“White Heat”: The Racial Backlash After Obama
Palin Country – Warren County, in Northwestern Pennsylvania
I just saw the most divisive hate-filled speech that I have ever seen. It was Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the conservative movement, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference to his dittoheads. It was angry. Angry. Angry. He speaks to that radically conservative angry man out there and he knows it. He uses them to make millions, he whips them up into a frenzy even though he is not interested in facts to support what he says. He lies to them about President Obama because, as he has said, if Obama’s way of hope, peace and propserity works, he and his conservative movement fail. That is why he has said that he wants Obama to fail. Hope dies. Rush can continue to hate.
I have been posting this week about the level of hate rising. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Intelligence Report was alarming. The White Heat of anger is rising and much of it is because of people like Limbaugh, Palin, Coulter, Malkin and Hannity have no apparent intention to try to limit the spew in their speeches, rallies, shows, books and their blogs that result in their base hating African Americans, Jews, Asians, gays, women and the poor. They are the antithesis of everything that Christianity stands for while they preach this spew to the Bible thumpers who yell Amen. These are people who blame their problems on others, unable to accept responsibility for failing to attain what they feel entitled to attain by virtue of their whiteness.
White Heat Rises as Obama is Elected: Backlash
Kaylon Johnson
Meet Kaylon Johnson. His is the face of a hate crime victim. After feeling euphoric over the election of the first African American, he opened a shop in Shreveport, Louisiana so that he could sell Obama memorabilia. He soon learned that the election of Barack Obama did not mee t that the struggle was over. The backlash had just begun.
…on the night of Dec. 6, Johnson, 33, pulled into a Shreveport gas station behind the wheel of his GMC Yukon adorned with Obama bumper stickers. Wearing an Obama T-shirt, Johnson purchased a soft drink and was returning to his vehicle when he was jumped by three white men shouting “Fuck Obama!” and “Nigger president!” The pummeling left Johnson with a broken nose and a fractured eye socket that required surgery.
Kaylon Johnson was not the only victim of a hate crime in the US in the days leading up to and after the election of Presidient Obama. While were all on pins and needles prior to the election and euphoric thereafter, a lot of ugly has been going down.
Prior to the Election
- A life-sized likeness of Obama was found hanging from a noose in a tree at the University of Kentucky.
- The co-owner of a Palm Beach, Fla., restaurant wrote “White Power” on staff memos taped to the eatery’s kitchen walls. She told her black employees they would be fired if they voted for Obama.
On the night of the election, while the nation rejoiced and celebrated, others did not
- A black Muslim teenager in Staten Island, N.Y., said he was assaulted by four white men who yelled “Obama.”
- The same restaurant owner in Palm Beach wrote “KKK” on employee timecards. After newspaper reports of her behavior, she blamed her actions on “watching too much Fox News” and “my hot Italian blood.”
- In Snellville, Ga., a boy on a school bus told a 9-year-old girl that he hoped Obama would be assassinated.
- Also in Snellville, a vandalized Obama sign and two pizza boxes filled with human feces were left on a black family’s lawn.
- Small black effigies were found hanging from nooses in trees in two Maine towns.
- In Midland, Mich., a pistol-packing member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan wore his Klan uniform and carried an American flag on a city sidewalk.
- “Obama” was spray-painted on a black man’s car, which was then torched, in Otter Creek Township, Pa.
- At North Carolina State University, four students spray-painted racist and threatening graffiti aimed at Obama, sparking an anti-racist rally attended by 500 people.
- Only hours after Obama’s election, a predominantly black church in Springfield, Mass., was torched.
In the weeks following the election.
- Three white men were arrested just days before Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration and charged with conspiring to deprive church congregants of their civil rights.
- A sign was placed inside a general store in Standish, Maine, that read, “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool.” Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when the new president would be assassinated. “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count,” the sign said. At the bottom of the sign somebody had written, “Let’s hope someone wins.”
- An employee of a gun-and-lock shop in Traverse City, Mich., flew the American flag upside down because, he said, it symbolized “an international signal for distress and we feel our country is in distress because the nigger got it.”
- A dark-skinned doll labeled “Obama” was hung in a high-school stairwell east of Tacoma, Wash. Five students were expelled.
- A biracial student at a high school north of Pittsburgh complained that a teacher’s aide said to a student sitting near her that Obama would be killed, that the American flag would be changed to the KFC chicken chain’s emblem, and the national anthem would become “Movin’ on Up” — the theme song of “The Jeffersons,” a sitcom about a black family. The aide also berated her for supporting Obama, the student said. The aide was suspended.
- Second-and-third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted, “Assassinate Obama.”
- Federal authorities arrested a Wisconsin man in Brookhaven, Miss., four days before Obama’s inauguration for threatening to assassinate Obama in a posting to an Internet site about UFOs and extraterrestrial aliens. Steven Joseph Christopher, 42, allegedly wrote that he “can no longer allow the Jewish parasites to bully their way into making the American people submit to their evil ways.”
- Neo-Nazi radio show host Hal Turner wrote on his blog that his “inauguration dream” was for somebody to send an explosives-laden aerial unmanned drone or chemical-filled balloons into inaugural crowds. In a follow-up posting, Turner maintained that Obama and congressmen and senators attending the inauguration deserved to die, as did African Americans (“sub-human simians”) and liberals (“mentally-ill Whites”) in the crowd.
Martin Luther King once said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” While we’ve come along way, Barack Obama’s election has taught us that we aren’t there yet. Get ready for 2010.
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God help us all…..
We have our work cut out for us.
willpen
February 28, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Nuts all around. Google “Violent Obama supporters” and see what you come up with.
Reply: There will always be nuts, but the hate against President Obama and African Americans, gays, Jews, etc., is sadly a matter of record in this country. The hate and venom is directed toward them and not Republicans and their supporters. That having been said, violence and hate directed to any person or toward any party is not acceptable.
rjjrdq
March 1, 2009 at 1:47 am
[...] of speech – but should this intolerance be tolerated? A sign was placed inside a general store in Standish, Maine, that read, “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool… Posted in [...]
Is America tearing itself appart? - continued « Gnomestrath - observations on being governed
March 1, 2009 at 3:02 am
So precisely how much of the First Amendment shall we decimate to prevent the above “hate speech” from being expressed? Such laws already exist right next door in Canada and are selectively enforced depending upon the perceived “victim-hood” status of the “target” — or lack thereof. Is that what we seek here in America?
I certainly support appropriate and consistent punishment for acts of genuine violence; laws already exist in America to prevent physical harm from being committed against others. Who would not wish to protect all of our citizens from harm such as Mr. Johnson suffered?
But prevention of “hurt feelings” by intimidating those citizens who engage in idle chatter? I can hear Pandora’s Box creaking not-so-slowly open . . .
I uphold the First Amendment — first, last and always.
Jeff Dreibus
Nebo, NC
[Deleted reference to your blog - please see "comments" above]
Reply: Mr. Dreibus, hate crime laws do not go after “hurt feelings.” In Collin v. Smith, the Seventh Circuit struck down a Village Ordinance in Skokie, Illinois that prohibited public demonstrations that would “incite violence, hatred, abuse or hostility toward a person or group of persons by reason of reference to religious, racial, ethnic, national or regional affiliation.” The statute was passed in order to stop a Nazi parade through Skokie, a Jewish suburb of Chicago that was home to large numbers of Holocaust survivors. The United States Supreme Court stayed a state court injunction, holding that although a Nazi parade would emotionally and mentally upset many Skokie residents, speech which invites dispute and induces “a condition of unrest,” and creates “dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger is among the highest purposes of the First Amendment.”
I don’t think you will see from my post that I urge that Rush Limbaugh’s hate speech from being expressed. To the contrary, I am pointing out that he typically uses his freedom of speech to whip up a base that ultimately may result in violence against others. Rush is all about anger and hate.
As for Palin, Coulter, Malkin and Hannity, they are all about hate as well. The Republicans should trademark it because they have it down. They’re really good at it.
But where did I say that they should not be allowed to speak?
As for your contention that we already have laws to protect victimsof hate crime, I have already addressed that the extant laws are addressed to the individual whereas hate crime laws recognize that the crime had nothing to do with the individual, but rather the group and are designed to instill fear in the larger group. individual crimes such as assault fail to address the larger crime directed at the group.
Capiche?
Jeff Dreibus
March 1, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I just cannot comprehend this mindset.
Part of the problem is that I keep trying to understand, but I have come to realize there is no way to understand– this type of hate is simply irrational.
Free speech is one thing; hate speech is quite another.
To Jeff Dreibus:
You are blind to the suffering being inflicted on others because of their color of their skin. Period.
If you have children, how would you feel if they were targeted on a school bus or on a playground because they are white?
Don’t try to minimize the others suffering at the hands of racist, uneducated haters. You, sir, are the very reason why freedom of speech isn’t freedom to hate and speak to incite others to violence.
Evolve or get left behind.
skyewriter
March 1, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I don’t recall any of those political pundits above inciting violence against another race. Is it peception? Hard to make a law covering that. On the other hand, what Wright, Sharpton, Jackson, Farrakhan and their ilk spew is clearly hate speech. Are they to be muzzled as well? What about anti-abortionists that think the practice is evil? Is that hate? Or Americans that think illegal aliens should be deported? Can you make an argument there? We could go on all day. Where do you draw the line?
Reply: I have given numerous examples of Rush Limbaugh’s racisim on this blog. Here is one example. I have also heard Rush use similar phrases and worse. Because you have not heard it, does not mean that it does not happen.
As for Wright, Sharpton, Jackson, Farrakhan and their ilk, I have heard things from them that i have not liked at all, but I have not heard anything that rises to the level of incitement to violence. That does not mean that they have not said it though. if they have, they should be reported and prosecuted.
I think there is a lot of hate speech about illegal immigrants right now. It should be dealt with under the law. The fact that a lot of that is coming from Republican and/or conservative groups explains why Latinos are leaving the GOP party in droves.
Free speech has limits. It should be limited according to established law. I am not suggesting anything to the contrary. What this post is about is not the lawful limits of free speech, it is about the rise of hate in this country.
rjjrdq
March 1, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I’m an independent. Don’t shovel the Repubs on me. I don’t have representation. You’ve never seen my blog. I’ll tear apart George Bush as fast as Obama. Is saying George Bush is a piece of garbage and should go to prison hate speech? Is calling Obama a fraud hate speech? Any worse than “white heat”?
This discssion is about race, so it won’t end anytime soon. I’ll just say “don’t tread on me”. And those quotes in that “example” you provided have no documentation. I won’t even comment on that.
Reply: 1. “I’m an independent….You’ve never seen my blog.”
Ok, fair enough. I assumed you were Republican. Now you’re wrong. I looked at your blog earlier today.
2. “Is saying George Bush is a piece of garbage and should go to prison hate speech? Is calling Obama a fraud hate speech? Any worse than “white heat”?”
As to Obama and Bush, no. White Heat referred to anger. Your argument was a real stretch because this is way off topic for my post and I never said that.
3. “This discssion is about race, so it won’t end anytime soon. I’ll just say “don’t tread on me”
Agreed it won’t end soon and I don’t follow you as to the latter.
4. “And those quotes in that “example” you provided have no documentation. I won’t even comment on that.”
Fair enough. I could get them, but don’t have time to research it.
rjjrdq
March 1, 2009 at 4:43 pm
It seems that this whole concept of freedom of speech has been haunting me lately.
I am in no way anywhere near a legal mind that can dissect the small nuances of the right to speak freely in this country. However I do know that there is a big difference between me getting angry at any politician and spewing some insult, and someone standing in front of a room full of people and whipping them up into a frenzy. The perfect example of this is someone screaming fire in a crowded movie theater. Does this fall under someone’s right to free speech? How different is this from Rush Limbaugh inciting people with his paranoid rhetoric?
In theory, the right to free speech is a wonderful concept, but like anything else when the human element enters into the picture the whole dynamic changes. There are unfortunately many unstable people out there in this big vast country of ours who are just laying in wait for someone to stand in front of a group of people and verbalize what has been festering in their sick little minds. All it takes is that one person to open that “pandora’s box” for one of many horrible scenarios to unfold.
Reply: Willpen, I am working on that First Amendment post, which was complicated by my travels. It is not uncomplicated.
As for your comments, I agree with you completely.
willpen
March 1, 2009 at 8:03 pm
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March 12, 2009 at 3:33 am