There's No Doubt Race Playing a Role in Protests Against President Barack Obama

Another newspaper has joined the fray in stating that much of the uproar against President Barack Obama is race-based. For the record, racism is very personal and subjective and it's often difficult to quantify. It is difficult to define, but most of us know it when we see it or hear it. It is safe to say that depending on our experiences, biases and personal beliefs, it is often seen differently. As someone who was born in Jamaica and spent my formative years there, I had no concept of what racism meant. I grew up with the mindset that I was limited only by my capabilities, not by the color of my skin. Well, I found that the opposite was true in many circles in the United States when I was called a nigger by a white male one night during my undergraduate years at Ohio University in Athens, OH. I began to realize that what occurred in the early 1900s and at the height of the civil rights movement, still persisted in some form to this very day. Former President Jimmy Carter opened a Pandora's box earlier this week with his comments about the treatment of Obama as being racist. He was absolutely correct in his assessment and I wonder why many have taken offense to his position and have dismissed them as baseless whining. Racism plays a prominent role in America's history, that most people would prefer to side-step.

Here's a portion of the article written by Tony Pugh for McClatchy Newspapers.

WASHINGTON — 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...

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.....

Many, however, think that the Republican Party and its supporters, particularly media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have used race most frequently and in the most inflammatory manner to frame their opposition to and displeasure with the president....

(Cartoon appeared in MAARIV, one of Israel's largest newspapers)

The not-so-subtle incidents are numerous:

• Last October, John McCain's campaign ousted a Buchanan County, Va., McCain campaign official, Bobby May, for writing a newspaper column that said that if Obama were elected he'd hire rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black and change the national anthem to the "Negro National Anthem" by James Weldon Johnson.
• Diane Fedele, who was then the president of a Republican women's club in San Bernardino County, Calif., resigned last October after she sent out a newsletter with a drawing of Obama on a bogus food-stamp coupon surrounded by ribs, watermelon and fried chicken.
• In May, Sherri Goforth, an aide to Republican state Sen. Diane Black of Tennessee, sent an e-mail to Republican staffers showing the first 43 U.S. presidents in stately poses, but Obama's image, as the 44th president, was a pair of bright white cartoonish eyes on a black background.
• In June, Diann Jones, the vice chairman of the Collin County Republican Party in Texas sent an e-mail to local Republican clubs calling a proposal for a $50 gun tax "another terrific idea from the black house and its minions."
• Also in June, South Carolina Republican activist Rusty DePass compared an escaped gorilla from a Columbia zoo to first lady Michelle Obama's ancestors.
• At an August political forum, Republican U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas denied any racial intent when she said that the party was looking for a "great white hope" to lead the party into the future. Source: McClatchy Newspapers

I can't remember a president in recent years being subjected to such treatment. This is, indeed, the summer of discontent stemming from the economic quagmire, massive job losses, among other things, with much of that outrage, rightly or wrongly, trained squarely on President Obama. Sorry, but while serious occupational hazard comes with the digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., some of the criticism of President Obama has the unmistakable and undeniable stench of racism.