Racism in the U.S. elections

It was inevitable that the fascist right would mount a campaign of racist attacks against Obama. But these attacks now include death threats.

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American law enforcement agencies fear Barack Obama will be the target of a violent attack by white supremacists at the Democratic convention in Denver this month.

Ever since the Senator for Illinois emerged as the likely Democratic presidential candidate, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups have been making racist threats.

In an interview on Fox News, Railton Loy, Grand Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan International, said of Obama's presidential campaign: "I'm not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down south is going to take him out... If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell. The hate would be so deep down south."

Meanwhile, websites and blogs have been buzzing with racist posts....

On Thursday, Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, appeared in court in Miami after allegedly threatening to assassinate Obama. He was in a training class when he allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet before adding: "If (Obama] gets elected, I'll assassinate him myself."

According to court documents, Geisel said in an interview with a Secret Service agent, that "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking".

A search of Geisel's car and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armour-piercing types, body armour, military-style fatigues and a machete. - [url=http://news.scotsman.com/politics/America-burning-racists-say-Obama.4375...

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[ 10 August 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Given the country’s painful recent past, race is an issue around which Americans do their best to dance. Instead, it is being aired in surrogate language as questions are raised about patriotism and “American values”. And in the background, a virulent internet campaign promotes the stubborn fallacy that the youthful senator is a Muslim (substituting religion for race, with much the same effect).

“Race is the elephant in the living room here in America. Nobody wants to talk about it, but it’s a factor,” says Dr Young at his home in Jackson. “Racism is not as overt and obvious as it once was. We keep hearing that America wants a change – but does it want change enough to vote for a black man? We’ll learn that on election day. If he wins, I will die a happy man.”

Across the Pearl River, in predominantly white and rural Rankin County, there is anxiety rather than excitement about Mr Obama’s prospects. Among the hunters and anglers shopping for guns, crossbows, fishing rods and camouflage gear at the cavernous Bass Pro superstore, his race and religion are viewed with scepticism.

In opinion polls, about 10 per cent of Americans consistently believe that Senator Obama is a Muslim, because his father and stepfather were Muslim, his middle name is Hussein and he went to school for four years in Islamic Indonesia – even though he has attended a Chicago church for nearly two decades. Such views were easy to find at Bass Pro last week. “I’m afraid that if he wins, he will go back to his Muslim upbringing and change the country to reflect that,” says John McKellar, a 22-year-old gardener.

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[url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/26... critics targeting his race?[/url]

[b]Deciphering their racist code words[/b]

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While McCain and the other Neanderthals in the Republican Party can't get away with calling Obama a criminal or a welfare cheat, they're using new terms to get the point across--he's Black, he's urban, and he's out of step with the "rest of us." And the us, of course, are "hard-working white Americans," as Hillary Clinton put it toward the end of her failed bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Last month's Republican National Convention was a cesspool of thinly veiled racist invective aimed at Obama. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice presidential candidate, sneered about Obama's history as a community organizer. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise derided Obama for his work "on the South Side of Chicago."

A few hours before McCain gave his acceptance speech, Republican bigot Lynn Westmoreland, a member of Congress from the former slave state of Georgia, referred to Michelle and Barack Obama as "uppity," saying, "Just from what little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity." Given an opportunity to clarify, Westmoreland said, "Yeah, uppity."

"As a native of the South," said political commentator David Gergen, "I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'He's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a Southern background."…

The use of racism in American politics isn't new, by any means, but the methods for invoking it have changed.

In the 1968 election for president, Republican Richard Nixon crafted the so-called "Southern Strategy" of making coded racist appeals to win white votes.

The Southern Strategy was an acknowledgement that open anti-Black racism would no longer be tolerated, now that African Americans' right to vote was firmly established. But with the Democratic Party falling apart because of its inability to contain the contradictions of being both the formal party of civil rights in the North and the party of Jim Crow in the South, the Southern Strategy was, above all, about winning the rural, white Southern vote into the Republican sphere….

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan picked up Nixon's mantle by campaigning across the South--he launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In office, Reagan regularly invoked fictitious characters like "welfare queens" to justify his program of cutting back on social programs.

Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, declared a war on drugs--which, in reality, meant a war on young Black men. Bush used an unapologetically racist ad--about Willie Horton, a Black man who was accused of a killing a white woman while free on a prison work-release program--against opponent Michael Dukakis, but the first politician to raise Horton was fellow Democrat and future vice president Al Gore.

When he ran for president in 1992, Bill Clinton made fighting crime and ending welfare big aspects of his campaign--both of which were used to convey a message that he was not beholden to Black "special interests." The most outrageous example of this was his public admonition of a Black female rap artist--a strange target for a presidential candidate….

That said, racism remains an effective tool of division and distraction in the hands of politicians who have no answers for the growing and profound crises gripping the U.S.

Clinton's campaign did help narrow Obama's lead in the waning months of the Democratic primaries. Clinton was able to prey on the anxieties, cynicism and despair among many white workers who are frustrated and angry about declining living standards and, in some cases, quick to blame immigrants and Blacks.

McCain and the Republicans are set on using the same strategy. Thus, opinion polls show that efforts at demonizing Obama as urban, elitist and "out of touch" have had some success in convincing some white voters, who under other circumstances would vote Democratic, to consider McCain. Plus, there's also a small group of former Clinton supporters who refuse to vote for Obama and threaten to join the McCain camp….

Since Obama's historic and effective speech on race last spring, his campaign has been quiet--unless it was to attack Black men on Father's Day or denounce Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By remaining silent, Obama both legitimizes media silence on these issues and simultaneously allows the right to continue with the same garbage.

Obama is no doubt concerned that if he were to speak out against the different expressions of racism from the Clintons or McCain and Palin, the media would focus on this alone and bury anything else about his campaign. He is frightened of being labeled by the media as an "angry Black man," running a campaign like Rev. Al Sharpton--in other words, one that isn't to be taken seriously.

It is certainly true that the media have a long record of trivializing and dismissing Black candidates and discussions of race in election campaigns. But there are consequences to the course Obama has chosen….

Obama's silence means the smears will continue because there is no political price to pay for those who make them. If the Republicans didn't fear being seen as racist, then they would forgo the symbolism and code words and go for outright slurs.

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[url=http://socialistworker.org/2008/09/17/deciphering-their-racism]Socialist Worker[/url]

Thanks for posting that article here, Martin.

It was the subject of a [url=http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=13&t=004260]s... thread[/url], but I never understood the need for such proliferation.

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=1&oref=slogi... Push to "Otherize" Obama[/url]
by Nicholas D. Kristof

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Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation’s “end times” and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it....

What is happening, I think, is this: [b]religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice[/b]. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.

I’m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it.

This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

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[ 21 September 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Sarah Palin was on the verge of inciting a race riot in northern Florida yesterday. At her rallies, the Republican faithful hurled a racial epithet at a black sound man, and screamed "kill him" and "treason!" at Barack Obama.

"Boy, you guys just get it!" Palin responded. This reaction, presumably, was what Palin had in mind when she urged John McCain to "take the gloves off."

The McCain campaign initially took her advice, sending out three emails about Obama and Bill Ayers yesterday and pushing the angle hard on the news media. But by the time McCain got to debating, he made no mention of Ayers or Jeremiah Wright or Tony Rezko. For once, McCain knew better. His campaign looked supremely silly the day before, ranting about domestic terrorists from the 1960s when the Dow was plunging 800 points. - [url=http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/369925]Source[/url]

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Over the past weeks, 28 million copies of the anti-Muslim propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West have been delivered to the doors of newspaper subscribers in swing states. The 2006 documentary, which has been a mainstay of David Horowitz's "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," describes "radical Islam" as a menace comparable to Adolf Hitler that, according to the film's website, "is threatening, with all the means at its disposal, to bow Western civilization under the yoke of its values."

For the groups behind the film's distribution, the goal seems pretty clear: Scare the holy hell out of millions of voters in swing states about a possible Muslim takeover of the U.S. It's hard to see the targeting of electoral battlegrounds as anything other than an attempt to help John McCain get elected--perhaps by capitalizing on the widespread whispering campaign that Obama is a "secret Muslim."

And one has to admit that the Obsession campaign's marketing plan has been quite slick. After all, what better way to disseminate hate propaganda than under the unassuming guise of a documentary film delivered in Americans' daily newspapers? A plan that, sadly, many newspapers were all too happy to go along with for the sake of corporate profits. While a handful of newspapers--the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record, the Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch--have taken the ethical stance of refusing to carry the DVD (the News & Record called it "fear-mongering and divisive"), some 70 papers, including the New York Times, have delivered it to their subscribers as a paid advertising supplement.

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[url=http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/11-1]Source[/url]

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Poor John McCain.

He let the Bush-Cheney operatives who took over his Republican presidential campaign late in the summer talk him into running a scorched-earth campaign attacking Barack Obama.

But, now that the campaign is fully operational, [b]McCain is shocked and unsettled by what he is hearing from his own supporters[/b].

"I don't trust Obama," a woman at a town hall meeting in Minnesota told McCain. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."

McCain silenced her and said, "No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues..."

The crowd booed the Arizona senator's attempt to quiet the hate speech that has become such a major feature of events at which he and his over-the-top running mate, ethically-challenged Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, have appeared in recent days.

When a man in the crowd suggested that he was scared about raising his child in an America led by a President Barack Obama, McCain countered him.

Speaking of Obama, the Republican presidential nominee said: "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

That may seem rich coming from the man who has "approved this message" of smearing Obama at every turn.

It certainly did not go over well with his backers.

McCain's description of Obama as "decent" drew loud booing from the crowd that had come to hear trash talking -- not the truth.

"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain continued, trying to calm, his feverish backers. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments."

At that, the mob booed even more loudly. - [url=http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/371267/mccain_i_admire_se...

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[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6YKOkfFsE]Watch the video[/url]