The Dark Skin Appearance of Legitimate Political Discourse
The Republican Proclamation of 2022 — Part 2
The End of Healing — Part 2
No great symbolic threat to that “racial” white unity was so obvious as President Obama.
Although Mr. Obama’s skin color was light black, and his mother was a white American, he was perceived of as black, not mulatto or “mixed race”.
(Technically not “race” since different races can’t mix from an evolutionary biological definition, only members of the same species; thus, both his parents were of one race, the human race; the “black haters” or supremacists have so brainwashed ever one that their use of race and racial reflects a history where the false separation of the human race divides people into groups that simply human and somehow not quit human, a mark from the invention of race back in Portugal in the 1400s and in the American colonies in the 1600s.The use of the term “racist” should be a person who studies race, not a person who hates “different” races or a “different” race. In technical truth I am just realizing this as I write, now in black history month, we have constantly succumbed to that rhetoric. Racist in every day speak means a white person in an implied “superior” position who hates the different race of blacks. Using a new moniker or trope, like “black hater” or “black-skinned hater” would be more accurate and descriptive and return the word race to unity where it belongs. Let’s start a movement and not use it. In the meantime, I’ve been using the word “racial” a way to refer to the white supremacist view. Now back to our part 2 discussion, but in case you didn’t see part 1, now’s your chance).
Obama of course was half black, and not even American black, but African black, his father having come from Kenya to study in the US. So, he was 0% American black, that is not an American Descendent of Slaves (ADOS). Despite that fact, he was perceived as black. Furthermore, he was raised for the first part of his life by white grandparents in Kansas, which gave him a most surely heartland pure white attitude. He later moved, serving a stint of his young life in Indonesia where he got a sense of the outside world his sheltered Kansas white existence.
Then he went to private prep school, a white invention where he was inculcated into more white politeness, before going to Harvard law to obtain a true upper white class mark. Despite those white centrists’ values being born and bred into him, he was branded of American black origin by blacks, which he didn’t correct and had probably been living with the impression his whole life especially by ignorant whites.
He didn’t help to allay those impression by marrying a “true” American black woman and then having mulatto children, who are 50% American black, 25% white, and 25% African black (in other words, all American). This uncorrected black branding had won him critical votes from blacks and whites, and other minorities, who could see themselves in him. (The whites could see his whiteness and hear it when he spoke; there were always white American abolitionists since the 1650s).
Whites could maintain a group identity, as only about 5% of whites were activists that wanted equality and pushed for abolition, with a smaller number agreeing for reparations. This small group could be silent, ignored, or promised things that needn’t go fulfilled. The centrist whites on both sides of the aisle could thus maintain relative peace and stay in power.
In a sense it is true: Obama was the first great symbol of American disunity, or extreme polarization, just because of how people perceived him. Not because of who he was. He threatened the very balance of power with just that appearance, even though he was steeped in centrist whitism, and even though throughout his presidency he kept “both sides” together — the majority of white centrists who straddled both parties.
But it is true that division has always existed in the two-party unified system since its creation. One side has money, civility, elitism, education. The other side of the same white federal political coin down South used the proxy militia of the Klan who were in tune with white politicians after the Civil War and who conspired with them to repress the vote of blacks and hang on to power.
To be fair to the South, white supremacists are elsewhere in the US, as they worked hard to spread their ideology, cross burning, threats and guns. Many of them moved out of the South to other states like Wisconsin, or Idaho, which was almost all white until recently. It’s just that some of the ‘best’ pictures of white mob lynching post-Civil War seem to come from Southern states.
And that tactic like lynching was a way to express themselves. Words were never their strong point, which is why many good Southern writers tended to be outsiders (Flannery O’Connor a Catholic and a woman, Truman Capote a gay, Zora Neal Hurston a black woman). Issuing threats, killing blacks, and creating complex voting laws that don’t mention color but keep blacks out of the polls was not easy. But it was easy to enforce with threats and violence. They ruled with the whip, the iron chains, the kick in the ribs, for centuries.
And they used that centuries of violence over legitimate objections: that is, that slavery was morally wrong, that blacks are humans with inherent rights who deserve equal treatment, and that the amendments after Civil War institute fair voting to all blacks and fair ownership of land and freedom of expression.
It’s not new to hear false claims to enforce power. I’m sure many blacks heard about the white girl down south who blamed a black man for looking at her wrongly and then a white gang hanged the accused without trial. Or the false accusation of stealing after the Civil War and using a beating by an officer to teach the falsely accused black boy not to steal. I’m sure the examples are endless. Or the common one we are so accustomed to hearing now for the last two decades: “He had a gun,” “I saw a weapon,” put in the report after the cop’s gun was already drawn and trained on the black man during a routine traffic stop.
This political expression taking violence of mobbing and targeting anything they perceive as against them under a white male leader is legitimate use of political power to them. And the truthfulness of the accusation or claim used to enforce their politically racially motivated violence of the unthinking mob has really never been important. In fact, it seems to be unimportant. They’ve kept power by using the outrage of unproven claims from a leader to incite mob white violence since the end of the Civil War.
So, calling January 6th an Insurrection by their proxy mob using false pretenses is not seditious to them. They didn’t always wait for a judge to make a ruling before pulling out the noose and to hang the accused black man (and yes, I’m alluding as well to the noose on January 6th they constructed). It’s just what they’ve been practicing for a long time: Legitimate Political Discourse. A clean historical pattern: false claims, mob violence. It’s not a smoke screen to hide their “hypocrisy” or intentions. It’s what they’ve always done to maintain power.
It’s not even a pepper and tear gas screen, since they were the ones spraying it.
