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.