After reading over two posts below on potential obstacles to Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Presidency I couldn’t help but connect two strains of bigotry that might be crossing paths. Chain emails suggesting Obama is secretly a Muslim Manchurian candidate certainly appeal to a uniquely wicked element of the American polity. But I wonder if the surface religious bigotry of the charge against Obama’s religion is really just a PC substitute for a deeper attack against Obama’s race.
It was the German article cited above that made the connection in my mind; why, I wondered, did a German newspaper automatically assume that white American men would be reluctant to vote for an African American when virtually nobody raises that possibility in the American press. Surely, people wonder if Obama is “black enough” on one hand or potentially beholden to black political interests on the other. But that’s different than opposing him simply because he’s black. Yet, it strikes me that the German newspaper might be on to something.
Surely deep-seated racism hasn’t disappeared in America. But it’s much more difficult for racists to openly express their white supremacist sentiments today than in the past – and I say that having lived in East Tennessee and rural Michigan, two places not likely thought of as oases of racial liberalism. So what’s a white person deeply bothered by the thought of looking at a picture of the President of the United States and seeing a black man supposed to say, without openly confessing to his or her racism? Something’s just “not quite right” about him as the President, I’m sure many feel. Alas, Obama’s unusual biography seems to offer fodder. Having attended a majority Muslim school (not a Madrassah) in Indonesia and having a step-father as a Muslim is surely enough evidence to the racist that something’s amiss. Calling him a Muslim is a convenient way to challenge his suitability – or even safety – for the Presidency. But calling him a Muslim also puts him well outside the American mainstream – even more than if he were a Mormon. Muslims are exotic to many white Americans, and so are culturally unfit for the Presidency. Blackness is not exotic in the American cultural context, but it’s certainly alien to the Presidency, as the race of the first 43 Presidents can attest.
I post this mostly as a hunch and a suspicion. It could just be old-fashioned dirty politics. But it’s a particularly virulent form of dirty politics, akin to the charges in South Carolina in 2000 that John McCain fathered a black child (thus reversing the charge in Obama’s case, as McCain’s daughter is Bangladeshi). And it smells of the sort of gutter racist politics that’s dogged America from the beginning. Those uncomfortable with electing a black President thus may find suspicions of his supposed Islamic beliefs more openly acceptable for public discourse, even if equally deplorable.