Barack Obama’s difficulties are the result of racism: It has been a frequently recurring theme ever since he emerged as a serious presidential candidate. Obama himself has raised it occasionally, though not often, but his supporters fall back on it all the time–including now.
House majority leader Eric Cantor and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan discuss the debt ceiling deal and the political fallout.
Here’s DeWayne Wickham in yesterday’s USA Today: “This total lack of respect is downright contemptible–if not unpatriotic. Such contempt, I’m convinced, is rooted in something other than political differences. . . . The presence of Jim Crow, Jr.–a more subtle form of racism–is there.”
What prompts these accusations of racism? In Wickham’s words, Speaker John Boehner “contemptuously waited more than half a day to return a call from the president,” and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor complained to reporters that Obama cut short a meeting, “as though the president needs his permission to end a White House gathering.” In reference to the Cantor spat, Wickham writes:
That encounter might have reminded Obama of the open letter Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave and abolitionist who became one of this nation’s first black diplomats, wrote to his slave master.
It would be “a privilege” to show you “how mankind ought to treat each other,” Douglass told the man who had badly mistreated him. “I am your fellow man, but not your slave.”
This is overwrought to the point of absurdity. Neither Obama nor Cantor is in a position remotely comparable to that of a slave, but Obama is the higher-status of the two. Perhaps Cantor failed to show due respect for the president’s authority, but that is very different from insulting an underling’s basic humanity. As for Boehner, he is the head of a coequal branch of government, yet Wickham faults him for not deferring to Obama as if he were the boss.
Writing at Salon.com, Michael Lind puts the racism charge in less personal terms. “In the House of Representatives,” he writes, “the Tea Party faction that has used the debt ceiling issue to plunge the nation into crisis is overwhelmingly Southern in its origins”:
The South sought to block the federal civil rights revolution by a policy of “massive resistance” to court orders ordering racial integration. Some Southern states went so far as to try to abolish their public school systems rather than integrate them. It is hard to avoid seeing a link between this racist rationale for privatization and modern conservative plans to scale back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, relied on disproportionately by black and brown Americans and low-income whites, while increasing taxpayer subsidies to private retirement and healthcare accounts enjoyed mostly by affluent whites.
We actually don’t see the link at all–but then, we do not have access to the inside of Michael Lind’s head. Hilariously, Lind approvingly quotes Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, who on a radio show “mocked the Southern accent of the typical congressional Tea Party caucus member.” He quotes a FoxNews.com report:
The congresswoman, who represents Anaheim and other parts of Orange County, laughed and said she knows how to get along with people. Then she used a mock Southern accent to describe how conversations with them play out.
“Hey what’s your name? ‘My name is M-o-e,'” Sanchez said, feigning a Southern drawl that drew howls of laughter from Miller and her co-host. “Ok Moe. Moe-ster, how you doing baby? What are we going to do today? What’s your interest? What can we work on together?”
“‘Well, it’s unconstitutional,” she said, using her faux Southern accent.
The accent Sanchez mocked is a regional, not a racial, one, but her behavior is far more clearly bigoted than any Lind, or Wickham for that matter, is able to ascribe to any Republican officeholder.
The idea that Obama is the victim of racism is not without popular resonance. A popular hashtag on Twitter, #BeforeBlackPresidents, allows people to sound off with similar complaints, a list of which was compiled by the Kos Kidz (quoting verbatim):
The debt ceiling was raised SEVENTY-FOUR times without incident. SEVENTY-FOUR TIMES.
A POTUS could tax the rich at 91% and be called a Republican—not a socialist!”
middle names were irrelevant.
Deliberately sabotaging economic recovery was not considered a legitimate option 4 the opposition party.
NO ONE screamed ‘you lie’ at the president during a state of the union address.
John Quincy Adams would probably disagree with the claim about the irrelevance of middle names, and more recently, we recall some quips about “George Herbert Hoover Bush.” But that’s a quibble. The broader point is that there’s a first time for everything, and it is obviously fallacious to think that everything that happens for the first time between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2013, is the result of racism against a black president.
Still, by now it is clear that a significant number of people are determined to believe that racism is what is ruining Obama’s presidency. The proposition can be argued against, but it cannot be proved false, because it is vague enough that disagreements will persist over just what would constitute proof.
Loretta Sanchez has no place to talk about racism.
Do you recall how she accused her Vietnamese opponent (in 2010) of trying to take away a Congressional seat from Latinos?
As if a seat in Congress BELONGS to one race!
30 second video.
No, she didn’t have the guts to say this in English.
Translation is 100% accurate.
It was never so necessary
he yelled “you lie” because obama did.
and he lie when he threaten the checks would not make it for the MILITARY
IN THE WAR ZONE
BOEMER CAME ON THE CAMERA AFTER TO REASSURE THE MILITARY