolerant and racist.
In coddling with McCain, black people see Mr. Harris as the Ultimate in Treason. To black people, and that includes me, Mr. Harris is “Uncle-Toming” for an inferior candidate, John McCain, to destroy the “Great Black Hope,” Barack Obama — most unfairly.
And, that’s TREASON!
Believe me, if it were Al Sharpton — nobody would care.
Professor Chinweizu — a Nigerian critic, poet and journalist gives us insight as to why blacks like James T. Harris do exhibit such behavior:
James T. Harris suffers from Negro Negrophobia:
Negrophobia is a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder. So too is blancophilia, its twin.
Negrophobia and blancophilia are, of course, conditioned responses to white power and black powerlessness. In a sad case of stimulus substitution, the responses to superior power have become transferred to white skin, and those to powerlessness have become transferred to black skin. The negrophobia syndrome is a chronic disease with the white race, a disease born of pride of power. It is a disease with which they have infected the whole world, including the black race, giving rise to negro negrophobia, the disease of black self-hate.
Negro negrophobia is a most absurd disease. Can you imagine some black running to escape his blackness? To escape from himself? His obsession with fleeing from himself proves he is unfit to live. His running to embrace his white enemy proves he is a suicide. The entire affair shows he is mad. Some call it alienation, a mental disorder. Yet some black sirens now sing in praise of alienation, beckoning all blacks to acquire the disease.
Negro negrophobia makes African-Americans, and now black South Africans too, believe that integrating white neighborhoods is social advancement. It makes blacks desperate to integrate white schools, white churches, white communities, white ideologies, white movements and white organizations.
Some would even gladly die to integrate the Ku Klux Klan — or a McCain Hate Meeting for that matter!
Personally, I have no qualms with integrating with well-meaning and progressive whites, who have no racism in their bones, and there are millions of them in America, but there are many more who will never change [SEE VIDEOS BELOW] — hardcore racists who given the optimum incitement (by McCain and co.), would drive this country back to the eighteenth century — back to lynching every black man and woman in sight.
These are the characters James T. Harris has been parading his black ass to, and is the principle reason why he has been getting a flood of hate-mail from fellow blacks.
Historical events have hard-wired the “perception of persecution” into the “black brain” just as much the false “perception of superiority” in white Republicans, and the two cannot mix.
James T. Harris is a “House Nigger,” a despicable ReTHUGliTOM in the mode of Clarence Thomas, and he clearly deserves the heat he is getting.
“Uncle Tom” Defends Himself on CNN
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MCCAIN-PALIN HATE-MEETING 1
MCCAIN-PALIN HATE-MEETING 2 — Bethlehem, PA
MCCAIN-PALIN HATE-MEETING 3
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References:
1.The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama — The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder.
2.The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama — A Fox News Channel program last week thrust Andy Martin, widely credited with starting a cyber-whisper campaign about Barack Obama, into the foreground.
From the yellowed columns of newsprint, Ms. Tucher . . . skillfully draws a contemporary moral. — New York Times Book Review
[Tucher] presents the colorful story of the early penny press with all the verve, intelligence, and humor it merits. — American Heritage
A deceptively complex book. . . . A readable, racy, and often funny study of an important aspect of antebellum social history. — American Historical Review
This well-written book is a valuable contribution to the literature on journalism in the nineteenth century. — Journal of the Early Republic
This is scholarship as solid as oak and history as timely as today’s tabloid titillation. — Bill Moyers
Product Description
Two notorious antebellum New York murder cases—a prostitute slashed in an elegant brothel and a tradesman bludgeoned by the brother of inventor Samuel Colt—set off journalistic scrambles over the meanings of truth, objectivity, and the duty of the press that reverberate to this day.
In 1833 an entirely new kind of newspaper—cheap, feisty, and politically independent—introduced American readers to the novel concept of what has come to be called objectivity in news coverage. The penny press was the first medium that claimed to present the true, unbiased facts to a democratic audience. But in Froth and Scum, Andie Tucher explores—and explodes—the notion that ‘objective’ reporting will discover a single, definitive truth.
As they do now, news stories of the time aroused strong feelings about the possibility of justice, the privileges of power, and the nature of evil. The prostitute’s murder in 1836 sparked an impassioned public debate, but one newspaper’s ‘impartial investigation’ pleased the powerful by helping the killer go free. Colt’s 1841 murder of the tradesman inspired universal condemnation, but the newspapers’ singleminded focus on his conviction allowed another secret criminal to escape. By examining media coverage of these two sensational murders, Tucher reveals how a community’s needs and anxieties can shape its public truths. The manuscript of this book won the 1991 Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation in American history.
About The Author: Michael Eric Dyson (born October 23, 1958, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American writer, radio host, and professor at Georgetown University.
