An Uncomfortable Truth

by Stephen A. Jones
October 30, 2009

When former President Jimmy Carter said the most extreme attacks on President Barack Obama were rooted in racism, he ignited a firestorm of debate.

Media pundits fought over whether Carter was right — often distorting his words in the process. Journalists sought to put Obama on the spot, demanding to know whether he considered his opponents racist. Wisely, Obama did not take the bait, shrugging off the controversy with a quip to David Letterman that he’d actually been black before he was elected president. He sought to defuse the issue with humor so it would not distract America’s attention from health care reform.

The issue has faded in recent weeks because of newer hot issues like Balloon Boy and the breathtaking cupidity (and stupidity) of Wall Street executives. But Americans would do well to take to heart the uncomfortable truth that Carter had the audacity to utter.

Are all of those who oppose Obama — on health care reform or any other issue — opposing him out of racism? Of course not. But then, that isn’t what Carter said.

You might be excused for thinking that he did, given the sound-bite mentality of the media debate. Conservatives accused Carter of smearing all of Obama’s critics. But look at Carter’s actual words:

“When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds. … I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American.”

Notice, he’s referring to a “radical fringe” of protesters who took part in the rally in Washington on September 12. Despite all the paranoid quailing about incipient socialism, many of the people at that rally had at least understandable concerns about the potential of excessive government or the budgetary implications of particular health care proposals.

Carter’s critics were arguing, absurdly, that since most of the protesters were not motivated by racism, racism was not involved at all. How, then, to explain the woman with the sign: “The zoo has an African lion; the White House has a lyin’ African”? Or the sign that used Obama’s name as an acronym for “Oppressive, Bloodsucking, Arrogant, Muslim, Alien”?

Maybe just a handful of wing nuts at the fringe of a huge crowd, you say. All right. But what, then, should we make of the former mayor of Los Alamitos, California, who resigned early this year after he distributed via e-mail an image of the White House lawn planted with watermelons, under the caption “No Easter egg hunt this year”? Or the now-famous New York Post cartoon that showed police remarking, after shooting a crazed chimp, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”? Or the widely distributed anti-health care reform image showing Obama as an African witch doctor, complete with a bone through his nose?

Well, you might reply, how is that different from the vicious attacks that were heaped upon George W. Bush? He got portrayed as Hitler, too, and even received some boos during one of his speeches to Congress.

Reasonable point, though it seems pretty obvious to me that heckling the president by calling him a liar goes at least a step or two beyond the generalized negative response that Bush got. And it must be admitted that we have a history of intense and mean-spirited political discourse in this country.

Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “Daisy” ad that sought to portray Barry Goldwater as a nuclear lunatic was so over-the-top that it was only broadcast once in the 1964 election campaign. Abraham Lincoln’s foes disparaged him as “Abraham Africanus the First” after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and they even invented the word miscegenation for a series of pamphlets and cartoons asserting that Lincoln’s policy was aimed at promoting interracial sex.

So Americans do tend to be pretty rough on their presidents — of all political stripes. But I never saw even the meanest attacks on Bush resort to racial stereotypes like monkeys, watermelons and witch doctors. That’s what makes the most extreme of the attacks against Obama — the ones that Carter was talking about — racist.

What is confounding to me is that anyone considers Carter’s critique surprising or inaccurate.

Perhaps some of the anger directed toward Carter is Americans’ displaced irritation at being disabused of a cherished illusion. It was just a year ago, in the warm afterglow of Obama’s election victory, that some were proclaiming — with straight faces — that we had been transported into a new era, a post-racial America. It should be abundantly clear by now that that is not the case.

The evidence is everywhere, as if the examples above are not enough. It is in the Louisiana justice of the peace who refused, a few weeks ago, to give a marriage license to an interracial couple and then had the nerve to declare, “I’m not racist.” It is in Rush Limbaugh’s gleeful playing of “Barack the Magic Negro,” a song parody by a white comedian imitating Al Sharpton’s voice. It is in the Confederate battle flag that shows up with pernicious regularity on bumper stickers, and even on banners flown from pickup trucks at college football tailgating parties (in Michigan).

Whatever else that flag may represent to some people, as an artifact of history it represents, first and foremost, the defense of two things — treason and slavery. “But wait,” some will cry, “the Confederates would have been considered patriots — like Washington, Jefferson and Adams — if they had won the war, and they were defending states’ rights.” True enough, but they lost the war. And the states’ right they were fighting for was the right to preserve a barbaric system of human slavery.

So before you dismiss Jimmy Carter’s assertion that the extreme critics of Obama are influenced by racism, do two things. First, spend a week paying attention to the cars and pickups you pass on the road to count how many times you see the Stars and Bars.

And second, contemplate the fact that when he was a state senator, Joe “You Lie” Wilson cast one of seven votes against removing the Confederate flag from the pole atop the South Carolina Capitol.

The real question isn’t whether Carter was right. It’s when will we stop hiding from the truth so we can do something to change it?

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).