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Fighting Hate --- Teaching Tolerance --- Seeking Justice
By Morris Dees, Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center
Guest Column
Right-wing pundits are jumping all over Attorney General
Eric Holder for daring to suggest on Sunday that “racial
animus” plays a role in the “level of vehemence” that’s been
directed at President Obama. They’re denouncing him for
“playing the race card” and “stoking racial divisions.”
Who do they think they’re fooling?
The rhetoric is what’s hateful. Calling people out for it is
not.
The racism Holder described has been obvious since the 2008
campaign, when Obama was portrayed as someone who was not a
“real American” – a Muslim, a Kenyan, a communist, even a
terrorist sympathizer.
Since then, an entire movement has been built around the
thoroughly discredited notion that the president’s birth
certificate is a fake. And that’s just the beginning.
Newt Gingrich has called Obama the “food stamp president”
and referred to his “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”
Rush Limbaugh has said Obama – and Oprah Winfrey, too, by
the way – have reached the pinnacle of their professions
only because they’re black. He added this week that
“so-called conservative media types” praised Holder’s
nomination only because he’s black.
Glenn Beck has said the president, whose mother was white,
has a “deep-seated hatred for white people, or white
culture.”
Conservative hero and former rock star Ted Nugent, who was
invited to campaign with the GOP nominee for Texas governor,
called the president a “subhuman mongrel.”
A Confederate flag was waved in front of the White House
during last year’s “Million Vet March.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina screamed “You lie!”
during the president’s address to Congress in September
2009. When has that happened to a president before?
All manner of overtly racist posters have been seen at Tea
Party rallies, including one depicting the president as a
“witch doctor.”
We’ve repeatedly seen stories about conservative politicians
sharing racist jokes about Obama.
And, we’ve seen an
explosive growth of radical-right groups,
including armed militias, since Obama was elected, and
repeated threats that violence is needed to “take our
country back” from the “tyranny” of Obama. This is part of a
backlash to the growing diversity in our country, as
symbolized by the presence of a black man in the White
House.
I grew up in rural Alabama during the Jim Crow years and
lived through the civil rights movement, when white
supremacists did everything they could, including committing
violent atrocities, to turn back the tide of progress. And
I’ve stared across the courtroom at some of America’s most
vicious hatemongers – men like neo-Nazi Glenn
Frazier Cross,
who recently killed three people and once targeted me. I
know racism when I see it.
No one, of course, is suggesting that merely disagreeing
with Obama is evidence of racism. That’s clearly not true.
But we have a political party and a right-wing media machine
that pander incessantly to the racist reactionaries in our
society, often through code words. It’s been going on since
Nixon implemented his “Southern strategy” of appealing to
white resentment in the wake of the civil rights movement.
I wish it weren’t so. But it is simply undeniable. We should
call it what it is.
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