What If We Elected a Black President?

During the last few months of the 2008 presidential election, I was dating a woman who was a grad student and, to pay her bills, worked as a reporter for a small town paper. On the day after the election, her editor called her and asked her to interview gun owners and gun store employees about the rush to buy guns and ammo in the wake of Obama's election. How he knew such a rush would occur within hours of Obama's election becoming official, I do not know, but he was right, because there was a spike in gun sales, at least according to the gun stores in this small town.

I remember finding the whole thing odd, because I didn't remember Obama speaking about gun control all that much during the campaign, and his record on the issue certainly didn't imply, to me at least, that he was going to be coming for people's guns once he was inaugurated. Then, after she'd done several interviews and was writing up her story, she listened to her interviews on tape as I sat there and listened along. I was shocked at what I heard. There was a level of paranoia among the ordinary people she'd interviewed that I had never heard before, and I grew up surrounded by gun-totin' rednecks. It became very clear, to me at least, that these people were less afraid because a Democrat had been elected than because a black man had been elected, and a black man coming from their guns was apparently a very, very scary thing. So they rushed out to buy guns and ammo. Suddenly it made sense to me. This wasn't about anything Obama had said, or about any of his past votes; it was about his race.

For some reason, this popped into my head again as I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent article in The Atlantic, "Fear of a Black President" (a play on Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet I assume, though I thought of the hilarious Fear of a Black Hat). Coates touches on many things in that article, including racism towards Obama, but also Obama's treatment, or rather lack of treatment, of race issues, and also the myth of Obama held by many black people in this country. It really is a must read, because it expresses many of the things I've heard from black people over the last four years, and does so better than anyone has to date.

What I really want to talk about, however, is not the article itself but the reactions to it here, which I suspect is a pretty typical range of reactions among white people in the less hyper-partisan regions of the blogosphere. It's the same reaction I see every time the issue of racism comes up. There are three species of reaction: those who passionately exclaim that racism is a big issue, those who think that any talk of racism is at best poisoning the well, at worst another expression of "gotcha" politics or at least "gotcha" rhetoric, and the self-appointed moderators between the views who say, in essence, that maybe we shouldn't talk about racism, because it leads to such heated arguments between the first two species. This last group is, in essence, siding with those who are offended by the mere mention of racism, because they're suggesting that we do precisely what the offended want: ignore racism altogether.

I find this incredibly frustrating, because it is precisely in such circles that racism needs to be discussed, because it is precisely in such circles that the path of continued racism is laid out. This may seem harsh, but it's true. Racism doesn't continue because of the skinheads or Neo-Nazis or other rabid racists. Those people are rightly despised by pretty much everyone who doesn't count themselves among their number. Racism as it pervades our society isn't this sort of fervent hate. As Coates puts it in his article,

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.

It is among the aforementioned circle, intelligent, educated, relatively successful white folk, that this sort of racism, the racism of casual, often implicit skepticism, that the seeds of future racism germinate. It's these people who carry it forward now, subtly, in their attitudes and behaviors, even if they're not aware of it, and it's these people's children who will carry it forward in the future. I wish I knew, then, how to engage them. I don't; I get too angry, too accusatory, to self-righteous for the people who most need to hear what I'm trying to say to hear any of it at all. And this only frustrates me all the more.