July Fourth, 2009, part one

Driving to a lunch meeting in the Boro this morning I turned on our local FM talk radio station to learn that almost all black people hate white people, that President Obama is a racist, and a foreign-born Moslem sympathetic to Iran and jihadists, and that the primary goal of the Obama administration is to wrest power from the white race and give it to blacks and Hispanics.

I arrived at my meeting shaking with a mixture of anger and fear. Anger that such stupidity gets commercial airtime, and fear that most people listening to it do not think it stupid.

I remember the last time we had a Democrat President. Right wing radio was apoplectic, but the talk wasn’t this vile. Sure the Clintons murdered members of their administration, were secretly Communists trying to set up single-payer healthcare, and the President could not keep POTUS Jr. in his pants, but I don’t remember it being this emotionally charged. Sure, Rush kept count of how many days American had left in Clinton captivity, but this was no more absurd that Keith Oberman continuing his count of days since Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment on the aircraft carrier off the coast of Iraq.

But there is something different about the Right this time around. And, given that President Obama isn’t doing anything of things that I wanted him to do (end discrimination against the LGBT community, stop funding dictatorships, put real pressure on Israel and Palestine to make peace, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, cease the bailout of today’s robber barons, put real incentives behind green technology, and a host of other things that should rightly make the right crazy) the difference can’t really be political. Obama is a centrist, but he is a black centrist and that makes all the difference.

True it is hard to argue that America is a racist country when we have a black man as president, but it isn’t hard to see that those who are so afraid of his policies are not really afraid of his policies but his color. No one suggested during the Clinton years that the President was planning to give America over to poor rural whites in Arkansas.

The guest on this morning’s radio broadcast was an African American preacher in town for this weekend’s Republican Tea Party in Nashville. See, the Right is saying, we aren’t racist. Here is a black man speaking for us. Except it was this black man who told us that almost all black people were racists. It is one thing if some honky makes this claim—I can right it off as racism—but when a black man tells me that black folk hate me ‘cause I’m white then you just gots to believe!

Not only is Obama trying to sell America out to the black race, the radio host and his guest explained, it is trying to convince good Christians that Jesus was black. This Muslim in Christ’s clothing is trying to tell us that Jesus wasn’t white! How can that be? In my neighborhood not only is Jesus white, he spoke King James’ English! The fact that Jesus was a brown skinned Aramaic speaking Palestinian Jew seems to escape everyone’s notice.

As we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July we would be wise to remember what this country stands for: White God, White Christians, and White Power—with a couple of black folks tagging along to ease our conscience.