Barack Obama and the Culture of Racism in American Politics
Syon Bhanot
January 22, 2007
“On June 10, 2005, Barack Obama committed suicide by way of shotgun to the face. KABOOM!! GOTDAMN, NIGER!!!!!!!!!!111"
Alongside the obvious grammatical and spelling errors (which I imagine were intentionally used to avoid internal Wikipedia censors), there was something viscerally inhuman about the statement – something that caused me to gasp and turn away from the screen. The words were more than offensive. They were a racially-motivated death threat. I quickly hit “Refresh” on my browser, and was glad to see that an eagle-eyed Wikipedia fanatic had removed the words from the site. I relaxed, but only for a moment. I got to thinking.
Moments before my Wikipedia discovery, I had been discussing race with Michael, my Kenyan co-worker at the International Rescue Committee in Nairobi, Kenya. Michael was curious to learn about the status of this social construct in the United States. I had assured him that anyone using the “N-word,” particularly when doing so in reference to African Americans, would be roundly chastised in American society. I had said, “It’s totally taboo to say that in public – no one would do it. Well, except for rappers, I suppose.” After reading the Wikipedia slander, I realized that what I had suggested to Michael was that racism was not a force in America. Obviously, such a position was as foolish as it was naïve.
The American cultural landscape is hopelessly infested with racism and xenophobia. And as an American of Indian descent, it disgusts me to the core. Sadly, this racism digs deeper than an ignorant fool looking for a laugh on Wikipedia. It has invaded our political corridors, to the extent that we have seen overt racism in high-level politics, not just during the times of slavery, but constantly throughout US history. And unfortunately, there are countless contemporary examples that provide evidence of this sick reality.
In 2000, Senator John McCain of Arizona lost the South Carolina presidential primary to George W. Bush, a crippling blow in a dogfight for the Republican nomination and one that would eventually lead to Bush’s victory. The primary campaign in the state was noteworthy because it included a particularly alarming race-based attack. Specifically, push-polling by the Bush campaign asked South Carolinian voters if they would support McCain if he had an illegitimate child with a black woman. This was an obvious and despicable reference to McCain’s daughter Bridget, a Bangladeshi girl adopted by McCain and his wife from an orphanage run by Mother Theresa.
Bush was not alone in his entanglement with racism. During the campaign, McCain referred to his captors during the Vietnam War as “gooks,” a well-known ethnic slur for the US enemy during the war. When pressed on his use of the term, McCain said that it was “the kindest description I could give them.” It seems that the biggest winner in one of the dirtiest primary fights in history was the legacy of racism in American politics.
We turn now to December 9, 2002. On this day, Trent Lott, a Republican Senator from Mississippi and the Senate Minority Leader, was on top of the world. A Republican was in the White House and the Senate was soon to be in GOP hands following victories in the November elections, which would make Lott the Majority Leader. Not only that, Lott was preparing to attend a festive birthday gala celebrating the life and times of Strom Thurmond, the 100-year-old Republican Senator from South Carolina. Thurmond had famously run for President in 1948 as a “Dixiecrat,” on a platform that featured a vigorous endorsement of racial segregation (a position that Thurmond never publicly regretted). In a televised tribute to Thurmond at the party, Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years.” This enthusiastic endorsement of a campaign that had fought to keep blacks and whites separated met the ire of countless organizations and eventually led to Lott’s resignation.
One might think that the political characters in these accounts should have disappeared from the public scene – that their racist attitudes and strategies would have resulted in their banishment from the political community. Unfortunately, this is not the case. As I write this, Bush and his push-pollers sit in the White House, having won not just one presidential election, but two. Meanwhile, McCain is preparing for a presidential bid in 2008 and Trent Lott is the new Republican Minority Whip in the Senate. What about Strom Thurmond? He died in 2003, but has since been immortalized, with a lake, a high school, numerous university facilities, and even a room in the United States Senate named after him. And a visit to the South Carolina State Capitol is surely not complete without a visit to the Strom Thurmond statue, erected in his honor. And to be fair, it is not just members of the Republican Party who have pasts checkered with racist activities. The longest-serving member of the US Senate in history is Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who was not only a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but was the leader (or “Exalted Cyclops”) of his local chapter. He was re-elected to his ninth Senate term in 2006, with 64% of the vote.
If you think things are changing, and that a new, colorblind era of politics is just around the corner, you are mistaken. The most recent issue of Insight Magazine, a stepchild of the conservative Washington Times, includes an article that claims that Hilary Clinton’s campaign has discovered that Barack Obama was educated in a madrassa – a radical Muslim seminary – as a child, and that he is hiding a strong Islamic faith. This, aside from being false (though Obama did attend a school with many Muslim students in Jakarta when he was six years old, he is a devout Christian), represents an opening salvo in the racial battle that Obama will be forced to wage in the coming months. Odds are that Insight ran the piece as part of a two-birds-with-one-stone strategy – paint Hilary as a devious mudslinger and Obama as a terrorist. Unfortunately, this is just the first of many such attacks to come; there can be no doubt, for example, that future political ads will make copious references to Obama’s middle name - Hussein. This is not a political conversation – it is a racial invective. And it is beyond disgusting.
It is easy to think that we live in a society without race, where hands the colors of the rainbow join to sing, dance, and play. But this is not the case. America still has a dirty little secret – an enduring culture of racism that looms large in every aspect of national policy, from mandatory minimums in drug cases to a foreign policy that devalues the life of people based on their melanin count. And the only way we are going to move past this is by breaking the silence and talking about race openly and honestly, something that is often suggested but rarely done. As Martin Luther King, who would have been 78 years old last week, said many years ago, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
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