election

Check the Maps: How Much “Change” Do You Really See?

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Much has been made of Barack Obama’s historic victory over John McCain for the presidency of the United States. The rise of a black man to the highest office in the land is indeed a major event in our history, but have race relations in the U.S. really made the advances we think Obama’s presidency signifies? Think again.

Although dear ol’ Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation around 150 years ago, and the civil and voting rights acts  passed just under 50 years ago, most would argue that we haven’t made real progress until now. This election has been touted by many as the final and real end to the racial politics that prompted the civil war, but let’s check our assumptions.

Compare the map above, which appeared in The New York Times and shows which states went for which candidates in this month’s election, with the map below, which depicts the Union states in blue and the Confederate states in red (and the gray states didn’t exist):

Has much “changed”? Instead of a Union and a Confederacy, we now have a Blue America and a Red America. The divide is the same, the semantics are different.

Those who see the election of Barack Obama as indicative of a triumphant “change” in U.S. race relations are mistaken. If anything, this election points to the contrary. The idea of a black man becoming president is still unacceptable in the states that once called themselves Confederate.

The Civil War did not end because the southern states accepted their intolerance. Rather, the brute force of the Union states made southerners abandon their bigoted practices. These southerners are in the same situation today—but this time, the votes of the majority (as opposed to guns and ammo) are providing the push for them to accept a racially just outcome.

Celebrating the election of the first black president in U.S. history should not be overshadowed by these realities, but should give us some pause for what lies ahead. Not everyone is pleased that Barack Obama is our new president-elect and these folks will be watching and criticizing (and undermining) his every move. Obama may have won the election-night fight, but he still has a four-year battle ahead of him.

We can only hope that his term in office will bring about much needed political and economic change, but also, and most importantly, a substantial transformation that will end this country’s long history of racial intolerance.

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How Bitter Racists Continue to Marginalize the Republican Party

Monday, November 17th, 2008
courtesy Staten Island Advance

courtesy Staten Island Advance

It’s been almost two weeks since Barack Obama was elected the first black U.S. president, and since then there have been “hundreds” of documented racial crimes across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported by the Associated Press.

Documented in the AP article are burned crosses in Apolacan Township, Pennsylvania and Hardwick, New Jersey; racist graffiti in Staten Island, Los Angeles and Kilgore, Texas; and a “Osama Obama” assassination prediction pool in Standish, Maine.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, a church under construction to house a black congregation was burned to the ground in the early morning after the election. While investigators have concluded the fire was caused by arsonists, they have no evidence it was racially motivated. The church’s leader has made up his own mind.

“I’ve seen segregation. I’ve seen Jim Crowism,” Bishop Bryant J. Robinson Jr. told the Boston Globe. “We’ve come quite a ways, but we’re not that perfect union yet. There’s obviously a remnant of that kind of behavior still being practiced, for whatever reason.”

Even more frightening, the splintered and ineffectual white supremacist movement has seen interest surge in the wake of the election. Two white nationalist Web sites have crashed because of heavy traffic, and a secessionist site has also had interest skyrocket.

These attacks follow on the heels of the racial epithets yelled at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies during the waning days of the campaign.

Throughout the campaign, the Obama camp stayed away from discussing race, and the candidate had to convince his aides it was OK to give a major speech on race after the Reverend Jeremiah Wright issue came to a head. But while there may not have been a true dialogue between the candidates about race, some voters had to reconcile previously held beliefs.

In Levittown, Pennsylvania, and other cities in the western part of the state, voters overcame concerns about Obama’s race that had been present until the final days of the campaign. But in other counties that straddle the Appalachian Mountains, and down through the deep South, racial questions led to increases in support for John McCain. Voter analysis by the New York Times found that less than a third of white voters supported Obama in the South, compared to 43 percent of whites nationally. In Alabama, 18 percent of whites voted for John Kerry. Only nine percent voted for Obama.

If some upset voters have no trouble expressing their frustration by writing the N-word on parked cars, others don’t object to speaking their minds to a reporter. In the Times article, voters compete for the Most Racist Quote Award.

“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks. From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.” — Gail McDaniel

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.

Conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh are crowing that the country is still more red than blue, ignoring the fact that the number of solidly conservative counties is steadily shrinking. And while Limbaugh says liberals “organize in little communes and cliques and cities and so forth and only want to hang around with each other and themselves,” he ignores places like Blount County in northern Alabama, where 84 percent of voters picked John McCain.

David Brooks, as moderate a Republican there is, worries the traditionalist arm of the GOP will cater to the base with more fear-mongering and suffer even more defeats on the national stage. An increased number of hate crimes can hardly be called a good start to rehabilitating the Republican image.

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Remembering the “Old McCain”

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

A funny thing happened after Barack Obama got elected. Everyone suddenly liked John McCain. His concession speech, they said, was a return to the “old McCain,” the one everyone applauded when he bucked the system way back in 2000 and challenged Republican front-runner George W. Bush during the GOP primaries. Everyone liked that McCain, and said he had disappeared during the course of his 2008 campaign. The narrative went that his campaign had been hijacked, the candidate himself had been muzzled, and another ‘they’—Schmidt etc. al—were controlling the “real McCain” and twisting his beloved maverick image.

The lovefest for the “old McCain,” began with the Alfred E. Smith dinner, and continued with the Saturday Night Live appearance the weekend before the election, where it seemed he was willfully poking fun at his attention-starved, power-hungry Vice Presidential pick, Sarah Palin. He seemed to be saying to the lefty American public, we’re on the same side, you and me. The McCain image overhaul culminated with this week’s all-in-good fun appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he joshed and joked: “I’m sleeping like a baby. I sleep two hours, wake up and cry.”

Perhaps his reversal to the “Old McCain” was calculated. But i think we’re just as complacent. We want to remember the “old McCain,” not the one who dominated the campaign, throwing out invectives about socialism and Bill Ayers and all the other wag the dog tales of woe. I call this pre-emptive revisionist nostalgia—that is, nostalgia for an event that didn’t happen at all and for a time that isn’t even over yet.

Sarah Palin, just a few days ago, remember, was a dangerous pick, a terrible hatemonger, a fraud dressed in a $150,000 wardrobe. Faster than you can say “community organizer,” Sarah Palin was tarred and feathered by her own camp, derided for supposed ignorance about world affairs—not knowing Africa was a continent, or which countries signed the North American Free Trade Agreement—making all those arguments about sexism in the media suddenly valid. Faster still, she retreated to her home state and gave interviews with the local reporters, speaking competently about energy reform in complete sentences, properly using the English language. Her look suddenly lost the slick polish we had gotten used to—her hair was a little frizzier, less done, her clothes a little more frumpy, and Sarah Palin, suddenly stopped seeming like Cruella Deville, and was almost….sympathetic.

Did someone spike my drink?

It’s happening with the rest of the Republican guard, too. Bush’s open arm embrace of Obama’s transitional period is being viewed as supremely kind—”generous”— as if he has any other choice, given the state he’s brought our country into. Never forget, these are the final days of his presidency, and Bush wants to be remembered better than he is certain to be remembered—as a total, utter, failure.

Bush’s cooperation with the man who will be President is being hailed as a monumental achievement; likewise, the rest of his administration’s images are being getting softened with this post-electoral nostalgic glow. Condi Rice, once considered by the left to be as evil and as fiercely right wing as her boss, held a press conference, in which she essentially praised Obama’s win as an awesome achievement that made her very proud. You could hear the collective liberal swoon. Awwwww. How soon we forget, it was she who helped pushed the Iraq War to the American public. After she appeared at the Glamour magazine awards with a new, fresh updo, Huff Post readers gushed, “I’ve always admired her for what she has accomplished. I don’t care for her politics, but she’s a great role model.”

They say time heals all wounds, but the didn’t mention that it can happen in seconds.

Colin Powell, too, gets a pass. After four years out of the administration, he’s forgiven for his unfortunate WMD at the UN moment, and we look askance at what those actions helped bring, because he endorsed the right man.

Pre-emptive revisionist nostalgia might be a way to feel less hateful toward our current administration and help cleanse ourselves of our dark thoughts over the past eight years, but we should never forget.

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Soap Box: What Barack Obama’s Victory Means for Me

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Democratic Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama and his family on election night in Chicago, IL on Wednesday, November 5, 2008. (David Katz/Obama for America)

Democratic Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama and his family on election night in Chicago, IL on Wednesday, November 5, 2008. (David Katz/Obama for America)

In a quiet and somber voice that carried the magnificent weight of the words being said, Charlie Gibson announced: “Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the United States The screen showed a shot of crowds going crazy in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles-all over the country. After two solid minutes, I jerked up from the couch where I was sitting with my roommate and said, “Wait, he won? It’s over?”

My roommates, who are also African-American, were shocked into silence and didn’t respond. For us, the immediate reaction wasn’t jumping and screaming-even though in the ensuing minutes, we heard car-honking and gleeful shouting from outside. We just sat, dumbfounded, staring at the TV set. I half-expected Ashton to jump out and say, “Ha, you just got punked!” But this was real. The American people had spoken, and they elected their first non-white president. I let the reality of this wash over me. A dream that had started more than two years ago had been realized with the softly spoken words of Charlie Gibson.

Two hundred years of history had been shattered and America had faced the ugly specter of its past, overcoming it. The election commentary covering Obama’s massive sweep over McCain, McCain’s class-act concession speech, the man-on-the-street interviews with everyone from a steel worker to Dr. King’s daughter, were all kind of a fast-forwarded blur that came to pause when Obama gave his victory speech to thousands of supporters in Grant Park in Chicago. For this, I got off the couch and, like a kid eager to watch Saturday morning cartoons, sat with my face six inches away from the TV.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama started.

Yes, it was. I’m only 19, but I still didn’t expect to see something like this in my lifetime. It was just some kind of crazy notion that I had never even bothered to entertain until a few months ago. How could a nation that was built on slavery ever come together and elect a black president? It had been 143 years since the end of the Civil War and 44 years since the Civil Rights Act. A few decades ago, a man like Barack wouldn’t even have been able to vote, and here he was addressing millions across the globe as the de facto leader of the free world.

Change had come to America. All it took was “two wars, a planet in crisis, and the worst financial crisis in a century,” but it had happened. Filling with hope and elation, I soaked in every word of Obama’s speech. It rang of truth and captured the fierce admiration of the thousands who were in Grant Park that night. White, black, Hispanic, young, old, rich, poor-they were all enraptured. Out of every part of Obama’s speech, there was one sentence that resonated with me the most.

“This is your victory.”

Those four simple words summed it all up. For as much faith as I had in Obama and his ability to lead, that was nothing compared to the renewed faith and awe I had in the American people. The young, the poor, the minorities, all of the overlooked and disenfranchised segments of the population across the country, realized the strength in their numbers and the true meaning of a democracy, showing how “a government of the people, by the people and for the people had not perished from the earth.” Two wars and economic strife had awakened the sleeping giant that was the forgotten, apathetic voter.

“It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep…”

It was our victory.

So as I listened to Obama’s speech, my heart filled with a new kind of the hope for the American people more so than hope for Obama. The people had spoken and they wanted change, Obama was just the messenger. My only wish is that this awoken giant will not go back into its slumber, but remain vigilant, mobilized, and self-aware.

This was my first time voting and one of the few moments in my life where I felt part of something bigger than myself. What I thought mattered and millions of other young people came to this epiphany as they organized, as they rallied, and finally, as they voted.

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Hold the Champagne: I Want to See What Obama Does, First

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

As an African-American woman, I do not believe in voting for a man because he is of a similar race as myself (I say similar due to his bi-racial heritage). Race is an ever-present influence in our society and, therefore, influences the minds of most Americans. I cannot deny that it had maybe a 15-20% influence on my vote. According to this CNN article, 20 percent of those polled say that race played a factor—in Obama’s favor.

It’s hard not to want to make history for civil rights. Yet in all honesty, I think it is unfortunate how much race affected the election because I fear that, not only has it put lofty expectations on Obama now that he has won, but that these lofty expectations, if they are not reached, might set African-Americans back in the game of racial disparity. Michael Jackson (whom I adore) is an example of an African-American who fell fro grace. He was the King of Pop for over a decade. Then, two accusations (not even guilty verdicts) of child molestation tanked his career and have made him a nationally understood joke. I don’t want that to happen to Obama.

What if now that “we’ve” gotten “our” chance, it comes back in failure? Sure we’ve got one Black president, but it doesn’t guarantee there will ever be another one, especially if Obama doesn’t follow through on his promises. It is much more important to vote for a man on what he can do than who he is.

I await his actions as President before I can make any judgment as to whether or not this was a wise choice for America, as I would for any other President. I would like to see what he does about the looming Social Security problem and about our collapsed economy. The number of people of retirement age in this country will be in a one-third ratio with the workforce that is supposed to support them by 2020. This means less social security benefits for retirees or more taxes for the workers. This will be a huge economic problem that has not been planned for. This is in addition to the fact that future generations are going to be paying for the recent bailout, the economic future of America is grim. Obama plans to cut taxes for the middle class, but that might be completely offset by these future financial burdens. If he can truly turn our country around and straighten things out when it falls on these aspects, he will be a great president in my eyes, not just a great Black president.

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