The Times Online is reporting: "Obama win prompts wave of hate crimes." The article's lead states:
Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president has unleashed a wave of hate crimes across the nation, according to police and monitoring organisations.
Cited examples include:
In North Carolina, four students at the state university admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head."
Second and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
Meanwhile in Snellville, Georgia, Denene Millner, an African-American, said a boy on the school bus told her nine-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human faeces outside the front door, Ms Millner said.
In the north-eastern state of Maine, customers at a general store in Standish were placing $1 bets on when the president-elect would be killed. A sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," it said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."
This leads me to make four observations.
First, perhaps we in the United States should be a bit less self-congratulatory, and indeed less delusional, about what Barack Obama's election says about the state of race relations, discrimination, and racism in the U.S.
Secondly, the oft reported (and perhaps accurately reported) demise of the Bradley effect is, and always was, a red herring. The Bradley effect was about hypocrisy, not racism per se. It was about people who felt guilty or embarrassed about admitting they wouldn't vote for a African American, and therefore lied to pollsters, only to in fact vote against the African American in the privacy of the polling booth. (There is a reason that the effect was first identified in California and is named after a man who ran for the Governor of that State.) The Bradley effect said nothing about white people in say, Alabama or Georgia, who had no trouble telling pollsters (and everyone else) that they were not going to, and indeed would never, vote for a black person.
Thirdly, I find it interesting that it was a British newspaper, the Times, that published this article. I've seen nothing similar in the U.S. media. Indeed, every article I've seen on the subject in the U.S. media has asserted precisely the opposite theme -- i.e., that we've entered (or at least are closer to) a wonderful post-racial America. The Times reports "'hundreds' of cases [of hate crimes] since the election, many more than usual," and the U.S. media is silent.
Finally, because of this story and others I've read, I truly fear for the life of President-elect Obama. I do not say that to be alarmist. It is simply my hope that he and his family take every possible precaution, and that the Secret Service do likewise. I've never seen such anger directed against a President-elect. I've never seen so many media stories were the name of the President-elect was in the same sentence as the word "assassinate."