There is simply no denying it anymore. A large segment of America is still, 145 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, steeped in hatred for and fear of African Americans. And nothing has brought it to the fore more than this year's presidential race.
Of course, ever since the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, when Republicans actively began courting racist whites in the South, turning the once Democratic area of the country Republican, race has been actively used to defeat Democratic presidential candidates.
But this year, for the first time, two Democrats are using race so that one of them can defeat another Democrat. And it sickens me.
I've tried to catch snippets of speeches by Bill and Hillary and they have gotten really good at sending out coded and not so coded messages to white working class voters (code: voters who aren't so keen on voting for a black man). They call Obama "elitist," for instance. How could that be racial code, you ask. Well, a working class white who has always had racist sentiments, doesn't want to ever think that a black man is better than him. So if you say that black man acts or talks like he is better, or even imply that the black man looks down on him, you are igniting that white supremacist mentality, even if that white man would never admit these feelings in public. "Elitist" is code for "uppity black." All Southerners know what that means. Now we know that there are a significant number of people in Ohio and Pennsylvania who carry around the same prejudice.
I have also heard Bill Clinton talk about Obama's campaign being willing to "beat up a girl." While it may sound silly and even demeaning to call Hillary a "girl," Bubba, a child of the South, knows exactly how such language plays. And it, too, is code.
In the South, for hundreds of years, black men were lynched for even looking at a white woman, let alone treating her with any kind of disrespect. There is a long history of whites in the South fearing the (imagined) behavior of black men towards their women. To accuse Obama and his campaign of "beating up on a girl" brings up all those fears and is one of the most coded racist things I can imagine Bill saying.
Then, of course, there's what he said about Jesse Jackson winning South Carolina twice, and what Geraldine Ferraro said about Obama only being where he is because he's black, giving a nod to the hatred working class whites have towards affirmative action.
If Clinton somehow grabs the nomination from Obama, it will mainly be because in the second half of her campaign, she used her own "Southern Strategy" and appealed in both overt and coded ways to the racism of the voters. She will have not only destroyed the ability of one of the most gifted politicians of our time to move us past the remaining vestiges of racism, she will have fueled the racism that remains. In other words, she and her husband will have made us worse as a country.
And I will never, ever, forgive her for that.
