Racial ugliness, nationwide

[freespirit]

From taunts to a beating, Obama election spurs "hundreds" of racist threats, crimes nationwide
By JESSE WASHINGTON
AP National Writer


"Someone once said racism is like cancer," Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission."

If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama's victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student's mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: "Whether you like it or not, we're in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision."

Other incidents include:

-Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head." Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

-At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."

-Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

-Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

-University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. "It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork," Houston said.

-Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.

-Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

-A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'

-In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

(The above is a snippet, click link for full article.)



Will this crap fizzle out? Will it get worse? Can we come together and combat this problem head-on, finally?

[Lone Laugher]

Insecure, weak-minded people ( I did not say stupid or ignorant ) have a very strong desire to prove to themselves that they are not at the bottom of the heap. They learn at an early age that a good way to feel good about oneself is to put others down............and since people of different races look different, often speak and act differntly and usually live in different commiunities.......they make a great target.

No matter how insignificant a young white kid is....no matter how inadequate....he can sleep at night without feeling completely worthless.......as long as he knows he is better than "them".

My father was competent in many ways....a good father....a good provider...a loyal husband. He had good friends and interesting ( to him )hobbies. But.....he carried with him racial prejudices until he took his last breath. He had friends who were black" and he "got along fine with the black guys at work" and he loved that George Jefferson. But every now and then he'd offer up a comment or a look of disdain that exposed his insecurity...his need to feel superior. This stuff was all hush-hush.........making it even more of a disgrace in my opinion. It was not drummed into us kids........but it was right there and my two brothers....however intelligent and otherwise good men.....picked it right up.

Somehow...............and I cannot really tell you how.......I came into adulthood with a completely different outlook. I broke a link in the chain.......and my three kids will not carry the burden of this insecurity with them.....nor will their children.

So....will it fizzle out? I suspect it will..............but there are many, many chains left to be broken. In our lifetime? No.

[toolman846]

Not all notions of the worth of others come one's own innate sense of insecurity and weakmindedness. Some people go by the notion that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - IT'S A DUCK!

And I'd love to see your decisions regarding what sections of what cities you might or might not frequent at night - or even during the day. Attitudes and platitudes tend to go by the wayside when your life is at stake. Realism tends to be a very large part of your "logic" at times like those - regardless of what you may publicly tell others, or WISH was true. We all WISH certain things were true, people behaved in certain ways, one could count on the goodness of man, etc., etc., etc. But when push comes to shove, self-preservation provides a different window for reality to be seen through than the one many of us might wish.

At the end of a dark alley, in a dark city, way after dark - you better be packin' - or you're a dead man. And after you're dead, who's left to spread those kind words, huh?

[Lone Laugher]

So....I suppose the primary reason that some parts of some cities are dangerous at night is the race of its inhabitants? Does anything else come to mind? It should.

[gurutoo]

Originally Posted by freespirit

Will this crap fizzle out?

No.

Originally Posted by freespirit

Will it get worse?

Yes, before it gets better.

Originally Posted by freespirit

Can we come together and combat this problem head-on, finally?

Be careful what you ask for.

My personal opinion is that deeply rooted prejudices held by several ethnicities, will bog down the process. I would even go so far as to speculate there will be groups on all sides working feverishly to prevent any such unification as long there is a profit to be made or political power to gain or hold from maintaining the status quo.

Prejudice is something I've witnessed my entire life in every country, state, city, and town I've been. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think prejudice is an integral part of being human.

I won't even address religious issues...

[freespirit]

Jim... I'm... speechless.



Guru... I agree with every word of your post. I hope we are wrong.

[LiberalNation]

The Klan will rise again. The immigration issue and barracks elections has giving them some appeal again in Kentucky.

[ninjalooter1701]

Originally Posted by LiberalNation

The Klan will rise again. The immigration issue and barracks elections has giving them some appeal again in Kentucky.

Oh, joy.

[gurutoo]

Originally Posted by LiberalNation

The Klan will rise again. The immigration issue and barracks elections has giving them some appeal again in Kentucky.

Nah-those days are gone for good - the early Klan had the support of the governor, the mayor, the town sheriff right on down to the local grocer. All had their own hoods.

The only people today stupid enough to even allow themselves to be associated with the Klan were total human wreckage before ever hearing of them. The idiot Klan members you've seen on Jerry Springer and other such TV "journalists" and Geraldo Rivera all the way back to Phil Donahue really were representative of their collective hive minds.

All they preach is hate. There is nothing for the edification of White's in general in their message.

[LiberalNation]

Oh I agree, bunch of idiots spouting off about a new civil war that will never occur. They can still get a small cultfollowing tho. Skinheads are even more popular than the klan with their more violent message.

[Zan de Man]

Prejudice is human, but as it becomes less respectable it is disappearing. It would be stupid for a white person to walk through a black ghetto at night, just as the reverse would be true, but I would have no qualms about being the only white face in the street in Accra or Nairobi. So it isn't black people I'm afraid of; it's cornered people who have turned violent.

In my home country, there are places I wouldn't go, but it might surprise you to know that they're not necessarily those inhabited by the "other side". Kids over there come in two groups: the cornered ones whose parents have incubated the hate in them and the educated ones who no longer seem to give a damn what religion their friends are.

Prejudice can die out.

[gurutoo]

Originally Posted by Zan de Man

Prejudice can die out.

It's gonna be a while...

[Zan de Man]

It is, but it can happen.

[gurutoo]

Originally Posted by Zan de Man

It is, but it can happen.

How old is recorded history 3000 yrs - 5000 yrs?

[suedanim]

I'm just trying to assimilate the hatred coming from the right at the moment. Its wildly over the top and isn't all about just plain old racism. If so, then where the explanation for the absence of hatred for Rice and Powell.

I just wonder if the threats and hatred would be so pronounced if Palin had not taken it upon herself to launch an attack against Obama, Andy Martin and Jerome Corsi had not launched racist attacks calling Obama everything from simple anti-American, black liberation theology (black people are coming to take over the world), Muslim, terrorist sympathizer, then socialist, marxist, communist... Have I left anything out? (oh yeah... Nazi...)

Obama's opponents sought to demonize him and Michelle Obama in pretty much outrageous ways with tenuous linking, guilt by association, but little to any real hardcore evidence of any wrongdoing on his part. So then they resorted to the flag pin..anti-American thing, the mispeaking of 57 instead of 47 states he'd visited and Michelle's comment about the first time she was proud of America.

THIS is where the hate and threats of violence are coming from....and the mainstream media gave the attackers a full and open stage, playing the Paris Hilton video's, the mocking disdain over and over and over again.

I'm not buying its all about the Obama's are black deal. Its more than that...and it came from some down and dirty campaigning whipping the crowds into a frenzy that compelled some to yell "Kill him!" and "terrorist!"...one lady calling Obama and Arab.

Colin Powell nailed it in his endorsement of Obama regarding how public on the right's mindset had been molded and shaped by Obama's opponents. The thing I now find fascinating and waiting for Obama's lead now... is that these same opponents are now sucking up... claiming they wish to work with the now President-elect Obama. While they make their amends, the people they molded are still in frenzied mode.

Somebody needs to calm 'em down.

[freespirit]

Sue... I think you are right about a lot, if not all, of that. But in considering your point about the lack of rage directed at Rice and Powell... it occurred to me that perhaps.. and these leaves such a bad taste in my mouth to say... perhaps they see those 2 as being less of a threat, ie "knowing their place"...? I don't know... I'm trying to assimilate this too. I know racism is a part of it. I also know that if he were a conservative non-lily-white, the amount of vitriol would be less, so politics and the vast (manufactured) left/right divide in the US plays a part as well.

[R Lance]

<<<<<<<<<<< The Klan will rise again.>>

Sadly it has already started to in some areas

[clownboy]

The last remaining racists for life got the message from the Palin ticket and the republicans this time, that it's okay to be a racist in America. That's a message they've been deprived of for some time now (a least from leadership), so they're running with it. They know deep down that this may be their last hurrah.

The good part is that they are revealed and that folks who hear that now in the extreme hold their noses from the smell, the bigots aren't getting as much traction as they expected. Even my ultra right-wing, religious right, anti-Obama friends are now telling me how turned off they are with the republicans' treatment of race this time around.

I can't remember the time when the republicans didn't court the "minority vote". Sure they don't usually get the bulk of it, but they always got some and they always tried. Not this time. They went out of their way to narrow in on the angry white vote exclusively. The whole party followed along with McCain and Palin on that.

[Francois Cellier]

From the Independent

White rage: The rednecks out to kill Obama

When millions watched Barack Obama give his history-making victory speech in Grant Park on election night, one thing stood out starkly – the bulletproof screen surrounding him. But just how serious is the threat of assassination to the President-elect?

By Andrew Gumbel
Sunday, 16 November 2008


Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August, 2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as saying: "No ****** should ever live in the White House.")

And they had at least the outlines of a plan. They checked into the downtown Denver hotel where they believed Barack Obama was staying, and talked about the ways they could try to gun down the Democratic nominee on the day he was due to accept his party's nomination at an outdoor sports arena before an adoring crowd of more than 70,000 people.

Like many assassins before them, both the successful ones and the idle fantasists, Adolf and Gartrell took their inspiration from popular culture. They considered hiding a rifle inside a hollowed out television camera – an idea they borrowed from the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard. (It is also similar to the way al-Qa'eda operatives posing as a news crew assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, on 9 September, 2001, but it is far from clear whether Adolf and Gartrell had any notion of this.)

They toyed with the idea of hitting Obama from as far away as 750 yards, using one of their high-powered rifles; according to their friend Nathan Johnson, who may or may not have been part of the plot, they had in mind the conspiracy theory that President Kennedy was not shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, but rather by professional assassins stationed on the "grassy knoll" above Dallas's Dealey Plaza.

None of these plans was ever remotely realistic, however. Adolf and Gartrell may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence, which disavowed them the moment they were arrested. But they were also rank amateurs living in a crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred. (One can't help thinking Adolf's name went to his head, at least a little, as he fingered the swastika ring on his finger.) They had no clue how to circumvent the security surrounding Obama – prosecutors who examined their plans laughed them off as ludicrously naïve. And they couldn't even figure out what every half-interested member of the press corps knew, that Obama was not staying at the Hyatt Regency, the temporary HQ of the Democratic National Committee, but at a different hotel altogether.

Four days before Obama's acceptance speech, Gartrell was pulled over for drunk-driving in the Denver suburb ' of Aurora after a patrol officer spotted his rented Dodge Ram truck swerving erratically, and the whole plot, such as it was, fell apart almost instantly. Certainly, the officer found plenty inside the truck to sound alarm bells – the two high-powered rifles, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be considered a mobile meth lab.

Gartrell ratted out Johnson and Adolf almost as soon as he was taken in and photographed for his singularly striking mugshot. (With his bleached blonde hair, heavy silver earrings and pierced lip, he looks like the neo-Nazi from central casting.) Johnson was in the room at the Hyatt Regency, and wasted no time in talking himself – insisting he had no idea about any assassination plot while almost simultaneously telling the world Adolf was planning to "go down in a blaze of glory" and take Obama with him.

Adolf was a tougher proposition, the only one of the three with a serious criminal record, including burglary, forgery, drugs and weapons raps. At the time of his arrest he was wanted on eight outstanding charges and had recently skipped out on a $1 million bail payment. He was staying at a different hotel in the Denver suburbs. When the police arrived, he jumped out of his sixth-floor room on to the roof of the hotel kitchen four floors below, then jumped again to the ground, breaking his ankle as he landed. He didn't make it far. He, too, was found to be high on meth. When asked why he was wearing a bulletproof vest, he said he was convinced someone wanted to kill him.

We will no doubt learn more colourful details about the trio of would-be assassins when their trial begins this week. Intriguingly, though, they are being prosecuted on drugs and weapons charges only. Their prosecutor, Troy Eid, has said he is absolutely confident the "meth heads", as he calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.

Not everyone is happy with this decision. After all, marginal people have hatched assassination plots before, and sometimes succeeded – one thinks of John Hinckley hitting President Reagan in 1981. And Barack Obama was never just another presidential contender; as the first African American to come even close to the highest political office on the planet, in a country whose history is spattered with the blood of racial animus, he is, by common consent, a target several orders of magnitude more tempting than the average for an extremist fringe of kooks, crazies, anti-government militia types, Ku Klux Klan members and other white race warriors, all of whom tend to be unforgiving in their ideological fervour, not to mention armed to the teeth.

He was granted 24-hour Secret Service protection just a few months into his campaign, in May 2007, after his friend and fellow Illinois senator, Dick Durbin, raised the alarm on his behalf. (Usually candidates receive that protection far later in the election cycle, after they have their party primaries sewn up.) We don't know exactly how hard the Secret Service has had to work on his behalf, although we do know that two men from the old confederate South – one from North Carolina, the other from Florida – were arrested and charged with making threatening statements against him in July. We know that effigies of Obama being lynched, or sliced through the head with a hatchet, have popped up periodically around the country – one on the campus of the University of Kentucky, another in Orange County, California in the run-up to Halloween.

We also know that Obama's supporters have been almost maniacal in their desire to prevent him sharing the tragic fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. On a couple of occasions during primary season, when security ' guards at Obama campaign events stopped searching people's bags because of the backlog of people trying to get in, sympathetic reporters, bloggers and ordinary members of the public complained as loudly as they knew how. Likewise, when someone at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida in early October reacted to a mention of Obama's name by sh