recent remark that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary Americans have stood up for their rights. It’s a statement, after all, that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, women in the fight for suffrage, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBTQ folks seeking to be treated as full and equal human beings.
This is what white privilege is about in the age of Obama: the ability to threaten others, to engage in violent rhetoric, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared as people of color would be, were they to try and get away with even half as much. It’s the ability to channel racialized rage and hostility, aim it directly at ostensibly the most powerful man on earth, suffer no consequence, and yet still perceive yourself as the victims of his policies and hatreds. In short, it’s the ability to engage in a form of self-delusion almost too stunning to contemplate, and so thoroughgoing that even now, in the face of blatant evidence, we will no doubt find ways to deny it.
IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK
RACISM AND THE DEATH OF RESPECTABLE CONSERVATISM
THOUGH CONSERVATIVES ACCUSE the left of thinking all critiques of President Obama are rooted in racism, this has never been my argument. From a place to his left, I’ve written two books highly critical of Obama’s positions on several issues, and am fully aware that reasonable people can disagree with Barack Obama from the right, too, without their disagreements serving as proof of bigotry or anti-black bias.
That said, what I have also long maintained is that the style of opposition, its specific form, and its particular content are often embedded in a narrative of white resentment, racial anxiety, and a desire to “other” the president in ways that go beyond the politically partisan.
After all, it is one thing to disagree with a president’s policies. It is quite another to suggest that that president is a foreign imposter, and to accept no proof, no matter how extensive, that he is a bona fide U.S. citizen after all. To wit, according to a spring 2012 survey, roughly two-thirds of Republicans said they believed Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Only about one in five unequivocally accepted the truth of Obama’s citizenship, which is to say that only 20 percent of Republicans can claim to be remotely rational beings.
It is one thing to disagree with the president about taxes or health care or trade policy. It is quite another to believe—as more than a third of conservative Republicans do, according to a recent Pew survey—that he is a secret Muslim who is “paving the way” for sharia law to be imposed. Or to say, as Rush Limbaugh has, that he is trying to deliberately destroy the economy as a way to pay whites back for slavery. Or to insist, as Glenn Beck has, that he chose to go by the name “Barack” rather than “Barry” as a way to thumb his nose at America, because he “hates this country” and is trying to dismantle it “brick by brick.”
It is one thing to suggest the president is wrong about energy policy, or the economy. It is quite another to claim—as again, Limbaugh has—that his “political model” is Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and that soon Obama, like Mugabe, will be confiscating white people’s farms. Or, as Beck opines, that he is “just like Hitler” and that his calls for national service and volunteerism are equivalent to the creation of a new Gestapo. Or that his health care reform bill is just about getting “reparations for slavery.”
It is one thing to believe President Obama naïve about the importance of a strong national defense. It is something altogether different to believe—as a sign held by a protester at a recent Tea Party rally exclaimed—that his real plan is “white slavery.”
Or to claim that his proposal to impose a small tax on visits to tanning salons is a racist imposition on whites who comprise the bulk of such customers, as was said recently by several right-wing radio show hosts.
Or to say that he looks like a “skinny ghetto crackhead,” as activist Brent Bozell has called him.
Or to choose to portray him, as a viral e-mail did recently, as a pair of white eyes against a black background in a picture of the nation’s presidents. Or to portray him as a pimp, as was done in a recent e-mail blast from a Tea Party candidate for governor of New York.
Or to joke that he might be planning to replace the annual White House Easter egg hunt with a watermelon hunt, as the Mayor of Los Alamitos, California, suggested before resigning.
Or to insist that Obama needs to “learn how to be an American,” as Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu recently suggested, and that he is taking us down a course that is “foreign,” in the words of Romney himself.
It is one thing to find the president inadequately committed to the cutting of what you consider burdensome business regulations. It is quite another to say that he is a revolutionary who believes in creating economic hardship as a way to atone for the nation’s founding, which he views as “illegitimate,” according to Limbaugh.
Or to quip, as a South Carolina GOP operative recently did, that Obama is thinking of taxing aspirin “because it’s white and it works.”
How many times must a person be called un-American before it’s accurate to claim that he’s being accused of being a foreign cancer to be excised from the body politic?
How many times can a man be the butt of racist humor, likened to black dictators, or accused of seeking revenge on white people, before we recognize that those doing such things are race-baiting white nationalists in conservative garb?
How long, in short, before we call that which walks like a duck and talks like a duck, a fucking duck?
In addition to these blatant examples of racially “othering” the president, conservatives have sought to separate him from the circle of Americanism by suggesting his views place him outside the national tradition and render him inherently suspect. But to say Obama’s views—like believing the rich don’t build their fortunes on their own, or supporting slight tax increases on the wealthy—place him outside the national mainstream, is so absurd as to leave little doubt it is his visage, not vision, that provokes.
After all, Lincoln agreed that labor created the wealth of business owners, and that labor was “prior to” and “superior to” capital. It was Eisenhower who presided over some of the most significant government projects in history, like the Interstate Highway program, and under whose leadership tax rates on the wealthiest Americans reached 91 percent: well above that which would exist even if President Obama got his every wish on tax policy. And it was George W. Bush who spent money like a drunken sailor on a three-day pass for the projects he believed in (principally unfunded wars and a prescription drug benefit), all without incurring the “otherization” to which Obama has been subjected. When those men are critiqued, their location at the heart of the American experiment is not questioned. Their views on capital, taxes, and government spending all may provoke disagreement, but those are rarely conflicts in which these persons are placed outside the orbit of mainstream Americanism itself.
Likewise, though it is fine to criticize Obama for his approach to the economic crisis, particular critiques—like calling him (as Newt Gingrich did) “the food stamp president”—are calculated to trigger racial associations between dreaded others and the president. They know precisely what they are doing.
Just as they know what they’re doing when they blame the economic crisis, and especially the housing meltdown, on poor people of color who received home loans thanks to the presumed meddling of civil rights activists. It’s a claim they repeat over and again, even though the Community Reinvestment Act didn’t cause the crisis. Most bad loans weren’t written by CRA-covered institutions, and loans covered by the CRA performed better than others. But by connecting the meltdown to “financial affirmative action,” the right hopes to link white pain and black gain in the white imagination.
So too with their claims that people-of-color-led organizations such as ACORN were responsible for election fraud in 2008 and that such fraud may have stolen the election for Obama. The only fraud uncovered was registration