Many insightful diaries and comments have been written here about the subtle racism of some who oppose Senator Obama. I would not have written this diary were it not for the reprehensible post which Dennis Prager made last week at Real Clear Politics.
Many insightful diaries and comments have been written here about the subtle racism of some who oppose Senator Obama. I would not have written this diary were it not for the reprehensible post which Dennis Prager made last week at Real Clear Politics.
The theme of the work is that liberals shouldn't say that if Obama loses a very close contest, racism made the difference between victory and defeat. Why not? Because the Blacks will riot.
This article is reprehensible for several things, but I want to start with something he said near the end, his characterization of progressive people and by implication all Obama supporters.
The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election -- where do all these Republican voters come from?
Granted, there certainly are some people on the left who live in an echo chamber and hear only what they want to hear. However, that is also true of some on the right. But more to the point, we who have been active in Obama's campaign (even in the limited sense of talking about it to friends), do run into conservatives. Many of us have conservative parents, siblings, cousins, and in-laws. And that is how we come across the recurring declaration, "I can't vote for the black guy." If we've encountered this, then surely conservatives talking to each other have heard it, and just as certainly, Prager has heard it.
Of course, I'm not saying that all or most white McCain supporters are against Obama for this reason. But we all knew from the git-go that Obama lost the white racist vote on the first day of his campaign. There are some people out there -- nobody knows how many -- who oppose Obama for racist reasons. And even if there are only 1 or 2 million of them out of a nation of 300 million, they would be enough to swing a close Presidential election against Obama, especially one complicated by the Electoral College.
This is the first thing reprehensible about Prager's article. It is a denial of an obvious fact. Prager wants us to deny in public something that we all know is true.
Here's the second reprehensible thing.
A second reason is that it is inconceivable to most liberals that an Obama loss -- especially a narrow one -- will be due to Obama's liberal views or inexperience or to admiration for John McCain.
This reminds me of a Congressional election (GA-4) in the east side of Atlanta's suburban sprawl in 1992, when I lived in that district. the Democratic nominee, Cathy Steinberg, had a distinguished record in the Georgia General Assembly and ran on a very middle-of-the-road platform, including support of the long-forgotten Balanced Budget Amendment. She lost that election by 250 votes to John Linder, who later became "Mr. Fair Tax."
Of course, DeKalb county GA (which is where most of the district is) wasn't as heavily Afro-American and Democratic as it is now. In fact, it was highly competitive between the two parties. I couldn't help wondering at the time how that election would have gone if Cathy Steinberg had changed her name to Cathy Stone and joined a church a decade before. Would she have won? Did she lose because she was Jewish? The question is worth asking, because it doesn't take many anti-Semites to swing an election the other way when the winner only wins by 250.
I like this example because it turns the issue around. Dennis Prager is Jewish. Would he refuse to consider that anti-Semitism is a factor when a Jewish candidate loses by a small margin? I'm willing to bet he wouldn't refuse to consider it. It's the same argument whether the candidate who loses in Jewish, Black, or White in a majority Black district.
This is the second reprehensible thing about Prager's article. It can be used against his community too.
Furthermore, the exploitation of a old racial stereotype of blacks as violent criminals and as physical threat to white people. If Obama loses by a close vote, and Afro-American voters decide that it's because of the racist vote (which is highly probable), Prager fears they will riot. Help! The Negroes are coming!
Would they riot? We don't know. It's quite possible there will be some distrubances in some places, but nothing more than grumbling in others. One thing we do know is that the extensive waves of rioting every summer between 1964 and 1968 had no sequel after that decade. There were scattered isolated outburst; in Brooklyn NY in the summer of 1978 and in Miami in 1980 and 1982, but these are nothing beside the "Long Hot Summers" of the Sixties.
So here's the third reprehensible thing. Prager is exploiting white fears of black crime and urban rioting, and exploiting a racist stereotype.
But the worst of all of these is the first one: That Prager is telling us to deny the truth. We will never overcome racism in America if we pretend it isn't there.