The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  Taken out of context, these phrases painted the ex-military Wright as an unpatriotic, vitriolic, anti-American zealot. Obama was thus guilty by association. The fact that he spoke in the vernacular of black liberation theology, prevalent among many black ministers, was irrelevant to the mainstream media and to Obama’s rival candidates for the presidency. Although much of what Wright had to say was not that different from sermons given in thousands of black churches every Sunday attended by local and national black leaders and elected officials, for much of white America those words came across as anti-American or even worse, anti-white. Obama’s opponents attempted to link him to those statements and to Wright, who became more defiant as the controversy unfolded. Ultimately, Obama responded by publicly criticizing Wright and leaving Wright’s congregation altogether. Media reports of the Philadelphia speech tended to focus on his denunciation of Wright but missed the more substantive and telling elements, and the complicated thesis that Obama is forwarding regarding race in the United States.

  When former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination on January 30, he insured that the 2008 election was going to make history. His departure left only Obama and Clinton, guaranteeing that either a black man or a white woman would head the Democratic ticket. Although Clinton had some black supporters and Obama had some prominent women supporters, the historic nature of the situation created a rift between some white feminists and some activists and scholars in the black community.42 Denied the black vote, the Clinton campaign sought to appeal to white working-class voters, especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the record shows that a disproportionate amount of Obama’s white vote came from college-educated whites. Clinton’s statements about “hard-working Americans” were seen, whether intended to be or not, as thinly veiled racial coding that catered to notions of the United States as a white country.

  However, the Clinton campaign’s tepid efforts to play the race card would pale in comparison to the racial hype and rhetoric that would come from the Republican Party, the McCain-Palin campaign, and the conservative media. During the campaign, racially coded language was used to great effect by McCain and Palin to tap into the racial prejudices of white voters. They played not only the anti-black card but the anti-Muslim one as well. From references to Obama’s middle name, Hussein, to accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” the McCain campaign consistently sought to inject racially loaded questions about Obama’s character into the campaign.

  At a McCain rally in Minnesota, McCain supporter Gayle Quinnell shouted to the crowd that “Obama is an Arab.” McCain took away the microphone from her and weakly stated, “No ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” Quinnell was no ordinary run-of-the-mill angry couch potato stewing in her rage against Obama and Arabs—presumably she meant Muslim, making the erroneous leap that all Arabs are Muslim, and vice versa. She actively distributed her inaccurate beliefs as broadly as she could. She claimed that she got the information from a volunteer at the local McCain campaign office and then decided to copy the pamphlet and distribute it widely, including to 400 addresses she randomly pulled from a phone book.43

  At Palin’s rallies, participants screamed, “Kill him” and hurled accusations about Obama’s “links to terrorists.” At an October 11, 2008, rally in Pennsylvania, a participant showed up with a monkey doll made to look like Obama and there were shouts that he should go back to Kenya.44 In Clearwater, Florida, at another Palin rally, a racial epithet was shouted at a black sound man by a Palin supporter, according to the Washington Post.45 At another October rally in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Lehigh County Republican Chairman Bill Platt told the crowd, “Think about how you’ll feel on November 5 if you wake up in the morning and see the news, that Barack Obama—that Barack Hussein Obama—is the president-elect of the United States,” emphasizing Obama’s middle name.46 All this was not just tolerated but encouraged by Sarah Palin. Going beyond the parameters set by McCain, Palin sought to incite her crowds by questioning Obama’s patriotism, mischaracterizing his relationship with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers, and emphasizing his foreign-sounding middle name, Hussein. It got to the point that the Secret Service had to intervene on behalf of security and directed the campaign to tone down the rhetoric because of the spike in death threats from white supremacists and others to Obama and his family following these events.47

  This egregious behavior was not limited to the Republican base. Incidents involving Republican officials and activists occurred both before and after the election. The examples seem endless. In October 2008, Buchanan County, Virginia McCain campaign official and local Republican Party treasurer Bobby May wrote a column stating that Obama, if elected, would paint the White House black, change the national anthem to the “Negro National Anthem,” and send more aid to Africa so the “Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream.” Also in October 2008, San Bernardino Republican Women’s Club president Diane Fedele, who was later forced to resign, mailed out a newsletter with a cartoon of Obama on a fake food stamp coupon. On the drawing he was surrounded by ribs, watermelons, and fried chicken. In June 2009, longtime South Carolina Republican Party activist Rusty DePass compared Michelle Obama to an escaped gorilla on his Facebook page: “I’m sure it’s just one of (First Lady) Michelle’s ancestors—probably harmless.” In February 2009, Republican mayor Dean Grose of Los Alamitos, California, sent around a photo by email showing the White House in the middle of a watermelon patch, with a caption that read, “No Easter egg hunt this year.” He later resigned over the scandal.48 Unfortunately, many more examples could be cited.

  More than just racist newsletters and cyberspace rants, real-world reactions erupted against Obama’s election. Within hours of his victory, some students on the North Carolina State University campus spray-painted the words “Let’s shoot that Nigger in the head” and “Hang Obama by a noose.” That same night, four white men from Staten Island decided to “go after black people” in response to the election and before being apprehended they assaulted two people of color and a white person they believed to be black. Also on election night, a black family in South Ogden, Utah, came home to find that their American flag had been burned. And on that same night, a black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was set on fire. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and research by authors John Amato and David Neiwert, more than 200 “hate-related” incidents and actions were documented within the first few weeks of America’s election of Obama, a number that would double by late spring 2009 although the data is not exact. 49

  Is the U.S. a “Postracial” Society? The Debate

  Within days of the Obama’s victory, radically different interpretations of its meaning and significance for American race relations began surfacing. Almost immediately, conservative and some mainstream pundits began to declare the end of racism in the United States. How could a nation be racist any longer if it had just elected someone from a segment of the population that had endured legal segregation within living memory? With not only a black president but two sitting black governors, two recent black secretaries of state, two black Supreme Court justices, one past and one present, and the largest minority bloc in the U.S. House of Representatives, surely African Americans could no longer complain about social exclusion, discrimination, or white bigotry. Race, it was now claimed, was over as a determining force in the lives of black Americans and, presumably, other people of color as well. Americans had grown beyond their racial past and were judging individuals, as Martin Luther King Jr. had dreamed, “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The evidence—the American people’s election of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America—was clear and irrefutable, the contention went. Racism was no longer an issue because the nation had become colorblind. Well, at least white peo
ple had. At the core of the postracial argument is the unspoken but nonetheless clear assumption that it is people of color, especially black Americans, who are obsessed with race, not white Americans. In the wake of the election, conservative black commentator Juan Williams wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Barack Obama’s election is both an astounding political victory—and the end of an era for black politics.”50 After citing Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas as examples of black achievement, he goes on to contend that the “extortion-like” politics of the Reverends Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright will become a “form of nostalgia.” Racial problems from now on, according to Williams, will center on being responsible regarding family obligations, overthrowing gangster cultures, and finding pragmatic, race-neutral solutions to social problems.

  Williams’s fallacious assumptions are many, but two stand out. One is that the election of one black person to the White House sweeps away hundreds of years of accumulated social and economic underdevelopment and institutions distorted by racism. As even Obama states in the epigraph noted earlier, such thinking is pitifully naïve. Vast and persistent racial disparities in criminal justice, incarceration, education, health care, housing, and environmental hazards, to name a few, did not disappear on election night. The second issue is the assumption that a majority of whites voted for Obama and for a new era of racial harmony. The facts tell a different and more complicated story. According to exit polls, as noted in Table 3, page 438, Obama won 43 percent of the white vote, an increase of two percentage points over what Kerry won in 2004, and about the same percentage Clinton won in 1996. In effect, the white vote for Democrats has not shifted in many years and has not been a majority in over forty years. Obama won primarily by building a coalition of black voters, Latino voters, and young voters of all colors. Project Vote, which has done a comparative analysis of the 2008 turnout, documents a large surge of minority voters, an increase of 21 percent compared to 2004. At the same time, white votes cast actually dropped. And the youth vote (ages eighteen to twenty-nine), which overwhelmingly went to Obama, grew by 9 percent from 2004.51

  In a defining piece for the postracial thesis, published in the New York Times just prior to the election, Matt Bai put forth the proposition that Obama’s rise signaled the end of black politics altogether.52 According to Bai, a new generation of black politicians, from Newark mayor Cory Booker to Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and others, represented a paradigm shift in African American politics wherein race has been neutralized as the most effective means of mobilization on issues facing low-income black communities. To make his case, Bai constructs two straw men—an undifferentiated, protest-driven, black, civil rights mafia on the one hand, and a young, enlightened, modernist talented tenth on the other—locked in mortal combat for the political soul of black, and white, America. The head of the latter group, symbolically and through voter legitimation, is Obama. Bai, like Williams, displays a gender bias that erases black women from both groups.

  The ideological and political aim of this argument is to marginalize the confrontational politics of the militant wing of the Civil Rights Movement and traditional black nationalists—conveniently ignoring, of course, their nearly universal support of Obama. It is also aimed at undermining legislative and policy initiatives on the part of the states and the federal government as ameliorative actions to end racial disparities and discrimination. There is little danger that the majority of black Americans, who will continue to live in the world of gross racial disparities, police profiling, and institutional racism, will buy this. The argument’s real targets are policy makers, the mass media, and those who genuinely or disingenuously want to get past the racial discord that has long defined the nation. The notion of a postracial world is not only factually wrong, but profoundly hazardous as well.

  After Obama’s win, conservative foundations and legal groups almost immediately attempted to use his election as a justification for ending affirmative action and other race-conscious programs. As the Los Angeles Times noted, “Obama’s success has emerged as a central argument from conservatives who say his victory proves that some of the nation’s most protective civil rights laws can be erased from the books.”53 In a case before the Supreme Court in 2009, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, involving a utility board election process in Austin, Texas, plaintiffs sought to eliminate their Voting Rights Act requirement of Justice Department preclearance. A brief filed in support of the plaintiffs by conservative foundations cited Obama’s election as a reason why the Voting Rights Act should be scrapped. The brief stated that Obama’s win “stands as a remarkable testament to the tremendous progress this country has made in terms of racial equality and voting rights.”54 While some involved with the brief claimed that they did not want to see an end to the Voting Rights Act, others, such as the ultraconservative Pacific Legal Foundation and Southeastern Legal Foundation, clearly do. In the end, the Court refused to rule on the constitutionality of the case and sent it back to the lower courts.

  Proponents of postracial policy celebrate the willingness of a growing number of whites, disproportionately young, to vote for black candidates, but fail to explain why. There are at least three reasons. First, black civil rights activists and other black leaders have been successful in exposing the lingering and persistent nature of racism and racial disparities. Clearly, many whites become antiracist because they are open to this information. Second, the Obama–Democratic Party win was the fulcrum with which the nation repudiated conservatism and Republican Party politics. Obama, for many, was the vehicle for the solid rejection of more than a decade of the most regressive government in recent memory. The wretched campaign of John McCain embodied the deadly combination of contradictions that Bush-era Republicans face: a base split between competing cultural, social and economic constituencies; an economic collapse popularly linked to the failed tenets of neoliberalism; unnecessary wars of choice whose cost in lives and resources is too high to tolerate even for many patriotic Republicans; and party demographics that are going in the opposite direction of a more diversifying nation.

  And third, the unacceptability of overt racism in the public sphere crosses party lines, and at least some conservatives reject such tactics. This made Palin’s venture into these waters problematic for John McCain. Despite a hard-core racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic wing in the party, most Republicans know that they actually turn off voters when they go too far in that direction. At least this appeared to be the case until the possibility, and then the reality, of Obama’s election ignited a firestorm of public racial rage not seen in the United States in decades. As former President Jimmy Carter so inconveniently opined, the wrath and animosity aimed at Obama is “based on the fact that he is a black man.”55

  At one level, the public sphere has become replete with references to Obama as Hitler, a witch doctor, a socialist/communist/Marxist, and a Muslim. These references surfaced at rallies of groups like the “birthers,” who believe he was not born in the United States and has illegally assumed the presidency. These views also arise among the so-called “tea partiers,” who promote states’ rights and limited federal government authority. Both birthers and tea partiers include a mixed bag of libertarians, genuine conservatives, and racists. The tea party movement, championed by Sarah Palin and most national Republican Party officials and leaders, has generally ignored, if not supported, racists in its midst, such as Houston-based teaparty.com founder and tea party leader Dale Robertson, who was caught in a photo carrying a sign using the (misspelled) word “niggar” and who sent out a fundraising letter with an image of Obama manipulated to look like a pimp.56

  Bigoted tirades against legislation for health care reform from white reactionaries like Rush Limbaugh were thoroughly racialized, as when he referred to the legislation as a “reparations” bill.57 Despite the claim that opposition to Obama is based on his politics, these virtually all-white movements, with a few notable exc
eptions, have been driven by political extremists who are informed by neoconservative leaders and hate media. Republicans such as Palin, Representative Michelle Bachman, and Representative Joe Wilson—who lowered himself to shout “You lie!” while the president was addressing a joint session of Congress—are stoking the flames rather than attempting to douse them with reason and reality. During his first two years in office, the entire Republican membership in both the House of Representatives and the Senate marched lock-step in opposition to everything Obama did, signaling to their constituencies that compromise, negotiation, and civility were not options for dealing with this president.

  All of this has been aided and abetted by right-wing talk radio and Fox TV News. Just as Wilson’s “You lie” can be seen as an attempt to sow public uncertainty and antipathy toward the president, so too can the punditry of Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who tries to stoke fear and paranoia with accusations that Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”58 It is nearly impossible to imagine a black (or white) media personality on the traditional networks, CNN, or MSNBC making a similar statement about a white political leader, let alone the president of the United States, and not being removed from the air immediately and denounced in a rapid-fire press release. Far from being regretful, Beck, Wilson, and others have used these controversies to raise funds and deepen their ties to the most reactionary elements of the far right.59