Can America EVER unite behind a black President?

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Fascinating article by Gavin Esler in today's Daily Mail on the subject of racism in the USA.


The ugly question that won't go away... Can America EVER unite behind a black President?



By Gavin Esler
Last updated at 9:39 AM on 17th September 2009

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Race issue: Barack Obama

One of the greatest hopes for the Obama presidency was that it would finally heal America's worst wound - racism. This week has shown that for all the good press Barack Obama has enjoyed at home and abroad, the wound is still there, just beneath the surface, and it takes very little to open it up again.
In the months since the first African-American President was sworn into office in January this year, American commentators have tip-toed around the race issue. Some have pretended it is no longer even relevant.
Others have rejoiced that a clearly loving and successful black family in the White House is providing a role model for others in a society in which black families have often been portrayed negatively.
But former U.S. President Jimmy Carter caused the issue to explode into the open again this week with his claims that much of the vitriol directed at Obama's ambitious healthcare-reform plan is 'based on racism'.
If Carter is correct - and I have spoken to white as well as black Americans who broadly agree he is - then simply putting an African-American President in office has not been enough to reverse the bitterest legacy of America's original sin, slavery.
Even worse, it has now tainted the most difficult issue Obama faces, changing the U.S. healthcare system. As Carter put it: there is 'an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be President'.
Certainly, the healthcare debate has created a far wider ideological battleground than the rights and wrongs of Obama's policy proposals. In sometimes furious town-hall meetings, anti-Obama protesters have talked about 'taking back' their country.
Some have portrayed Obama with a Hitler moustache - in a crude suggestion that he has totalitarian ambitions.
Others have suggested that he is not really an American citizen - pointing to his Kenyan father and childhood in Indonesia - and is therefore ineligible for office, not a 'real' President with 'real' American values.
Despite the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is a practising Christian, there are even those who still claim he is a Muslim. It would be tempting to dismiss such hysteria as belonging to a lunatic fringe element. But then came the 'Wilson outburst'.
When President Obama made his big televised speech on healthcare to Congress last week, one Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, screamed out 'you lie'.
This was shocking and unprecedented to Americans of both parties and of all racial backgrounds. The President of the United States is not simply, like a British prime minister, the head of a government. He is also, like the Queen, the head of state.
'You lie': Joe Wilson

Even in the rough-and-tumble of American political debates, I cannot think of an American president who has been heckled in such a way during such a major address. It was crude politics, and obviously rude. But was it racism, as Jimmy Carter claims?
Wilson has since apologised for his outburst - and the President has been gracious enough to accept it.
But in Washington they are noting that years ago Congressman Wilson worked for a segregationist politician in the South and more recently voted in favour of flying the Confederate flag - a favoured symbol of white rule.
Moreover, the controversy comes hot on the heels of a similar inflammatory episode involving the arrest of an old friend of President Obama's, Henry Gates - a prominent black academic.
Professor Gates was observed by a police officer acting suspiciously outside a property in Massachusetts that subsequently turned out to be his own home. When questioned by the officer, Professor Gates became verbally abusive, accusing the police of being racist, and was thus arrested at the scene.
Yet when the story became public, the President waded into the debate, stating that the officer concerned had 'acted stupidly' with regards to his friend. This, said his opponents, was proof of Obama's inherent racial loyalties, even at the expense of a police officer performing his normal duties.
A storm in a teacup? Not, it seems, when the issue of the President's race remains such a sensitive issue - as it undoubtedly does.



More...

• Use the force, Barack: Obama shows off his skills with lightsaber (and probably wishes he had a real one to deal with opponents)

An American journalist friend of mine said to me just last week that the atmosphere in the U.S. nowadays is 'as poisonous as anything I can remember since the early Nineties'.
Mr President: Jimmy Carter

He referred directly to the Oklahoma City outrage - a bomb planted by Timothy McVeigh that killed 168 people in a direct attack on the U.S. government. My friend shocked me by saying he would not be surprised if there were further acts of domestic terrorism spawned by hatred of Obama.
He is by no means the only one to detect an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
At a recent conference I asked the African-American veteran civil rights campaigner Roger Wilkins - a man who marched with Martin Luther King - whether the election of Obama meant the end for racism in America.
Professor Wilkins, who worked for the Johnson administration in the Sixties, accepted that a black man in the White House was a great leap forward, but said that racism was still there, and black people knew it. So did white people.
For Obama this is, then, a very dangerous time - not just politically but personally.
Many Americans are worried that, sooner or later, some American, racist nutcase will try to shoot their President simply because of his skin colour.
The Secret Service is, of course, vigilant, though the white supremacist plots against him that have been discovered so far have been almost laughably incompetent.
As for his political enemies, Obama's success has been that from the outset of his presidential campaign he has been 'above race'. That is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge, as his opponents seek to highlight once again his colour, however far-fetched their accusations may be.
In all the enthusiasm for Barack Obama in Britain and Europe, we need to remember that even when up against John McCain - a relatively elderly candidate from a Republican party in disarray - he did not win in a landslide.
Demonstrators have equated Obama to Nazi leaders

For all his oratorical and political skills, Obama's victory was not overwhelming. He offended some working-class white people by talking of them 'clinging' to guns and God. Some Democrats I talked to simply refused to vote for him, though none would say openly that race was a factor.
And now in trying to reform healthcare - which amounts to almost 17 per cent of the American economy - Barack Obama is emerging as just the type of Big Government President that those on the American far-Right really loathes.
As he takes on healthcare reform, cracks down on the banks and spends government money trying to keep the economy afloat, there are plenty of political reasons for Barack Obama to be a controversial President, to be opposed, even to be defeated.
His race is not one of these - for most Americans. But for a minority, even in the 21st century, a black President is still unacceptable. Obama has changed much in America, but not even his oratory and skill can change that.
● Gavin Esler’s novel Power Play, about the potential collapse of the British-American 'special relationship', is published this month. He is a former BBC chief North America correspondent.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...#ixzz0RNSRUWGk

[uscitizen]

I want the republicans to put forth a black candidate for president next time around.

It would be interesting to watch.

[SmarterthanYou]

I want the republicans to put forth a black candidate for president next time around.

It would be interesting to watch.

the race baiting that would stem from that would put the current episodes of race baiting to shame.

[Damocles]

As if we were uniting under white presidents...

If race baiting is all you have, then you have nothing.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

unconditional Unity is the seed of all totalitarian ideologies.

[Topspin]

Damo, nice new guy burn

[DamnYankee]

Damo wins this thread.

[Canceled2]

I want the republicans to put forth a black candidate for president next time around.

It would be interesting to watch.

Remember asshole, it was white Hillary democrats who came out against Obama...did that make them racist?

And what a stupid op-ed that started this thread! This country is divided over radical differences of what government should be. Obama is a closet socialist pretending to be some kind of moderate. That mind-fucks make it about the color of his skin show just how out of touch they are.

[uscitizen]

Remember asshole, it was white Hillary democrats who came out against Obama...did that make them racist?

And what a stupid op-ed that started this thread! This country is divided over radical differences of what government should be. Obama is a closet socialist pretending to be some kind of moderate. That mind-fucks make it about the color of his skin show just how out of touch they are.

Some of them did it for rascism.
Can you prove they did not?

[Thorn]

As if we were uniting under white presidents...

If race baiting is all you have, then you have nothing.

It does exist, though, and more prominently than many would want to admit. Until we confront this, we'll never get past it.

[uscitizen]

It does exist, though, and more prominently than many would want to admit. Until we confront this, we'll never get past it.

QFT

[Canceled2]

Some of them did it for rascism.
Can you prove they did not?

So let's see: Republicans were against all the democrat candidates because they were democrats. By your own admission the only obvious racist's were the democrats who supported Hillary...good job.

[uscitizen]

So let's see: Republicans were against all the democrat candidates because they were democrats. By your own admission the only obvious racist's were the democrats who supported Hillary...good job.

LOL

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

It does exist, though, and more prominently than many would want to admit. Until we confront this, we'll never get past it.

So everyone must be made to agree with obama? To prove we're not racist? What does it mean to confront it, as you say?

[Damocles]

It does exist, though, and more prominently than many would want to admit. Until we confront this, we'll never get past it.

I am confronting it. There is no way it is okay to say that agreement is the only option otherwise you are "racist."

Speak up about real racism, don't devalue something important by using it for something as simple as this. Of course we could "get behind" a black President. We elected him, he had popular support until his policies started stinking. There is more evidence that he had support than there is that everybody suddenly realized he is black.