In the pre-dawn hours of last Nov. 5, while much of the nation celebrated Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president, three white men in Springfield, Mass., doused the partially completed Macedonia Church of God in Christ with gasoline and burned it to the ground.
After their arrest, the men told police they'd torched the black church because they were angry about Obama's election and feared minorities would be given more rights.
At about the same time, newspaper Web sites were filled with millions of hateful messages about Obama, and the computer servers of two large white supremacist groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens and Stormfront.org, crashed because they got so much traffic.
"You immediately got the sense that something significant was happening," said Mark Potok, who investigates hate groups as the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
Potok's instincts were correct. Obama's victory had stirred immediate racial anger among a small portion of Americans.
That visceral backlash quickly subsided, but as the grip of the worst recession since the 1930s began to tighten, a different type of anger began to surface. Only this time, the hostility wasn't limited to society's fringe elements. It was everywhere.
The collapse of the housing market, the government bailout of Wall Street, record job losses, long-term unemployment, trillion-dollar deficits, shrinking retirement funds, growing government intervention, foreign economic competition and America's changing demographic landscape left many Americans angry at the direction of the country, confused about the source of their problems and fearful about the future.
In this summer of discontent, much of that outrage, rightly or wrongly, has been trained on President Obama. While it's an occupational hazard that comes with the turf at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., some of the criticism of Obama has the unmistakable stench of racism.
For example, a recent poster making the rounds shows Obama outfitted in full African witch doctor gear, complete with headdress, above the words "OBAMACARE coming to a clinic near you."
"I certainly detect a racial element in some of the hostility directed at President Obama," said Richard Alba, the distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "I'm certain there are white Americans for whom having a dark-skinned president in the White House is an enormous shock. This is really a complete overturning of what they thought was the natural order of things. The natural way that American society worked. It upsets all their ideas about how American society is structured."
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment