USA And The Future Of The World

[acharya]

<b>Jimmy Carter was right. 'Post-racial' America is still a forlorn hope
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The former president has caused outrage by claiming that many Americans do not want a black president. Sadly, he spoke the truth


Jimmy Carter has always been one to speak bluntly – irritatingly so, to some of his critics. Even at 84, the former president continues to show his willingness to raise the most indelicate topics, often at the most inopportune time. This time, the topic is race and, more specifically, the racism that underlies some of the ugliest, most vociferous criticism of President Obama.

"I think people that are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by the belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," Carter said.

Carter's remarks were like throwing a dead cat into the middle of the dinner table. Obama in interviews broadcast today says race is not a factor, while other democrats disavowed the former president. Republicans cried foul. But perhaps most disturbing in all this is that it looks like Carter is right.

Ten months after Americans poured into the streets to celebrate the historic election of the first black president, the racists, white supremacists and old-school segregationists are feeling emboldened. As Obama's poll numbers have fallen from stratospheric highs, and as criticism has grown over his health reform plan and economic policies, so, too, have the bigots felt more comfortable coming out of the woods.

Sharp criticism of presidents is routine and bipartisan– it comes with the territory. And it can sometimes be nasty. Ronald Reagan was derided as lazy and ill-informed. George W Bush was mocked as the "toxic Texan" and an imbecile who bumbled us into Iraq.

But Obama-hatred among a certain segment of the extreme right has crossed a line into something else – it borders on the pathological. When a southern congressman shouted: "You lie!" in the middle of Obama's joint session of Congress, it was a stunning display of disrespect, not just to the institution, but to the president himself.

One did not have to look too hard at the 12 September anti-Obama rally in Washington – an overwhelmingly white, largely rural crowd – to see the sea of Confederate flags, a symbol of "heritage" to some southern whites and a symbol of racist oppression to blacks. Or the racially laden signs, such as "The zoo has an African lion – the White House has a lyin' African." Others held signs that demanded Obama be sent "back to Kenya".

The increasingly overt racism was on display earlier this year with the so-called "birther" movement, the small but vocal group of conspiratorial nuts who, despite documented evidence to the contrary, are convinced Obama was actually born in Kenya and is ineligible to be president.

If the president were white and his name was O'Malley, would anybody be seriously questioning whether he was secretly born in Ireland?

And go back to the campaign itself, when, despite Obama's groundbreaking triumphs, particularly in majority white states such as Iowa, racism showed its ugly face on the edges. There were the people bringing toy monkeys with Obama stickers and buttons to McCain-Palin rallies. And the people shouting that Obama was "an Arab".

For an unvarnished glimpse of the nastiness, take a look at the disturbing documentary Right America: Feeling Wronged, in which film-maker Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of House speaker Nancy Pelosi, attended 28 rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and just let the crazies speak directly to her camera and microphone.

What is most disturbing is not the evil and inane nonsense these people spout – it's that they seem perfectly happy to do so for a documentary.

Reporters on the campaign trail often encountered similar sentiments. My Washington Post colleague Robin Shulman travelled to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a largely white, working-class former coal-mining town. At a diner there, a retired collection agency worker named Marlene told her: "I guess you could call us prejudiced… I don't believe a black person should be president."

The dirty secret of American politics is that race has been a salient issue for decades. It is rarely spoken of directly; it comes in coded language. But racism has provided an ugly undercurrent ever since the Supreme Court announced an end to Jim Crow segregation of the south in 1954. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon, eyeing the 13% of the vote that went to Alabama's segregationist governor George C Wallace in the 1968 presidential election, adopted what became known as "the southern strategy", which made blatant appeals to the Wallace vote and made the south solid for Republicans for a generation (the exceptions being when a southern Democrat was on the presidential ballot).

According to my former Post colleague Thomas B Edsall, who has written extensively about race and politics, it was Wallace who laid the groundwork for the Republicans' current brand of conservative populism. Over the last 40 years, Republicans learnt to echo the conservative "anger points", through coded phrases such as "states' rights", "family values", "tough on crime" and opposition to "centralised government" and meddling "federal judges".

The racial signals are sometimes subtle, often not. In 1980, Reagan began his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a place notorious for the slaying of three civil rights workers in 1964, and he declared: "I believe in states' rights." Constantly on the campaign trail, Reagan railed against a so-called "welfare queen from Chicago". His supporters knew what he meant.

Obama's victory was supposed to be that transcendent moment that moved us beyond race; he was the "post-racial candidate".

But take a close look at the numbers. Obama won 53% of the vote overall, but he won just 43% of the white vote – McCain beat him by 12 percentage points among whites.

More important, look at specific state results. In the southern states of the old Confederacy, Obama managed just 30% of the white vote, even while he was winning close to half the white vote in the non-southern states. In Alabama, Obama won just 10% of white votes; in Mississippi, 11%; in Louisiana, 14%.

Is all opposition to Obama and his agenda racist? Of course not. Many Americans are clearly frightened by what they see as the deepening reach of the federal government into the American economy and their lives. Being afraid of government overreach is as American as the republic itself.

So, too, is entrenched resistance to any plans to "redistribute" wealth downward. The "haves" never want to pay more in taxes to help the "have nots". But there is a racial component here, too, when the "have nots" are seen as poor blacks, Hispanics and immigrants who came the country illegally.

To paint absolutely all of Obama's critics as racist is clearly wrong. But for his conservative and Republican critics to deny the racial ugliness at the fringes is also wrong – and dangerous.

Republican and conservative leaders rushed to the microphones to condemn Jimmy Carter for playing the race card. Too bad that when it comes to condemning the racists – the ones carrying the signs and questioning the country of the president's birth – those same "leaders" have offered only a deafening silence.