My colleague Ed Kilgore was raised in Georgia which gives him a totally different perspective than I got being raised in the relatively “enlightened” and idyllic Ivy League town of Princeton, New Jersey. What Ed lived with every day, I mostly learned about in textbooks. It also helps him that he is a little older than I am. Racial tensions in Princeton were significantly more pronounced for my brothers, who are ten and thirteen years older, than they were for me. By the time I was in third grade, a Georgia Democrat was our president, and the Jim Crow Era was taught in school as something shameful from the distant past.
Ed visited the Atlanta exurbs this past week, and it ain’t seeming like the distant past to him.
I’ve just spent nearly a week back home in exurban Atlanta, and I regret to report that the events in and in reaction to Ferguson have brought back (at least in some of the older white folks I talked with) nasty and openly racist attitudes I haven’t heard expressed in so unguarded a manner since the 1970s. The polling we’ve all seen about divergent perceptions of Ferguson doesn’t even begin to reflect the intensity of the hostility I heard towards “the blacks” (an inhibition against free use of the n-word, at least in semi-public, seems to be the only post-civil-rights taboo left), who have the outrageous temerity to protest an obvious act of self-defense by a police officer…
…Putting aside the legal issues (you can’t really expect lay people to understand how grand juries work unless they’ve served on one), there seems to be a complete lack of reflection on the fact that it’s the black kid who is dead and the cop who is alive and free. This skewed perception of the equities of the matter is what most reminds me of the very bad old days back home, when to a shockingly overwhelming degree white people believed all that civil rights stuff was a fabrication of outside agitators and lying yankee reporters inciting the normally placid if potentially dangerous local helots to “act ugly,” richly earning whatever hellish retaliatory violence that might ensue.
I think Ed was better prepared by his upbringing than I was to meet America in the Obama Era. I had unlearned a lot about race relations in this country prior to 2008, but I still harbored delusions that most of the ugly past was dead and buried. Didn’t the success of Barack Obama in some sense prove that?
In reality, it proved something different. It proved that we could beat these folks in pitched battle, but it also revealed that this would be more necessary and more urgent than I ever imagined.
Sadly, I agree. I thought his election was a sign of the post-racial era. That certain old fools went nuts about his election, I laid to the dying breed of a dead era. Now, like you, I realize that this was wrong as I see open racism that I hadn’t seen for forty years.
That’s the thing, isn’t it. Open, ugly racism has really become astonishingly widespread since Obama’s election – but you dare not call it racism because that would be rude.
Three men in particular are directly responsible for the rekindling of racist speech in the South:
Ronald Reagan
Rush Limbaugh
Roger Ailes
Thirty years of mainlining garbage into the small town kaffeeklatches and workplace conversations has had an effect. Folks that formerly would have kept quiet about their attitudes are flaming with their acting out.
That the Blue Dogs and DLC political strategies never confronted this grassroots movement of the Overton window in Southern states even after it resurface in virulence with the election of President Obama just allowed the attitudes to be given legitimacy instead of dismissed as the un-American tripe that they are. Un-American from the point of rhetorical promise instead from the realistic view of history.
It wasn’t Ferguson, it was the run-up to the midterm election IMO with the ISIS-Ebola-Obama-Fear ads on in saturation mode that resurfaced this attitude. And now these folks are using Ferguson as an excuse for legitimacy of their pre-Civil Rights era views.
What was hopeful 40 years ago has almost been completely rolled back, except for certain academic and urban islands and even these are under rhetorical assault as academic jobs are cut back and the persistent recession frays relationships in formerly congenial urban areas.
People in general right now are in a pretty foul mood.
Exactly. When Joe Scarborough can be paid a shit-ton of money to call a murdered black kid a “thug” on the air- and not on Fox- why would anybody expect Joe Average White Asshole to keep his racism quiet? And I believe that a long period of polite hypocrisy is a necessary prelude to any real change in attitudes, so it would be wrong to think that nothing “real” has changed and people are simply being more open about what they thought all along; this change in climate is a real and very serious regression, wiping out what little progress was made in the previous 40 years or so. This country is in a disgusting and scary place.
In other words, racism was the foundational bedrock or a main weight-bearing beam of St Reagan’s New “Conservative” Era. What an edifice has now been constructed upon it!
It certainly was always present in American conservatism, and was an important source of “energy” for them.
Reagan in turn was just building on Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Which in turn was built on the racist appeals that enabled Goldwater to win Southern states. So it has been not only present, but foundational to the conservative movement for a very long time. To a pretty good first approximation, the modern conservative movement simply IS organized racism.
Conservative racism was snarling and unelectable until affable Reagan legitimized conservativism. Now all Republicans are being forced into snarling racism in order to stay elected, regardless of their personal feelings. And the media competing with Roger Ailes’s “proven formula” for ratings have become complicit in the relegitimization of what was banished to the woodwork for 15 years.
It is not only relegitimized for conservatives, it has become relegitimized for moderates and not a few liberal Democrats as well–not to mention some “class is everything, don’t talk to me about race” left wingers as well.
Conservative racism was snarling and unelectable only in 1964, 1992, 2008, and 2012.
Yes, it was in-your-face racism in 1968 with George Wallace, but those 9.9 million voters didn’t think they were hurting Nixon (they weren’t too bright). They didn’t make that mistake again in 1972. (And Nixon added another four or five million that had voted for HHH to his 1972 tally.) Reagan just went with what had previously been established as a winning strategy but got two new able assists with the anti-abortion/anti-ERA backlash and the rise of overt Christo-political speak (for which I will never excuse nor forgive Carter for introducing), none of which figured into pre-1980 Reagan-speak.
Maybe not. We could look back to the post-1950-1960s civil rights era to see that a backlash emerged. Driven in part by the GOP fomenting the conscious anti-Black prejudices in southern and border states. However, it didn’t stop there. The Boston school desegregation order didn’t happen until 1974 and the resistance was as ugly as what had taken place almost two decades earlier in AL, AR, and MS.
The Los Angeles and Detroit riots, along with the FBI and local police infiltration and targeting of SNCC and the Black Panthers (organization in-fighting made the authorities’ job easier), reinforced existing prejudices. And caused MLK, Jr. to despair.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how swiftly the “money-bags” came forward to fund people distressed by the cognitive dissonance a Black President produced in them. How quickly those people were promoted as real opposition voices in the MSM (owned by the “money-bags”) and not what they really were — distressed racists. But to call them racists or accuse them of racism isn’t helpful because not many of them consciously think of themselves as racists. Nor do the accusers seem all that aware that they aren’t also prejudiced, only less prejudiced.
Just look at MSNBC. They kept Buchanan around how long before finally kicking that shitbag to the curb? And they still have another white supremacist(JoeScar) on weekday mornings.
I’ve always thought that Buchanan and the 1992 GOP convention stage that look as if it were imported from Berlin 1936 were given too little credit for defeating GHWB.
Interesting how people inculcated with hate (for any “other group”) need frequent booster shots to stay hateful. We should have banned all symbols of the Confederacy as hate speech and not allowed the monument built in honor of George Washington to be appropriated to honor Robert E Lee.
and SCEF.
I’m not sure if Kilgore is drawing his conclusions just from observed behavior of “older white folks”, or if this view is, um, more expansive in the Atlanta exurbs.
The paradox of the Obama presidency is that the election of a black prez has ushered in a new era of more open and increased racial hatred, or perhaps simply reignited the old era. We did of course open this period of increased racial animosity with an appetizer of 10+ years of hating on Arabs and Muslims, so that perhaps helped get everyone back in practice…
When irrefutable phenomenon appear, historians will have to try to look for causes. With our New Racism, I have little doubt that the monstrous “conservative” movement, its captured party, the Repubs, and its 24/7 Noise Machine are the principal sponsors and instigators of it. Repub leaders adopted an unprecedented strategy of absolute opposition to Obama, and they were simply delighted to support the early comments and tactics of the racists in their midst, and saw them as useful allies. They certainly never denounced them, and helped run early racial campaigns like the Birther retardation to stoke the fires and rekindle white resentment. Of course, Repubs quickly advanced a nationwide plan of suppressing minority voting under the guise of “fraud”, which is straight out of the Jim Crow era.
At every turn of the wheel, the coaches of Team Conservative operated to drag their white conserva-cogs deeper and deeper into the racial cesspool, while never attempting to lift their followers out of the shit. The culmination of their efforts are now seen with the Ferguson debacle and the white reaction to the killing, with the almost unbelievable openly race baiting performance of the NY turd Rudy Guiliani as exhibit A. Racism is truly back in style!
It wouldn’t be a surprise if “race relations”–i.e. the level of white crappiness–has lost 25 years of progress as a result of this intentional tribal gambit by the Repubs as a route to political power. Party over country, always. And somehow the multiracial multicultural Dems are really the party of racial “identity”, of course! To think this, one’s brain has to be poisoned beyond repair.
A demented country. Exceptional, indeed.
“I’m not sure if Kilgore is drawing his conclusions just from observed behavior of “older white folks”, or if this view is, um, more expansive in the Atlanta exurbs.”
You can count on it, I assure you. This phenomenon includes younger exurbanites as well.
And white exurbanites in other cities in many non-southern states as well.
Conservatives are ardent tribalists, and Obama doesn’t look like a white man.
If Obama wore a (R) after his name, he’d be accepted into the tribe, because tokens are always great for brand appeal, and god knows the Republican brand is reeling in this country, 52% of 37% of registered voters electing them not included.
Obama is therefore an “other”. He’s somehow a Muslim and an Atheist. He’s been called a Kenyan, because Kenyans are Africans are black. He has had to produce two birth certificates, and both of them have are surrounded by their own conspiracy theories created out of whole cloth by white conservative tribalists.
It isn’t that Obama has brought racism back. It’s that his role as the face of America has upset a lot of white conservative tribalists because he doesn’t represent them, as he isn’t a member of their tribe.
Sure, Bill Clinton was a libruul Democrat, but at least he was white. In this case, you have a northern, multicultural black man as the leader of the US. Tribalists consider this an…usurpation of their tribe as the rightful rulers of the country. Hence, they want their country back.
Racists generally don’t become less racist, they just learn to keep their mouths shut in polite company. Electing a black man has created a whole lot of impolite company, so now they feel that it is more acceptable to shout their hatred out loud more and use their dog whistles less.
Who was impeached and had only advocated for one policy change (DADT) and signed one piece of legislation the conservative tribe didn’t like, the 1993 tax increase. Everything else he supported/did was similar to what GHWB would have done — with the exception of Bush’s silly flag burning amendment.
Deprived of attacking him for his skin color and any liberal public policy changes, they had to settle for calling him a draft dodger and rapist. Evil people can always find something to use to denigrate those not in their tribe. It was different but no less strident nor unrelenting during Clinton’s tenure.
Sure, he was also the “first African-American president” and had his sister souljah moment.
And even he was fought constantly and impeached, when Clinton wasn’t some arch-liberal hellbent on imposing socialism.
I’m not saying Clinton had it easy. I’m just pointing out that at least Clinton was white, and conservative tribalists hated him.
Now, fast forward a decade and stick a black democrat in there.
None of this should be a surprise. At all.
Rush wasn’t fired for his loathsome comments about Chelsea Clinton and that woman who attacked Obama’s daughters was fired for one disgusting comment.
The white “conservative” tribe was just as exercised over Clinton as they’ve been over Obama. They’ve become more unhinged in their language because their numbers are now even smaller. Obama won twice with over 50% of the vote. A feat that Clinton didn’t achieve in his two elections.
Yes, it does feel worse to see a President attacked for the color of his skin. But I too feel assaulted by all the attacks on women and liberals that have been going on since I was a young, female liberal. Neither female nor economic liberal has been championed much by the Democratic Party for the past few decades. No ERA. No universal right to all reproductive health services. etc.
I really think that the backlash has never receded, and there was no “era of good feelings” in the south. My father always told me after we had moved to Vermont that the thing about southern racism that northerners never understood was that it was immune to education. He was just apt to hear a racist comment from the gas station guy as from the PhD he was working with on a rocket.
It was all just driven underground. Social media gave a voice to that which was swept under a rug. Via social media they are gaining courage.
So the problem can be easily stated: is it necessary to win a portion of white racist votes by appeal to class? Is it even possible?
This is why I take all of the “populist” stuff with a grain of salt.
You’re right. There was no “honeymoon” era in the South. Trash is trash and crackers (like the poor) will be with you always.
I remember Whites Only water fountains in Clarksdale … in 1969. Apparently roughly 30% of MS whites think miscegenation should be illegal. I’d be willing to bet that number holds in LA, AR, AL, GA, SC, NC and FL (north of Tampa).
However, and this is a demonstrable FACT, a black man was TWICE elected to the presidency AND most of the votes that put him there were white.
It IS different, It IS better, and the light at the end of the tunnel is NOT the headlamps of an oncoming train.
The “increased” racism from electing Obama is just an artifact of a whole lot of racists feeling strength in numbers and putting down the dog whistles and just saying what they feel instead. Exactly.
Just like if HRC is the nominee and elected, Republican misogyny will be out in force…which I’m looking forward to, as it should help a lot of otherwise “Republican” white, southern women realize that the Republican party doesn’t consider them to be equal to men.
Much like Winston Smith thought hope was with the proles, I believe that hope lies with southern white women.
I’m a northerner living in Atlanta, and I’ve met quite a few white women who identify as Republican, much how I used to buy Tide detergent because my mom did. My white girlfriend identified as a Republican until I started pointing out all of the racism and outright delusion inherent in the party. She’s not an old woman and isn’t racist, and now she gets it. Funny enough, she’s still a southern baptist by birth and vehemently opposes abortion, but she sees the Republican party for their craziness and votes for whomever has a (D) after their name. And I’ve taught her well, because she’ll tell you that a lot of Democrats are just about useless, except that they aren’t delusional, insane morons like Republicans.
A little daylight is a good thing. I have no problem with centrists and “independents” having their racist or misogynistic bullshit recorded for posterity. As a proud troll, I give the racists massive amounts of shit on the AJC’s comment board every chance I can. And believe it or not, even with the massive amount of racist comments on the AJC comment boards, the likes always mount for non-racist remarks.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease…and the Republican party loves squeaky wheels. It doesn’t mean that squeaky wheels are going to be in vogue. They’re just fucking loud and annoying and begging for attention.
Racists are like egg-sucking dogs. The only solution to the problem is to take them out back of the barn and execute them.
No fear.
Did you mean Volkspolizei instead of Stasi? Or do you have pictures of Stasi looking like what we imagine or Hollywood tells us Nazi Storm Troopers looked like?
There surely must be photos that I can’t find of Nazi and East German police (secret police like the Stasi would look more like FBI and police undercover agents) that look like this:
NOBODY expects the SPANISH INQUISTION!!!!
From the Smoking Gun, GOP Staffer Who Attacked Obama Girls Was Arrested During Her Own “Awful Teen Years”
Apparently only a couple of speeding tickets when she was nineteen and reaching the end of her “awful teen years.”
All this could have remained her little secret if she hadn’t tried to act like Rush or Palin.
I grew up in California’s Central Coast, about as close to a post-racial idyll as you’ll find in the US. Then I moved to the Southeast after college.
At first, I was thrown by the fact that most people were either black or white – not a lot of the diverse immigrants I’d known back in CA. But after living here for a couple decades, I feel like I can understand the dynamic a little better.
You see, nobody ever stops discussing race in the South. It’s always right there, right up front, looking you in the face. You can’t ever pretend race didn’t or doesn’t matter, because if you do someone is going to remind you right away that it does.
But I think this is actually a good thing. We’ll never improve racial injustice by sweeping differences under the rug. We have to bring them out into the open and talk about them. In this, it helps to have a big enough minority population that there are black leaders who will not let the older white folks mentioned in the article slip back into what they remember as the good old days.
“Talking about it all the time” is as likely, if not more so, to reinforce the pre-existing view. OTOH, “sweeping it under the rug” is not likely to extinguish the pre-existing view. But your claim piqued my curiosity as to how racism operated in Presidential elections over the decades. That’s not easy to tease out given the flip in the two parties wrt racism and the “favorite son” factor in the various elections.
What we know is that 1964 was the roll-out of the GOP
“southern strategy” and 1968 was the only election with a dedicated racist on the ballot. Using GA (talk about it) and NY (sweep it under) how far have they come? In 1960 JFK won in GA (a traditionally DEM state) with 63% and NY (a traditionally purple state – FDR and Dewey) with 53%.
1964
GA: LBJ 46%, BG 54%
NY: LBJ 69%, BG 31%
1968
GA: HHH 27%, RMN 30%, GW 43%
NY: HHH 50%, RMN 44%, GW 5%
2008
GA: BHO 46%, JSM 54%
NY: BHO 63%, JSM 37%
Looks to me as if the GA electorate is basically where it was in 1964, and NY has become both less Republican and less racist since the 1960s.