Last week, I had a pretty upsetting conversation with my mom about my grandfather.
She and my sister had just returned home from his house in Baltimore, where they had been helping him with some errands. While there, my mom decided, "against [her] better judgement," to bring up the election with my grandfather (She just can't resist an opportunity to talk up Obama :-)
Wasting no time, my grandfather said definitively (as is his custom...) that if Clinton is the nominee, he will vote for her; but if Obama is the nominee, he will vote for McCain. This shocked my mom, as she never would have thought my grandfather would vote for Clinton. After all, the man worked for Barry Goldwater way back when.
take the jump ~
One thing led to another, and it came out that my grandfather had received an email, from "a longtime friend," stating that Barack Obama was a Muslim. This email made him decide that he couldn't support Obama. More than this, it made him decide that he had to convince his family not to support Obama either. To this end, he encouraged my mom to pass the email along to me, so that I would stop volunteering for Obama (which, apparently, he had heard I was doing). Apparently, he was trying to protect us all from ourselves.
Trying to avoid a fight, my mom said: "I don't think it would make any difference. [Seabrook] has already read about those rumors. You know dad, some emails are true, and some are false..."
And that was the end of that conversation.
Both my mom and my sister were quite shaken up by this encounter. My grandfather is on his last legs, and I think it is really hard for my mom to realize how little he has changed since she rebelled against his authority and conservative worldview in the 1960s.
When my mom told me all of this, my response was: I don't know if it makes sense to scratch too far beneath the surface on this one. She agreed, letting out a wry, yet melancholic, chuckle.
This whole encounter got me thinking about these "anti-Obama emails" that we have all been hearing so much about.
In doing so, I realized that, for all its wonderful aspects, email is one of the best tools for the dissemination of racist propaganda these days.
Email is the medium of choice for racists in our "post-racist" times.
I thought of a few reasons why this is so:
Someone can forward a chain letter by email to their acquaintances without taking too much responsibility for the content of the email: "I don't know if this is true, but it made me nervous when I read this, and I just thought I would send it along so you could make up your own mind..." For this reason, it is very hard to "call someone out" for spreading racist, or otherwise scurrilous, rumors by email. They can always just say: "Well, its not like I believed everything that the email said, I just thought it would be worthwhile to pass along what I was reading... It's not like I wrote the email anyway..."
Someone can spread racist rumors without having to face up to their friends directly. And even if their friends are put-off after receiving a racist email, they are very unlikely to actually confront the emailer in person, since it is just so damn uncomfortable to accuse someone of racism to their face..... You just don't do such a thing in good company, donchaknow....
As demonstrated by my grandfather, many people are inclined to believe things that their friends send them by email, even if their friends neither wrote nor vetted what it is that they are sending. So falsehoods like "Barack Obama is a Muslim" can get implanted in the public consciousness, largely below the radar screen of progressive opinion makers and the press.
And, most importantly, pretty much everyone is racist at least to some degree, and -- albeit for different reasons -- pretty much everyone doesn't feel like they should express racist ideas publicly. Email provides a way for people who feel constrained by an imagined "PC regime" to let out their true feelings without facing much, if any, social sanction. Moreover, reading a scurrilous rumor about Obama's supposed Muslim heritage is likely to activate someone's racist response system.... The fears, the doubts, the ugly thoughts that we generally try to keep out of view (of others, if not of ourselves).
So, that's my two cents.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about these anti-Obama emails below....