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Tag Archive | "Racial Prejudice"


Decoding Obama’s Birth-Certificate Move: Bring it On, Racists!

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   By: Adele M. Stan
Adele M. Stan.Wednesday’s release by the White House of President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate signals several dispiriting things about the state of our politics and the lingering poison of racism therein. As Baratunde Thurston so poignantly illustrated in his video (see below), that Obama felt the need to do so bears the echos of the days of poll taxes and literacy tests, when African Americans were made to go through the motions of passing an ever-rising bar to prove their worthiness to exercise rights that were already theirs on paper, only to be deprived one more time by an obstacle newly concocted once they had surmounted the last one.

Yet I think it wrong to view as a capitulation the president’s decision to give the birthers, once and for all, exactly what they said they had wanted all along. This was no mere defensive move; this was a calculated offensive play.

No, the current occupant of the White House should not be held to a higher standard of proof than any who came before him, and the persistence of the birther myth — that Obama was ineligible for the presidency by virtue of the unfounded allegation of a foreign birthplace — surely indicates a rejection and smearing of Obama on account of his race. Yet the birther myth also served to obscure, in some ways, the racial nature of the birthers’ claims. Since the argument was cast as one simply about his birthplace, it was a dispute about eligibility, not capability. Now, with the matter of the president’s birthplace settled, the birther crowd has gone right where the Obama knew they would go next — to an argument more obviously tied to the racial and racist assumptions of those who deem him unfit for office, that of his intelligence.

Baratunde Thurston: With President Obama’s Birth Certificate, Klansman Trump Reminds Blacks They Will Never Be

The racist has an unholy need to see himself, and those of his own race, as superior to members of the race he abhors. The particular form that much American racism takes is an assumption of the intellectual superiority of the white man* to the black. The presumed intellectual inferiority of the black man then justifies blocking his path to positions of authority.

By slapping his long-form birth certificate on the table just as he takes to the campaign trail, Obama is flushing out the racists into the light. They just can’t seem to help themselves from taking the bait. Deprived of their birthplace conspiracy, their automatic default is to question the president’s intelligence, and to challenge his credentials as a learned man.

These elements of the birther/racist yarn about Obama have always existed. That’s what the teleprompter jokes have been about all along. Certain right-wingers pretend that Obama relies on a teleprompter more than other presidents have (he does not), and paint a picture of him as a sort of idiot savant with a preternatural talent for reading words written for him by others (presumably white men), delivered with the oratorical flare that, you know, those people have a knack for. It’s not unlike the tropes created about jazz musicians — that they ply an amazingly complex art form through some channel that bypasses the brain, that they’re actually simple people who don’t know how to read music, and on and on. Ye olde magic Negro story…

Now that demands are being made by such as Donald Trump and Patrick J. Buchanan for the president’s college transcripts, it becomes clearer to those don’t think of themselves as racially prejudiced — but who were thrown by the exotic nature of the president’s name and lineage — that there’s more afoot here than settling the matter of where he was born.

America abounds in racial prejudice, but Americans do not like to think of themselves as racist. When anti-black racism takes an irrefutable form, white Americans become uncomfortable. However much it achieves the same end results, the modern form of garden-variety racial prejudice (as opposed to hard-core racism), I believe, is quite an evolved permutation of the racism that was used to justify slavery in the nation’s early days. Racial separatism as it exists today, I believe, is a way for white people to look away from the nation’s ugly history of the abuse of African Americans.

You see, black people know what white people have done to them. They hold the history we want so much to forget. When we whites live and work amongst ourselves, we need not confront that history. When we are in the presence of black people, we can’t avoid it. We know that they know.

I think he’s affirmative action all the way!Pat Buchanan said of Obama’s educational achievements on MSNBC’s “Harball.” While Buchanan surely has his fans — and there are no shortage of Americans, alas, who are prepared to believe that claim — his uncouthness in stating his prejudice without qualification or apology draws a collective wince from those who like to think themselves more polite. And Trump, of course, in his “I’m so proud of myself” speech, automatically defaulted to questioning Obama’s grades. While this may play well to a segment of the GOP base, it will not gain the kind of traction among the general public that the birther myth acquired. It’s just too obvious.

Plenty are the wags who today complain that Obama released his long-form birth certificate too late, thinking it was an attempt to assuage the believers in the myth. It was not. It is a chess move designed to expose the birthers and their fellow travelers for what they are; now, on the campaign trail, and on a very troubled landscape, Obama gets to say, “See what I’m up against? Is this who we want to be?”

Obama has taken a great deal of criticism — much of it warranted — for not fighting hard enough in negotiations with congressional leaders. But when he does choose to fight, this is how he does it — by using existing dynamics to prove his point, by using his opponent’s weight against him or her. (We see evidence of this, too, in his choice of Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, as his hand-picked opponent in recent speeches.)

And when Obama chooses to fight, he is steely-eyed and formidable. That birth certificate hitting the table? Consider it a gauntlet.

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NOTE FROM AUTHOR: I am using male pronouns in this discussion, because the birther myth was hatched by white men — although several women have helped to promote it — and the president is a man. This particular situation is primarily about the racial dynamic between American men, which is not to say that women are not party to similar dynamics.
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Goldie Taylor: Donald Trump and The Racist Roots of ‘Birtherism’

About The Author: Adele M. Stan is the Washington bureau chief for AlterNet, the progressive news and culture Web site.

Stan has served as a columnist and blogger for The American Prospect Online and as a featured essayist for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site. Stan’s work has also appeared in The New Republic, the Village Voice, The Nation, The Advocate, Salon.com, the Washington Blade and Mother Jones magazine, as well as on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News. She began her media career at Ms. magazine, where she served both on staff and as a contributing editor.

Along the way, Stan developed expertise in covering the intersection of religion and politics, in addition to lifelong specialties in women’s issues and pop culture. Her Mother Jones cover story on the religious right is considered by many to be a definitive primer on the movement; a special 10,000-copy reprint sold out its print run.

Those who graduated college with women’s studies majors are familiar with Stan’s book, “Debating Sexual Correctness: Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Date Rape and the Politics of Sexual Equality, in which the author details the porn wars, date rape controversy and theory on sexual harassment that helped define the modern feminist movement.

Stan has also served as a contributing writer to Mother Jones, and Washington correspondent for Working Woman.

Outside of the office, Stan indulges an array of interests, with music taking center stage. She is in the midst of planning a second career as a lounge-singing ukulele-player.

Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/addiestan

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Racists For John McCain!

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If Obama Loses – It will not be because of ‘NUT-JOB’ McCain but RACISM

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…..and the RACISM was not created by Hillary and Bill Clinton — They are just “two white people” afflicted by an age-old “white-disease” that has to a large extent seriously compromised the quality of life of blacks and other minorities over the years.

From Jörg Colberg’s weblog:

If Obama Loses: “If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin. Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election.” ….[READ MORE >>]

From Jacob Weisberg writing for Slate.com

Let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin. Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election.

Spotting RacismFive percent of white voters acknowledge that they, personally, would not vote for a black candidate. Five percent surely understates the reality. In the Pennsylvania primary, one in six white voters told exit pollsters race was a factor in his or her decision. Seventy-five percent of those people voted for Clinton. You can do the math: 12 percent of the Pennsylvania primary electorate acknowledged that it didn’t vote for Barack Obama in part because he is African-American. And that’s what Democrats in a Northeastern(ish) state admit openly. The responses in Ohio and even New Jersey were dispiritingly similar.

Such prejudice usually comes coded in distortions about Obama and his background. To the willfully ignorant, he is a secret Muslim married to a black-power radical. Or–thank you, Geraldine Ferraro–he only got where he is because of the special treatment accorded those lucky enough to be born with African blood. Some Jews assume Obama is insufficiently supportive of Israel in the way they assume other black politicians to be. To some white voters (14 percent in the CBS/New York Times poll), Obama is someone who, as president, would favor blacks over whites. Or he is an “elitist” who cannot understand ordinary (read: white) people because he isn’t one of them. Or he is charged with playing the race card, or of accusing his opponents of racism, when he has strenuously avoided doing anything of the sort. We’re just not comfortable with, you know, a Hawaiian.

Then there’s the overt stuff. In May, Pat Buchanan, who writes books about the European-Americans losing control of their country, ranted on MSNBC in defense of white West Virginians voting on the basis of racial solidarity. The No. 1 best-seller in America, Obama Nation by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., leeringly notes that Obama’s white mother always preferred that her “mate” be “a man of color.” John McCain has yet to get around to denouncing this vile book. ….[READ MORE >>]

Paul Street for ZMAG Writes:

….Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his quest for the presidency, “it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.”

“….like many of Obama’s formulations, his comment was partly true and largely false.”

If Obama loses to the reactionary war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context that would normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of a significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a significant part of the explanation. ….[READ MORE >>]

Bob Herbert of The New York Times says:

So what’s the problem for the Obama campaign?

The problem is the dog that isn’t barking.

Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate.

When Jack Davis’s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied:

“My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”

It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.

After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year’s Democratic primary race, I’ve developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:

Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama’s poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote.

[ READ MORE HERE ] — The race issue in Barack Obama’s campaign can come up in peculiar and jolting ways.


This book holds that racism cannot be eliminated until it is viewed as a white problem that seriously compromises the quality of life.

Impacts of Racism on White Americans

REFERENCES:

1. Racist Attacks on Obama Growing More Heated
2. Jerome Corsi: Politician-Basher’s White Supremacist Ties Revisited
3. Hawking Racism — Pat Buchanan’s latest book is a White Nationalist Screed
4. Fox ‘Racist News’ Channel Depicts Pro-Obama Europeans as — ‘Scary’ Black People
5. Obama Smears – Fox News’ Racist Liars On A Rampage!
6. Attack Politics – Taken To New Lows By Fox News Morons!
7. Neo Nazi/White Supremacist Hal Turner Confirms Friendship And Kinship With Fox News’s Sean Hannity

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