A number of prominent Americans, from former president Jimmy Carter to various news commentators, have charged President Obama's critics with racism. Many of these folks have reacted with anger, claiming that they are nothing of the sort. Few of the president's attackers, for example, have used the "n-word". In a recent New York Times, David Brooks pointed out that next to the latest tea bag rally in Washington was a black family reunion, and folks mingled easily from both events.
This is the result of some failures in communications and analysis by the left. The first is that we have not redefined racism to keep up with a changing face of evil. For most Americans, the term "racist" is frozen in time, a stereotype of a Southern sheriff with a hose, a dog, and aviator sunglasses. We have never replaced Bull Connor in our pantheon of villains.
In the meantime, racism changed. It became more subtle, changing its form, its language, its mode of attack and its targets. For decades Republicans -- from Nixon to Reagan to two Bushes -- appealed to prejudiced whites in various forms of code, and then acted in high dudgeon when we called them out. After all, they didn't sound like Rod Steiger in In The Heat of the Night, but they still ran Willie Horton ads. And they got away with it because Americans hadn't updated, hadn't renewed their notion of what racism is.
The other problem concerns what Barack Obama stands for. Obviously, he is a black man. But he is also a lot of other things that are a threat to some Americans, he is really so much more a danger than just the color of his skin. The hateful reaction to the president is about race, but so many other cultural and social values as well, it is hard to separate out any one strand.
Above all, Barack Obama, as president of the United States, represents a changing America, where whites cannot reign unopposed. Like the former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker, many folks feel the greatest assault on this country comes from the fact that many of its citizens no longer sound like the stereotype of folks at a NASCAR rally. Thus a lot of the gut opposition to Obama is engendered, not by his health care plan, but by the ever-present declaration in the news that whites are already a minority in many places, and destined to become so as part of the nation in a relatively few years.
Obama is a lot of things that are scary, and only one of these is the fact that he is black. He is sophisticated and worldly, a problem for those who think the swine flu vaccine is a plot to emasculate gun owners. He is educated, intellectual and articulate. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with the smarter members of their society, taking pride in the accomplishments, but often resenting those whose mental gifts stand out. There is even the fact that he is thin in an obese country, and thus reminds folks that they are not eating the things their doctors are nagging them about. The president is clearly not a fan of bacon, the latest fad in some circles. Why is this coming up now, if not as a subconscious rebellion against the changes towards healthy life styles that some folks are trying to get adopted, and others resisting? As Frank Rich noted in his Sunday column, "They need a scapegoat for all that ails them, and there is no one handier" than a modern, sophisticated president "who just happens to be black."
This is not the first time this kind of national culture clash has broken out in hateful ways. The nineteen-twenties, for example, was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that enjoyed a membership in the millions back then. While the Klan is commonly known for its racism, historians now know that this organization was neither exclusively Southern nor poor. The state with the largest Klan population was Indiana, and nationwide, the typical person under the sheets was lower middle class, afraid of losing ground in an era where there were many technological changes affecting jobs. And there were substantial women's auxiliaries, just as females come out to anti-Obama rallies today.
There were other reasons people joined the Klan back then, that mirror some of the stresses America is undergoing today. The 1920 Census showed that for the first time, fifty-one percent of Americans lived in cities, which meant that the home of foreigners, not 100% Americans (as they called themselves in those days -- you could be an American, but not a real, 100% American) would dominate the country. This terrified many Americans, who felt that their way of life was being pushed aside, just as many folks fear the same thing today.
In a similar vein, the latest theories on Prohibition are that it was not just a silly, extremist way of dealing with alcohol, but an attempt by small towns to pass pejorative rules that reigned in big cities. This was actually one gigantic bout of culture wars, in other words.
And all this fear, resentment, anger was being felt and expressed, often with sickening violence against minorities and the foreign-born, at a time when the presidents were old stock Americans like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
We, on the other hand, live in the age of Obama, whether the fear mongers can deal with it or not. Are they threatened because he is a black man? Yes, but by so much more as well.
Progressives need to eschew simple name-calling, and get to the myriad prejudices that are at the root of this hate (including, but not just limited to racism). They must then address all of them in a systematic and comprehensive fashion, in a way that combines sophisticated analysis with popular recognition of the new face of evil.