No, White People, it IS About Race!

Hatin' On the President is Driven by More than the Health Care Debate

By MAS Freedom Civil and Human Rights Director, Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey

First it was the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, in his own home, at the hands of an irate white Cambridge Massachusetts police officer. Our nation's first Black President jumped into the fray and took more than a little heat from white journalists and politicos alike, when he characterized the actions of the arresting cop as "stupid" and did an about-face damage control maneuver by inviting the officer and the professor to join him over a few beers in the White House garden.

Now, and arguably more seriously, politicians, prevaricators, and pundits alike, and even a former American President, are stirring the cauldron of race in the aftermath of the boorishly vulgar remark of "liar" that spat from the lips of one Joe Wilson – an otherwise undistinguished Republican congressman from South Carolina – where, apparently, some of the good citizens have yet to realize which side did, indeed, lose the Civil War.

All of this has led to some visible shifting of the tectonic plates of American racial discourse. Black folks (and apparently, most Democrats as well), were mortified to hear the President of the United States shouted at as a "liar" in the middle of an important speech to a joint session of the United States Congress. And Conservatives, nearly all of them white (with a few colored folks thrown in the mix for their amusement), are rallying around the good South Carolina Congressman as if he were he were some modern incarnation of Patrick Henry.

Give me liberty, or give me thinly-disguised racial animosity fronting as "free speech".

But this incident is more than an apparent breech of political etiquette in Washington, D.C., a town for dainty dialogue between the contending parties.

Neither is it some random verbal outburst that can be forgotten after the apology that President Obama got from the offender.

It is, in my view, symptomatic of not only a deep racial division, but a malignant racial animus that still simmers in the melting pot of U.S. culture.

As Black folks have known all along, former President Jimmy Carter, himself a Southerner, was right on point when he mentioned the deep resentment that Obama stirs up in the hearts of many European- Americans.

Consider the constant vilification of Obama as a "Nazi", or a "Communist", or someone with a deep-seeded hatred of white people (the last accusation, from Right-wing media talkster Glen Beck being totally baffling in light of the racial identity of the President's late mother).

Add to that the "Birthers" who assert that Obama is not really an American citizen at all, and the weapons that frequently appear in public when the President appears before not-so-friendly public gatherings, and you get the impression that all of this goes beyond legitimate political disagreement over health care issues.

This is, straight up, about hatred, and a particularly toxic strain of that old American virus that evidenced in the political and social corpus of the nation.

It even has an effect of the "responsible public opinion leaders" who claim-falsely, in my opinion, that their anti-Obama positions are not motivated by racism.

Just a few weeks ago, the hate-spewing Washington Examiner ran a cartoon that depicted a gigantic eared caricature of the President, dressed in a while lab coat, calling one of his opponents a "Nazi" in full view of a medical diploma earned from "Karl Marx University".

Of course, Black folks know that even the most egregiously obvious white racists would never refer to themselves at that. In fact, it's much more strategically suitable for many whites to pretend that they have no fear or dislike of a Black President (or in the immortal words of Public Enemy, fear of a Black planet). Their frequent claim is simply that Obama, as a "liberal", is simply too far to the political Left for their liking.

The freedom of political association, and the right of dissent, should be sacrosanct privileges in this, and any, democratic form of government.

Not all disagreements with current administration policies are rooted in racism, of course, and Congressman Wilson has every right to disagree with President Obama's policies, even if his positions seem to be influenced by notions of racial (and class) privilege.(Wilson, for the record, supported the movement to keep the Confederate battle flag on the South Carolina state flag.).

But the Joe Wilson incident should be a wake-up call to white people and people of color alike.

It speaks volumes to the sad reality that racially fueled animosity in public life is very much with us. It is fed by both unchanged notions of white superiority and the concomitant fear of real black authority and political power.

President Obama would, I believe, wish that this weren't true, because he has an abiding, optimistic belief, in the inherent goodness of America. But it is also worth noting that Congressman Wilson has received, as a reward for his boorish and imprudent public remark, more than a million dollars (and counting) in new campaign donations and pledges, presumably from the folk who share his sentiment about President Obama

We may wish that this situation were otherwise, and that political disagreements – even heated ones – are driven by things other than color privilege, hatred, and prejudice. But Mr. Wilson represents haters, not political dissidents. And we should all be wise enough, and vigilant enough, to understand the dangerous reality of race in America.

Racism has not been swept away because some white people are in denial of it. It is all too real, and it is being galvanized by the election of a Black man to the office of the Presidency of the country. And anyone who grew up in the segregated South, as I did, clearly understands that some white people don't have to resort to using the "N" word in public to demonstrate that they regard you that way.

"Anti-Identity" Politics and the Hypocrisy of the Radical Right

By Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey

It has been fashionable for Rush Limbaugh and other pundits of the political far Right to brand Supreme Court nominee Sonia Maria Sotomayor, a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as a "racist" and purveyor of "Identity Politics" based on a public remark that she made some years ago. Judge Sotomayor's statement, in essence, compared her experiences as a Latina raised in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx with the experiences of her white counterparts in the judiciary.

In essence, Judge Sotomayor noted that a "wise Latina" could make better judicial decisions than a person who lacked her depth of diverse racial, ethnic, and class experiences in the social melting pot of America. The remark was followed by a clarification and quasi-retraction from Judge Sotomayor and President Barack Obama, both of whom stated that the "choice of words" was unfortunate.

There is little doubt that any person nominated by President Obama to the Supreme Court would be anathema to the Rush Limbaugh crowd. The political dividing line between conservatives and liberals – or reactionaries and progressives – is a deep and contentious one. And, as most of us know, the Right is in no mood for conciliation or cordiality after their decisive defeat in the presidential election of 2008.

But to call Judge Sotomayor a functionary of "Identity Politics" – that is, the advocacy of race and ethnicity as central factors in the work of promoting justice – is both an outrage and an act of profound hypocrisy.

The real "identity politics" in the American judicial system is a racist and xenophobic trademark of the radical Right.

For the record, I'm sure that Judge Sotomayor will make a good, and possibly brilliant, addition to the Supreme Court. She is a totally qualified, experienced, and thoughtful jurist with first-class intellectual credentials.

The Puerto Rican people, Latinos, women, and all persons who love justice should be delighted with Judge Sotomayor's nomination.

That said; let us not forget that the American justice system is, sadly, still riddled with the contradictions of racism and Xenophobia. All too often, as we saw in the recent trials of the Holy Land Foundation defendants and Dr. Sami Al-Arian, juries are quite willing to ignore substantial exculpatory evidence, or to substitute real facts with testimonies from "secret" witnesses in their rush to convict defendants based more on political associations than on any evidence of criminal conduct.

The "identity politics" of racial and religious discrimination also holds true for Naji Hamdan, a Muslim-American citizen who has endured a nine-month imprisonment and been subjected to torturous interrogations in the United Arab Emirates because of U.S. complicity in his arrest.

Identity politics hold equally true for possibly hundreds of innocent Muslim men victimized by torture, abuse, and false imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, and in countless secret American prisons worldwide.

The identity of being Muslim, especially in this time of war being waged in Muslim lands, is sufficient (for both juries and zealous prosecutors) creates the presumption of guilt before the bar of justice, even when the empirical evidence of innocence is clear and overwhelming.

Identity politics is, indeed, alive and well in America, but don't blame Judge Sotomayor; it is not she who is racist. The racism, and politics of racial and religious identity, is manifested by the same people who gave us torture rendition, illegal government surveillance, and the support for the violence and injustice that frames both U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world, and all too often, Islamophobia in the American court system.