I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the terrifying scale of the racist hatred being directed toward Obama. Yesterday I saw this article, which implied that the Secret Service is struggling to keep up with threats against the president.
Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service.
Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
And today there’s this article, about a creepy militia-like organization (one of several hundred just like it, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [cited in the article]) that’s convinced Obama is Hitler and is therefore preparing to fight back against his impending “dictatorship”:
Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders.
The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.
One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”
OK, none of this is surprising to me, nor should it be to anyone who understands just how racist this country is. This is simply the new face of the KKK — the sheets are off, the N-word is gone, and they’re using code-words like “patriotism”, but these people are preparing for a race war. They’re terrified that Obama’s election means… something. That PoC will enslave white people, maybe. The end of white dominance in the country’s bastions of power and privilege. The fact that these bastions are in no danger whatsoever of a mass “browning” is beside the fact; Obama is a symbol, and they’re terrified of the potential change that he represents. And to assuage their terror, they’re gearing up to kill… well, not just him, but pretty much anybody who scares them. I figure most of us ABW bloggers and readers are probably somewhere on that list, if you go far enough down. I mean, really — we’ve got radical Christianists* praying for the man’s death. These are the terrorists we should really fear.
But I found myself wondering, today, what Barack and Michelle Obama have told their children about this.
Because parents of black children have to do that. If they have any sense of responsibility, they prepare their children for the racism they’ll inevitably face. I don’t have kids, but I certainly remember my parents and grandparents carefully pointing out incidents and disparities and stereotypes, and talking with me about them. I remember my mother instructing me about how to act with the police — as a woman I’m not in quite as much danger from them as a black man would be, but I’m not safe either. Yet even with this advance preparation, I remember being shocked as I grew older and realized that racism had not ended with the Civil Rights Act, as I had been taught in school. It was still happening, still killing — still a near-daily threat to my personal health and welfare. My parents had done what they could to cushion this shock, but it was still painful, even terrifying, when I finally understood it as more than an intellectual exercise.
So what, I wonder, does the first couple tell Sasha and Malia? Do they try and prepare their daughters for the possibility that their father will be assassinated because of his race? Have they warned the girls that they’ll probably never be able to leave Secret Service or bodyguard protection, at any point in their lives? Do they keep the girls off the internet, for fear they’ll find out that Dad is getting 30 death threats a day? Or when they talk with the girls about it — how the hell do you talk to a child about something like that, without traumatizing them for life? How do you keep children, when they’re immersed in so much hatred and fear, from growing up hateful and fearful themselves?
I’m not a parent yet, so fortunately I don’t have to deal with these questions. (I am an official “auntie” to my best friends’ kids, but like a good auntie I get to defer the tough questions to Mom and Dad. To a degree.) But I cannot help empathizing with Michelle, who was younger than me when she had Malia, and wondering how I would handle the matter if I were in her position.
PoC parents: how do you do this? How do you prepare your kids for this fucked-up world?
* Using this term consciously to mimic the way most of American society refers to “radical Islamists.”
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What do they tell the children?
Most of the people heavily promoting Oath Keepers are libertarians or paleocons. Both of those groups also opposed the Bush administration. They aren’t the “new face of the KKK” or whatever. You know, if left-liberals keep talking like this, by this time next year, “racism” will be a meaningless word.
Yes, Andrew, and I’m sure that’s exactly the reason that the Oath Keepers formed in 2009. They were against Bush the Yunger just that much.
While Andrew sounds foolish in his assumption that there is no racism among libertarians or paleocons (refresh my memory, *who* opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?), I do think that one has to compare to Bill Clinton in order to suss out which aspects of this are clearly racist and which are simply the massive hostility that conservatives and libertarians have toward any Democratic president. Are the threats at a much higher and graver level than they were against Clinton? Is there a lot more Hitler rhetoric than there was against Bush?
Clearly some of the animus out there is specifically racial (thinking here of Rush Limbaugh’s blaming Obama for a white kid’s getting beaten up on a schoolbus), but a great deal of it is simply the same conservative disbelief that someone other than a Republican is in the White House, which we saw ad nauseum during the Clinton Administration. Has anyone started circulating an e-mail with “suspicious deaths” linked to the Obamas? Has the WSJ editorial page accused him of conspiring in anyone’s murder? Is there an investigation of him that will somehow leap from his wife’s real estate investments to his sex life?
It’s been a while since Clinton, so some folks have forgotten the level of hatred the right has toward a Democratic president — even a moderate Southerner who trashes Sister Souljah, supports the death penalty and signs welfare reform — even if he’s a white good ol’ boy. And some of that overall rightwing rage toward the Dems is racial, because of the concern that Democrats are excessively beholden to or accommodating of POC. But there’s quite a pile of that hatred that you have to dig through before you strike the part that is based on the race of the president himself.
As for what POC tell their kids, mine didn’t really tell me much of anything. I was never explicitly warned that people might mistreat me due to my race/ ethnicity, so it was a shock to me when it began happening, and especially when it happened explicitly (e.g., several kids ganging up on me to mock my wearing a bindi for my faith — there were very few other Hindus in our town, but those kids instinctively knew what slur to use, “Dot-head”).
My parents knew that we weren’t living among totally enlightened people. My dad had to deal with unwelcoming attitudes among both his colleagues and potential patients, and later in life I overhead him recounting what our town had been like when we first moved there — he was talking about how he hadn’t been treated well, but he frankly felt lucky because he thought black people had had it even worse.
But I think their attitude as immigrants and as such a tiny minority in a small town is that they should just suck it up and not complain, even when someone broke the window of our car while it was sitting in our driveway. To them, part of “not complaining” was not telling us much when we were little about what they were dealing with, which in turn left me unprepared to deal with what my peers would dish out. I had the typical child’s reluctance to admit that I was being mistreated, and the one time I ventured to say anything about it to my dad, he told me I should just ignore those kids because clearly they were ignorant. (A bit difficult to do when slurs are being hissed and whispered at you when you’re sitting in class and don’t have the option of walking away.)
I haven’t thought much about how I’ll deal with this for my kids, in part because I want to believe naively that since I won’t live in such a small place where my ethnic group is such a tiny minority, my kids won’t have to deal with that. This is an incredibly silly idea on my part, since if anything the areas of North America where South Asians are a larger percentage of the population have seen worse hostility toward them than I had to encounter.
I guess I am reluctant to put the idea into my hypothetical kids’ heads that people will mistreat them because of their ethnicity. I want them to talk to me about it immediately if it ever happens, but it seems like telling them that there’s no Santa Claus — sure, it’s the truth, but it makes the world look like not so good a place.
@PC. The world ISN’T a good place. Better to prepare them than sling them in without warning. I don’t have kids but if I did? Proper history and contemporary warning are going down their throats from the beginning. Then again, I’m a black woman. We have very little margin for error.
PG,
Sasha and Malia’s father gets 30 death threats a day. Regardless of whether this is more or less than what Bush got, or Clinton got, or whatever other irrelevancy other folks in this thread have latched onto, this is a fact. It is also a fact that there are whole movements in this country arming and psyching themselves up to kill Obama.
And death threats aside, the girls have already been the target of blatant racism several times before this.
So. If these were your hypothetical kids, would you really want them blindsided? Would you really leave them defenseless, if you knew stuff like this was very likely to happen?
nojojojo,
Are you under the impression that Chelsea Clinton didn’t have to consider the possibility that her father would be assassinated? Do you think any child of a Kennedy contemplating a presidential run doesn’t have to worry about that? Assassination comes with the presidential turf in this country, whether you’re black or white. I don’t think focusing on that aspect of Malia and Sasha’s lives as an example of something peculiar to the children of an African American president makes a lot of sense. I have a lot of anxiety about Obama’s getting assassinated — I had a nightmare the night before seeing him at the health care rally of someone’s shooting at him and being down on the floor and not knowing whether the president were alive or dead — but it’s just absurd for me to assume that this was never a concern for any prior president. All our prior presidents have been white, yet somehow a whole bunch of them got shot at anyway. Sometimes by nuts on the right (John Wilkes Booth), sometimes by nuts on the left (Lee Harvey Oswald) and sometimes by just plain nuts (John Hinckley). It is not a special quality of being a black president that leads to the fear of assassination that your family has to live with.
If I had kids of this age and were running for president, I’d assume that (a) they’re learning something at school, like that both black and white people who become famous are targets of assassins, which is why
(b) they must never try to run or hide from the Secret Service agents, whose job is not to be their pals but to protect them from kidnappers and other criminals who want to hurt them because of what I’m doing.
I’m guessing, given the combined brainpower in their maternal and paternal genes, that Malia and Sasha are smart girls who grasp both (a) and (b). And I wouldn’t see much sense in telling them that they should be more scared than any presidential child ever has been before because I’m not white. I don’t see how that’s useful to them at all.
And death threats aside, the girls have already been the target of blatant racism several times before this.
This is a much more useful thing to discuss with one’s children, because racism inherently is going to be targeted at POC who are famous, and won’t be at white people who are. Racism, unlike presidential assassination, is something that happens only to POC, not to white people. And I do think it would be important to discuss with my family before entering politics that I am going to be putting all of us in the political spotlight, and that because we are POC we are going to be getting criticized and insulted in ways that we won’t see for my (probably white) opponent and his family. (I’d also warn them that we’ll probably see this because of my sex.) We will have to deal with people saying that we’re somehow not “real” Americans, or that my children are not the right image for a politicians’ kids, or that we are ugly or that we are stupid.
But assassinations? Those are not brought out for POC-only.
ETA: The link to womanist musings says, “The conservatives are continually harping about family values and yet it fails them when it comes to respecting the children of democrats. It was not that long ago when Chelsea Clinton was treated mercilessly because of her pubescent appearance.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates had a good post last month (taking off the Glennwald piece comparing right-wing extremists under Clinton and Obama) that argues there was a strongly racial element to the opposition to Clinton that is that much more exaggerated for Obama.
O.K., that’s racist.
I read the link, and then I actually went to the site and poked around. I saw some people imagining some rather extreme circumstances that I seriously doubt will ever happen. But at no point did I see anything that had anything to do with Obama’s race, just his policies (or what they imagine his policies are).
I’m sure that some of the threats directed towards the President are rooted in racism. But opposition to President Obama is not automatically racism. You really DO risk trivialization of something quite real and serious by putting forth propositions like this.
PG,
Nowhere did I say that white presidents, or famous people in general, don’t have to worry about assassination. But as the first article noted, the scale is greater. As the second article noted, the tone is different. There’s a reason Obama needed Secret Service protection a year earlier than any other presidential candidate in history, and it’s not because he’s a seekrit Hitler clone. What’s happening to this president is simply not the same.
And like you said, his daughters aren’t idiots. They’re going to notice the differences, especially when they’re so blatant that even the mainstream media has picked up on them. Kids are good at noticing differences, even if they don’t know what they mean. And black kids eventually start putting two and two together — usually around the tween years, according to racial identity development theory (if you’re not familiar with it, a good book is here. If no one prepares them for this moment of realization, the results can be traumatic, and tragic.
Ron F,
Nowhere did I say that opposition to the president = racism. My whole article notes a very specific kind of opposition that I have not seen aimed at white presidents, and certainly not on this scale. But then, if the only racism you notice as such is a skinhead mass-murder plot, no wonder you didn’t notice the nuances of what I said.
I suppose they try to make sure that they spend as much time with their kids as they can and make good memories for them, the way people in high-risk jobs do.
I was married to a trucker who drove a tanker for fifteen years, and I had a policy that he never went off to work in the middle of an argument, and that I told him I loved him every chance I got, because I really didn’t know if he was coming home next weekend.
He always did, and now drives a tow truck, which is somewhat safer. But I sympathize, and I’m grateful that Obama is there.
But as the first article noted, the scale is greater.
Your quote from the first article compares only to Bush, not to Clinton, and there’s also the issue in making statistical comparisons that communications technology has become revolutionized in the last decade — it’s a lot easier now to make threats using a throwaway cell phone or a temporary email account.
As the second article noted, the tone is different.
Your summary and quote regarding the second article is about how Obama is compared to Hitler and to George III, and is called “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.” Maybe you attended different anti-war protests than I did, but Bush = Hitler, references to the PATRIOT Act as enabling a fascist dictatorship, calling the president George the II as an allusion to King George III — that was all pretty standard. And that was at the polite protests, the early days of Code Pink with permits and no anarchists allowed. Moreover, the article also says, “The Patriot movement, so named because its adherents believe the federal government has stepped on the constitutional ideals of the American Revolution, gained traction in the 1990s and has been closely linked to anti-government militia and white supremacist movements.”
I think Ta-Nehisi has it right: as I said @3, “some of that overall rightwing rage toward the Dems is racial,” and there is also additional hostility toward Obama because he is black that would be directed at even a black Republican president — though I don’t think all of those people who claim that they would just love to see Condi Rice or Alan Keyes as president are necessarily lying.
PG,
That is a good point. The fact remains, though, that the Secret Service has to investigate every one of those threats, so they’re having a practical, not merely statistical, impact. And the figure is out there, implying that Obama — who hasn’t been in office a year — is much more hated than Dubya — whose ratings were in the toilet. (And whose terms also covered the period of throwaway cellphones and easy email, so really he’s a better object for comparison than Clinton.) Again, though, how does one explain that to kids? Trying to explain it away as possibly-misinterpreted-statistics isn’t going to work, when you’re talking about a girl’s father.
And yes, the article notes that the Patriot movements gained traction in the 1990s. Both anti-government militias and white supremacist groups have existed in this country for centuries; that’s not new. But I think you missed the article’s point — a) that the movements have grown after several terrorist incidents gave them publicity and attracted more members, including the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the Branch Davidians shooting up Waco. And that b) the militias and the white supremacists are collaborating now, “cross-pollinating”, sharing methodology and language.
So basically these groups are growing more “terroristic”, for lack of a better adjective, and they’re evolving new tactics blending the methods of the KKK with the methods of Timothy McVeigh. All of this beneath a polite NRA “yay! guns!” veneer, probably with a slapdash of Left Behind premillenialist fanboyism. And there are a lot more of these groups now that Obama is president. I’m really surprised that you’re downplaying this; it scares the hell out of me.
Also, it’s important to note that left-wing radicals and right-wing radicals are not the same thing, even if they may sometimes use the same language and methods. The two sides’ composition and philosophies are very different — so I’m not sure why you’re trying to lump them together here. There’s a significant difference between the people calling Bush a fascist — because of his fascisistic (sp?) actions — and the people calling Obama Hitler (not even a generic fascist, but one noted for genocide and ethnic cleansing). The latter don’t have many actions to work with, though that doesn’t seem to stop them. They go on about his czars (a practice that dates back to Roosevelt) and TARP (which Bush originated) and so on, but some of these people have been calling Obama Hitler, Osama, etc., since before the election, even before we knew what his platform was. That’s what makes me think their language is code for something else.
(And whose terms also covered the period of throwaway cellphones and easy email, so really he’s a better object for comparison than Clinton.)
Bush is a better object for comparison based on the technology, but he’s not as good a comparison based on who rightwing lunatics go after. That’s where Clinton comes up. With Clinton, you had people still considered respectable enough to write for national publications and be invited on the national networks writing in edited, published books, “In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he ‘did it,’ even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate.”
I’m really surprised that you’re downplaying this; it scares the hell out of me.
I’m not sure you’re picking the right things to be scared about. People who organize to enact violence against other people are indubitably scary. People who organize to refuse to use state-sponsored force against others — as Oath Keepers is purportedly organized — are not scary in the sense of posing a direct threat to anyone. They may pose a threat to law-and-0rder generally, because the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force is necessary to its ability to maintain law-and-order. And if the people entrusted with that force (police officers, National Guard, military, etc.) refuse to use it when ordered to do so by duly elected officials, then there is no way for the government to maintain law-and-order and we descend into mobs and anarchy. In this scenario, the actual scary folks — the ones who do want to enact violence directly — will feel unconstrained by fear of just punishment from playing out all their race war fantasies. But that’s an attenuated responsibility for the Oath Keepers, not a direct one, although it’s certainly a reason for the government to fire any person who joins Oath Keepers, because those members clearly can’t keep the oaths they were supposed to swear to uphold the law, and have taken another allegiance instead.
Also, I don’t think “Be scared about an extreme and unlikely scenario” is really a useful response. It’s an emotional reaction that’s justified, but I think the feeling I had after the health care rally — excited about the progress Obama has made, and pumped up about volunteering to get Congress to pass reform — is a lot more useful than the feeling I had after I woke up from the nightmare about a possible assassination. With regard to Obama’s kids, it’s a lot more useful to prepare them for the already-happened and sure-to-happen-again incidents of racist insults, than to dwell on whatever degree of heightened probability that their father will be assassinated due to his race.
There’s a significant difference between the people calling Bush a fascist — because of his fascisistic (sp?) actions — and the people calling Obama Hitler (not even a generic fascist, but one noted for genocide and ethnic cleansing).
I thought I’d made pretty clear that people on the left were specifically calling Bush Hitler, not just “generic fascist.” The proposed MoveOn ad is only the most commonly cited example; there are plenty more.
The latter don’t have many actions to work with, though that doesn’t seem to stop them.
People often worry pre-emptively even about possibilities that someone has specifically disclaimed. Did you not hear from Rolling Stone and law professors who were convinced that Bush would reinstate a draft — even though everyone in the Administration said a draft was out of the question? Or that the Japanese internment would be reenacted, but this time against Muslims, even though Bush repeatedly claimed that he was not waging war on Islam and that he considered a “religion of peace”?
Look, I don’t like having Obama called Hitler, and I don’t like people’s hypothesizing that he’ll do such-and-such terrible thing based on no evidence, but unless I have a track record of having called out that stuff when it was done to Bush — and except for a few extreme examples, I have to admit that I don’t — I have no credibility in saying “Oh, you can’t say that, it’s beyond the limits of legitimate political discourse.”
The “don’t use racism too much” comments really piss me off. I hate people who put limits on what is allowed to be called racism, which is always only the most obvious cases. They want to subtle, calmer, less obvious instances to remain open so they can use them as often as they want and then claim they’re not really racists when you call them on it. You know, like someone isn’t really a drug user if they only snort a little coke on the weekends with their friends. If you keep calling them a drug user the word just loses all meaning, don’t you know.
i must say i am a tad perplexed by the obama = hitler stuff. normally we on the right like to redbait while you on the left racebait. we’re fascists, you’re communists.
but this is the first time i’ve heard a dem being called a fascist so routinely. i’m not sure why the right hasn’t just settled with commie, although technically speaking his corportism mixed with economic populism fits more with the fascist economic model, but i don’ think think the lablers are that sophisticated.
Tim Wise says its because Hitler was a racial tyrant, so the right is playing on fears that he’s going to specifcally target white people, not just all people like commies do. haven’t heard a better explanation.
but this is the first time i’ve heard a dem being called a fascist so routinely. i’m not sure why the right hasn’t just settled with commie, although technically speaking his corportism mixed with economic populism fits more with the fascist economic model, but i don’ think think the lablers are that sophisticated.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were due to some combination of
(a) The influence of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which basically collapses all totalitarianism — regardless of whether it is actually nationalistic — into “fascism,” such that H.G. Wells’s call for a global socialist technocracy (only allowing those he deemed sufficiently educated in the right fields to vote) in Goldberg’s hands turns into “fascism.”
(b) “You said it about Bush, so we’ll say it about your guy!”
And he’s getting “socialist” and “communist” along with the cries of fascism. At his health care rally in New York on Tuesday, he was joking/ complaining about those who criticize without offering their own solutions, and spoke about how he didn’t mind working hard to clean up the mess America is in. “But don’t say I’ve got a socialist mop.”
Eh I wonder if it has more to do with the majority of people not being taught the difference between socialism, facism, totalitarianism and communism. The upshot of my pre-college education on the subject was that they were all EEEEEEVILLLLLLL. In this manner they’ve all just become a generic insult meaning “controlling and bad”.
I’m only slightly puzzled by the insistence that we not claim the opposition to Obama stems from racism. Republicans, in my experience, always play that game: we aren’t allowed to call them on their true natures, or call them out on the true games their running, because, well, that wouldn’t be fair, would it?
So they can bay about how the media is biased, they can insist attacking a country that never did anything to us is fine, but saying a naughty word is evil, they can deregulate and break unions and destroy the nation, but mercy, we can’t call them out for their racist ways, because that’s uncivil.
Yes, Republicans dislike Obama because he is black. Here in Arkansas, during the election, that was why they did not want to vote for him, and no one was shy about saying so. Well, actually, what they claimed was that he wasn’t actually black, he was just pretending to be black so that all the idiot liberals would vote for him. (Because, you know, pretending to be black gets you so many points in America. I’ve certainly noticed that.) Also, according to the Republicans around here, once he got elected, someone was certain to take him out (Republicans around here were fond of dwelling on various scenerios) and then all the *other* black people were CERTAIN to rise up and kill all the innocent white people in their beds.
Yeah, not racist at all. You betcha.
Aside from the many rants I had to sit through in various venues back previous to the election, I give you the tea bagger protests. And if that’s not enough, go visit some of the Right-Wing blogs, if you can take it. I can’t, not for very long at a time. Ack.
delagar,
I’m only slightly puzzled by the insistence that we not claim the opposition to Obama stems from racism.
Are you saying that all opposition to Obama stems from racism, or that some opposition to Obama stems from racism? These are two very different assertions. I don’t think anyone disagrees with the latter (at minimum, it seems safe to assume that declared KKK members oppose Obama due to his race), but you’d be the first person I’ve seen who will assert the former.