Just say no to the racists

“This Is Not An Endorsement of Barack Obama!” by dAlton Anthony AkA voiceIn the United States, race is political and domestic racial politics has international consequences. Racism comprises the foundation of a white populism that has driven the American political system ever since the slave owner Thomas Jefferson wrote his racist screed, Notes On the State of Virginia, with quite possibly the very same quill pen he used to compose the Declaration of Independence…all while maintaining a 38-year interracial relationship with a black slave which began when she was 14 and with whom he had five children. Racism, slavery and genocide were the foundation of Andrew Jackson’s particular brand of Populist/Nativism in the 1820s, 30s and 40s which unified the white colonial population at the expense of intensifying laws and acts of violence against rebellious slaves and the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans—the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creeks, the Seminole and the Cherokee—from their homelands in the American southeast to Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. After the civil war, white Nativism and populism formed the basis of the racial terror used against blacks to insure their exclusion from the political and economic resources of the nation. These same white, racist populists were the foot soldiers who were called upon to execute the massacres, i.e., the genocide of Native Americans during the entirety of the 19th century, peeking with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and continuing through multiple forms of subordination and genocidal policies.

This is the legacy I believe the Obama campaign has the ability to challenge and I see my vote in these terms. I am not so naïve as to believe that an Obama administration can completely overturn this history or that it will necessarily even try to do so explicitly. These issues are bigger than Obama or the specific policies he will initiate over the next four years…although his decisions and actions will certainly not be inconsequential. But in observing the reaction of the right wing of this country I have noticed a desperate, almost panicked appeal to a very old, tried and true Nativist rhetoric and sentiments that rest upon the foundation of militant white supremacy. And no, I do not think that a black candidate like Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell would elicit the same sharp reaction among whites that we see being expressed by the prospect of an Obama presidency. We may, just may, be witnessing the slow dying pangs of this radical right movement and I, for one, want to help usher it into the grave. I’m not sure if this is true, of course, but the prospect of it being so is certainly worth my vote for this particular election cycle.Comment:  For more on the subject, see The 2008 Presidential Campaign.

Below:  The way it was:



The way it is:



The way it should be: