Grand Junction Colorado Billboard Combines Racism, Homophobia and Xenophobia
This brutal billboard sums up the rock bottom reasons for Democratic losses -- the white supremacist heterosexist capitalist patriarchy does not go down easy.
As always, fear is the twin to anger, those ever reliable tools for divide and conquer.
Fear and anger won on Tuesday..
Oh yes, there is the usual midterm swing, the utter collapse of the fickle and feckless indies (whose numbers now account for well-over one third of the electorate), Tuesday's preponderance of older whiter conservative voters, the endless drumming from the right-wing media lie machine, fueled of course by a corporate $$$$$$$ gusher that spewed some $38 million worth of attack ads, courtesy of George W Bush, John Roberts and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
But in the end this is all mere side-show for the root of the backlash - both out there and here --
it's the black man in the White House - stupid..
Regardless of what anyone thinks of Obama's policies platforms and positions, he represents the first POTUS who is not an old white guy... Obama represents a threat to white male hegemony and despite his middle of the road economic policies, he represents a threat to unfettered capitalist interests too -- tax the rich is just small pitstop on the imagined road to socialism...
And yes you were warned well over a year ago...
This noise is about race. It is about "othering" a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and unchallenged from the darker skinned other. This is what animates the every move of the angry masses, individual exceptions notwithstanding.
Unless the left begins pushing back, and insisting that yes, the old days are gone, white hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and that we will all be better off for it, the chorus of white backlash will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing and conquering the working people who would benefit–all of them–from a new direction.
Well the backlash grew louder and where were some of you?? Were you pushing back or were you piling on?? Were you speaking out or joining Bill Clinton in that chorus of racism deniers??
Hey, with friends like these, who needs Glenn Beck???
Oh yes it was more subtle, carefully coded in acceptable color-blind style, but it was plain in the obsession on the person of Obama as the sole arbitor, denials, the impatience, the claims of arrogance (read "uppity"), the endless emasculating metaphors.... Barack the "Magic Negro" -- the "one black friend that we didn't even think of as black" -- just couldn't fix 40 plus years of conservative mess in 15 minutes..
Better leave it to the old white guys -- be they bloggers or baggers..
When is the left going to get it??? The use of race and gender and sexual orientation to divide is a worn and tired tactic. How long will we keep falling for it???
Make no mistake - the threat of Obama as "other" is not just the threat of Blackness. As the billboard illustrates, he represents all the "others" that threaten the power structure -- any and all people of color, women, the lgbtq community, immigrants, Muslims, the poor.... When they are done with him, they are -- as Niemöller warned-- coming for you..The attacks on Obama are designed to insure that never again can the White House be entrusted to anyone but another literal old white man or one of their ideologically aligned diversity props.
As progressives, we can no longer pretend that we can focus on issues devoid of a race, class, gender analysis. We can no longer pretend that we can make political progress without addressing and resisting the foundational racist classist sexist and heterosexist structures that are used to both oppress and divide us..
We live at the intersections.
We hang together or we hang alone....
Wake Up and Resist..