Racial Politics on Site Map subfolders
By Maureen Dowd: Joe Wilson yelled
“You lie!” at a president who didn’t. Now it has made
Wilson an overnight right-wing hero. Fair or not, what I
heard from that South Carolina Republican was an unspoken word
in the air: You lie, boy!
Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president
... convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is
president and will never accept it. I’ve been loath to
admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic
efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a
foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a
cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate
kids — had much to do with race. For two centuries, the
South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama,
they have both.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of
Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the
Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol
and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that
she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist
candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being
lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president
presiding over the majestic chamber.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now
given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to
“break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty
DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped
from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn
Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money.
And now Joe Wilson.
Obama is at the center of a period of racial turbulence
sparked by his ascension. This president is the ultimate
civil rights figure — an educated black man whose air of
elegance, manners, and erudition makes the right wing more
angry at him. Wilson's outburst has to do with
delegitimizing him as a president. In South Carolina
politics, the olive branch very seldom works. You have to come
from a position of strength, remembering that silence gives
consent. [Excerpts from:"Boy,
Oh, Boy", By MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times: September 12,
2009]
By Yael T. Abouhalkah: The knives are
out for former President Jimmy Carter for telling the truth:
Racism is hurting President Barack Obama.
1 min
Look at the facts, which show there's a great racial divide in
America regarding Obama. In the 2008 elections, for
instance, Obama got 10 percent of the white vote in Alabama, 11
percent in Mississippi, 23 percent in Georgia and 26 percent in
Texas. Even outside the South, Obama received 31 percent
of the white vote in Utah, 33 percent in Idaho, 40 percent in
Kansas and 42 percent in Missouri.
It's not at all untoward to look at those results and
conclude that there were plenty of white people in those states
judging Obama by his skin color, not the merits of his
positions vs. GOP candidate John McCain.
And as Carter pointed out Tuesday, that kind of racial
divide continues to exist in America as Obama tries to carry
out his policies. Obama doesn't want this furor on his
hands right now, given all the incredibly important policy
decisions he's handling. But critics are off base when
they carp about Carter and his comments. They were truthful.
And they sting. ["Obama battles great
racial divide", Kansas City Star Editorial]
Turning Sotomayor supreme court nomination to
race.
8min
"Rapping
Joe’s Knuckles," MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times, September
15, 2009
|