If you don’t believe there is a segment of white America out there that wants to harm soon-to-be president Barack Obama, then you are undoubtedly out of your mind – especially if you are black.
We saw how the floodgates opened during the primary when Hillary and company went “racial” against Obama for votes in a vain attempt to wrest the Democratic Party nomination. Many working-class white folks gravitated to Clinton like bees to a hive, led by older white women.
As with calling hogs, there are verbal signals used to conjure up a groundswell of latent hate. It was the devil that set forth the evil Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade that started it all. That’s how lynching, maiming, rape and all other forms of inhumanity that characterized slavery of black people came about.
I’ll wager that there aren’t many white Americans over 40, given the right approach, who won’t tell how family, friends and neighbors taught manifold hate of black people. They also learned it at school, religious and social institutions, indeed, throughout a vastly segregated Eurocentric (white) culture.
Sen. John S. McCain attended an Episcopalian church and high school in segregated 1950s Virginia before graduating from the then-segregated U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland in 1958.
McCain’s father and grandfather also graduated from the segregated U.S. Naval Academy and both became four-star admirals of the U.S. Navy.
As a naval officer and playboy, McCain spent a few years in segregated Pensacola, Florida. McCain dumped his first wife and settled in Arizona with his very wealthy second wife, Cindy. Remember, as a U.S. senator, McCain came down hard against a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Arizona, stopping it cold for some time.
John McCain is, in heart and soul, a southerner and a conservative. He is of Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish and English ancestry. Members of those groups were deeply involved in the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade, and many owned slaves and plantations throughout the Americas.
And the key reason why McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate is to lead his campaign in conjuring up energy among the evangelical conservative movement that has become the Republican Party base.
With Palin drawing big numbers at rallies from that base, McCain hopes the excitement will spill over and engage other Republicans, Independents and Reagan Democrats, creating the groundswell he thinks he needs to overtake Barack Obama down the stretch.
But what McCain and Palin have actually done is conjure up a lynch-mob energy against Obama, reminiscent of civil rights years gone by, when law-enforcement officers joined or led the rabble against peaceful black citizens who only wanted to exercise their rights under the Constitution of these United States of America.
At a New Mexico rally last week, McCain asked the crowd, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”
While the question did not speak of race or religion, the overlay was quite clear. McCain was obviously stirring up the base to believe that Obama is not really a Christian, but secretly a Muslim, because his father’s family in Kenya is Muslim. So Obama was hiding something, hiding his past.
Couple that with a McCain campaign national TV ad charging that Obama worked with a “terrorist” and lied about the friendship. It’s not true. The man, Bill Ayers, was involved in the Weather
Underground, a radical anti-war group of the 1960s and early ‘70s that advocated violence, including the bombings of the Pentagon and other government buildings. Charges against him were dropped due to an improper FBI surveillance technicality.
At the time of the bombings, Obama was about 8 years old. Ayers is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He, Obama and other leading citizens were active with two highly popular charities.
White nationalists at McCain and Palin rallies are shouting things like “kill him,” in reference to Obama, and there have been other death threats. One black TV network soundman was pelted with a verbal “racial epithet” and screamed at to, “Sit down, boy!”
One woman called Obama an “Arab.” McCain took the microphone from her and told the crowd, “No,’’ and that Obama is a decent man. By week’s end, McCain sensed that things had gotten out of hand.
But now the evil genie is out of the bottle!
Al Calloway • Al_Calloway@Verizon.net
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