Many of the conservative right wing now feel comfortable in espousing their racist views openly.They are disrespectful to Barack Obama in a way that has never been shown to any president in the history of the country. Many of them are bold enough to appear at rallies showing off their firearms. If anyone says anything, they and the conservative media claim the" Race Card" is being played . Even the liberal media defends some of their behavior. Beware, Be focused. I predict they will get even bolder. Check out the following articles.
The Uppity-Negro Syndrome
What Jimmy Carter and a pivotal scene from "Rosewood" have to say about President Obama and America's increasingly hostile race relations.
- By: Sophia Nelson | Posted: September 17, 2009 at 2:49 PM
The furor over former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's remarks that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man" reminds me of a scene from John Singleton's 1997 film, Rosewood, which dramatized the real-life lynching and burning of a rural, predominantly black Florida town in January 1923.
President Carter's statement reminds me of one scene in particular: Two white men are talking about the town of Rosewood. The people of Rosewood were black landowners, and for the most part, they had escaped the shackles of sharecropping and much of the Jim Crow oppression of that time.
In the scene, the two men talk about the alleged rape of a white woman and the false rumor that a black man named Jesse Hunter had raped her. (It was alleged that a local Rosewood resident named Sylvester Carrier, a private music instructor who played the piano, was harboring Hunter.) This, of course, was false, but it was used as an excuse to inflame tensions and anger.
Then came the line that's still etched in my mind: "Oh, that's them uppity folks that own a piano," one of the white men says.
"I don't even own one." This bit of dialogue sparks what culminates in a 200-person, white lynch mob that burns Rosewood down, killing dozens of black women, children and men. Black people died because of a classic case of "uppity Negroes" not "knowing" their place.
My point is this: President Carter is speaking
a truth that few Americans are willing to hear. He grew up at the height of Jim Crow in the Deep South—the man knows racism when he sees it. Most white Americans simply cannot face the ugly past of "race in America" and how much it is still with us today.
In my opinion, folks, it's the piano, stupid!
Rep. Joe Wilson's, R-S.C., inability to contain himself from
yelling out "You lie" at the president during a joint session of Congress is a classic case of an angry Southern white male reaching his limit with the uppity Ivy-League educated, one-term-senator-turned-president. Some may argue that this doesn't make him a racist. But at best, his outburst demonstrates an intolerance and a lack of respect that he never would have shown to a white commander in chief. Such is the case with much of what we hear from our fellow citizens. There is an anger, a vitriol, a hatred of this president that seems deeply personal. And it is unnerving.
As Americans, all of us should be alarmed at the increasing hostility of our dialogue: There's Fox News TV host Glenn Beck calling the president a "racist." Rush Limbaugh declaring that "Obama's America" is one "where black kids can beat up white kids on a bus." Then there's the "birthers" who swear that Obama is not a legitimate commander in chief and those who sob that they want "their country back." My question is: From whom do you want your country back?
The problem is that we've gotten so used to not dealing with racial tensions in this country. They've become so nuanced that we cover or shrug them off because they are not as blatant as they were in the 1790s, 1840s, 1920s or 1960s. That's a mistake. Whether we like it or not, those tensions are still here with us.
Sophia A. Nelson, a long-time Republican, is an attorney and a regular contributor to The Root.
Jimmy Carter, True Son of the South, Hits Nail on Head
The White House's fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. The rest of us accept it at our peril.
- By: Kai Wright | Posted: September 17, 2009 at 10:21 AM
Philip Cheung/Getty Images
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Jimmy Carter is a son of the South. Not the New South of relocated corporate headquarters and (foreclosed) McMansions, but Jim Crow's South. So we'll all have to excuse his refusal to act like he doesn't hear Glenn Beck's vicious dog whistle. He knows too well the coded language of political racism because he witnessed its writing.
America abhors history. No wonder, given how many national crimes are lurking back there. But we've arrived at a time when a politician's refusal to consider the past is a perverse testament to prudent leadership. And as a result, a statement as obvious as Carter's—that the tea-baggers hate President Barack Obama because he's black—can be passed off as controversy in 2009.
It's self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don't brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president's death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.
Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren't new, that their fear of "big government" is but the latest version of states' rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy. And he wants us to recall this history: In the months following the 1954 Brown ruling, a Mississippi college football star and plantation manager named Robert Patterson launched a crusade to protect school children from "being taught the Communist theme of all races and mongrelization." Patterson was angry, and proud of it. "You say this is not the time for hotheads and flag-waving," he wrote in a public letter quoted in Gene Roberts' and Hank Klibanoff's must-read history of civil rights journalism. "We need those hotheads, just as we always have when our liberty has been threatened."
Patterson channeled his anger into a lasting innovation for the white supremacy movement—give it a respectable face, strip it of explicitly racist rhetoric and use it as an invisible hand to guide mob violence. He created the Citizens' Council, which would spawn a regional network by year's end. Each council's membership boasted the area's finest white leaders in business, government and, yes, media. They directed their public anger less at integration itself than at federal incursions on local rule, but the resulting violence was no less extreme.
At the time, Carter was a Plains, Ga., peanut farmer and board of education member. He recalls in his campaign memoir, Turning Point (Random House, 1993), how the Plains Council pressured him to join. When he refused, the council sent 20 of his best customers to demand compliance. Carter again refused, this time adding, "and besides, there are a few politicians in Atlanta who are taking the dues from all over the state and putting the money in their pockets, just because folks are worried about the race issue."
Tea-bagging elites like Fox News, Sarah Palin and Joe Wilson are the political descendants of Patterson's councils. They're still using coded language to orchestrate rowdy, racist mobs and they're still pocketing the money the frenzy generates.
In the tea-bagging universe, "big government"—or, really, the social programs both Beck and Rush Limbaugh conspicuously dub "reparations"—is a stand-in villain for integration. Not the literal act of blacks and whites going to school together. Rather, bashing big government swats at the same anxiety Patterson had: a concern over who gets to make the rules. That question has haunted Dixie ever since black slaves outnumbered the South's white residents. And it still haunts the GOP's Southern, white base today.
Nor is it new for the movement's media mavens to cry foul when someone dares break the code. It started, as Roberts and Klibanoff detail, as the national media covered Little Rock's brutalities, and it intensified throughout the era. Southern newspaper editors, themselves affiliated with Citizens' Councils, led a concerted effort to bully national outlets into what pioneering Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill called "the cult of objectivity."
The fruits are seen in the timidity of today's mainstream news. Demonstrable liars like Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin are given point-counterpoint coverage. A rally dominated by ugliness such as that on display in Washington on Sept. 12 is reported as legitimate political dispute. And Jimmy Carter's willingness to speak the clear truth is debated as controversy. Decades ago, CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith predicted this outcome as he watched his network reel from complaints about his Freedom Ride coverage. Applying balance to a discussion in which there is none, he warned, was "equivalent to saying that truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil." [Emphasis mine.]
The White House's fear of challenging the tea-bag madness is typical of its cautious politics. But the rest of us accept it at our peril. The absurd, plainly racist ideas that found air at Palin's campaign rallies have dug in as meaningful parts of our daily public conversation. Carter is the most significant public figure to say that's not OK. Rather than allow the right to shout him down, many more purported leaders must stand up with him.
Kai Wright is The Root's senior writer.
10 Reasons African Americans Should March on Washington About Health Care
August should have been marked by black rage at the status quo—rather than white paranoia about change.
- By: Kai Wright | Posted: September 16, 2009 at 7:01 AM
Never mind Joe Wilson and the tea baggers. You know who really ought to be breaking congressional decorum and marching on Washington about health care? Black people. We ought to be so angry about the disastrous health care system that we disrupt society at every level until it gets fixed.
Why? Well, don't expect our post-race president to make the point, but nowhere are the festering wounds of race in America more visible than in our broken health care system. From cancer to infant mortality, its disparate outcomes across racial lines are staggering.
Right-wing advocates worked hard during the Bush years to frame them as the results of individual choices, and surely, we all need to do a far better job of taking care of ourselves. But it's also plain that racial disparities in health cut too profoundly across too many illnesses to be dismissed as solely about bad behavior. You name the illness, and blacks are more likely to get it and less likely to survive with it.
Here's a list of ills to boil your blood and get you shouting at your own congressional representatives.
10 reasons black people should be mad as hell about the health care status quo.
1. Uninsured. Forty percent of black Americans reported being uninsured for some portion of 2007-2008, compared to 1 in 4 whites. And it's not just about income, nearly a quarter of blacks making more than $84,000 a year lacked coverage at some point, compared to 16 percent of whites in that income bracket.
2. Early death. If black America were its own country, it would rank 105th in the world for life expectancy, behind places like Algeria, the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka. We're barely in the developing world.
3. Infant mortality. Black infants are 2.5 times more likely to die than white newborns. Again, if black America were its own country, we'd rank 88th in infant mortality rates. (Hat tip to my Black AIDS Institute colleagues for the global comparisons.)
4. Cancer. It's the second-leading cause of death in America, but that means more to some than others—the black male death rate is 37 percent higher than whites and the black female rate is 17 percent higher.
5. Breast and cervical cancer. Black women are twice as likely to die from cervical cancer as whites and while breast cancer deaths are dropping for whites, black women continue to die at higher rates than anybody else. Why? No preventive care to catch cancer early enough to treat it.
6. Diabetes. America is in the throes of a diabetes epidemic, but it's raging like nowhere else among blacks, particularly black women, who have a higher rate than any other group. Worse, both black men and women are much more likely to be hospitalized, disabled and killed by diabetes once they have it.
7. Heart disease. It's the nation's leading killer and leading disabler—and racks up some $300 billion a year in health costs. Surprise, surprise—blacks have more of it and get it younger than anybody else.
8. HIV/AIDS. Blacks account for a whopping half of all those living with HIV today, 45 percent of those newly infected each year and about half of all deaths. At this point, it's basically a black epidemic.
9. STDs. An unprecedented study last year found 48 percent of all black teenage girls tested had a sexually transmitted infection. Damn near half. Which helps explain the HIV data, since untreated STDs facilitate the spread of HIV.
10. Downward spiral. All of this is getting worse as time drags on. Between the civil rights movement and today, black people have improved our lot in life by just about every score—education, income, occupation. All except the one that matters most: living to see old age. The gap between black and white mortality rates has actually increased by a third since 1960. If that's not enough to piss us off, I don't know what is.
Kai Wright is The Root's senior writer.
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