This morning’s New York Times carried a stunning piece by editorial writer Brent Staples, the words blasting into my eyes like tiny pieces of burning glass. Staples focused on how race–or should I say coded racism–has been injected into this year’s presidential campaign. But before that, he set table with historical evidence of the smoking gun connection between then and now.
In the South Carolina of the 1950s, the time and space where I grew up, African Americans endured near-death experiences on a daily basis throughout the Deep South. As Staples points out today, black people could be not only “beaten and killed for seeking the right to vote” but also for the mere pedestrian act of “talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk.” Further, as Staples informed his readers, black people who were so brazen as to violate these and other soul-killing proscriptions could be designated as “uppity niggers.”
I remember my grandfather “pulling over to the side,” to give way to white people when he would take me into town. A child not knowing any better, I refused, and so had to be severely and publicly reprimanded and then forced to do so. Otherwise, my experience would not have been near-death, it simply would have been death.
I also remember that in many parts of the South black men were not allowed to wear white shirts except on Sundays. Otherwise, they would be stopped and interrogated not only by the official law enforcement, but ordinary white male citizens. “You better be preaching a funeral today,” they would say to my father and uncles.
In fact, Staples brought more ugly memories back to me about “uppity” black people who own nicer homes, cars, farms, or more successful businesses. If you were not an undertaker, black people could be putting their lives at risk for owning a Cadillac.
As Staples points out, these social transgressions not only provoked social repression but often they unleashed wholesale violence. “Race-based wealth envy,” he wrote, “was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.” To be sure, similar horrors happened in other states at different times.
Staples captures the base of essence of that time and experience: “Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color.” Deeper still, he wrote, “black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye–and argued with them about things that mattered” were declared an intolerable, subversive threat and persecuted.”
I know this to be true because even in my little farming community, many black men had to leave their families and homes in the dark of night and make way North for the defiance of “looking squarely in the eye” of a quasi-authority figure in the county.
But I digress. Staples has set his table, and now presents Representative Lynn Westmoreland, the Georgia Republican who described Obama as “uppity” and refused to retract. Instead, the Congressman insists that there is no racial meaning in the term, citing the dictionary as his sourced authority. The next offering comes from Representative Geoff Davis, Kentucky Republican, whose stated view of Obama is “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.”
The McCain campaign has run an ad accusing Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. Evidence? Examples?
None. None are needed. The Republican playbook rules. Simply asserting a big lie with the sordid language of coded racism makes it immune to the need for reasoning.
It’s painfully ironic that Barack Obama, of all people, should be the target of this vicious propaganda. After all, Obama has been forceful in declaring that there is no Black America or White America, only a United States of America. Obama’s brand is anchored to the myth of an American post-racial society which virtually declares the end of racism.
All candidates operate in an alternate universe. If that convinces you that Obama is simply having to endure what the other guy endures, just add color.
Tags: Diversity, Speaking in Tongues
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