The backlash against Obama's blackness

From Arizona to Ground Zero via birthers, the Republicans are riding a wave of white resentment. It's reckless and frightening

Dan Kennedy
The Guardian (UK)

The August madness into which America has descended is about several things. It's about the still-sputtering economy, of course, and the fear it engenders. It's about xenophobia, never far below the surface. And it's about a rightwing media-political complex that plays on the public's ignorance.

But there's a unifying theme that few wish to acknowledge. What we are witnessing at the moment is the full, ugly furore of white backlash, aimed directly and indirectly at our first black president.

The case was made, inadvertently, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last week by Republican congressman-turned-lobbyist Dick Armey, the godfather of what might be called the Tea Party movement's corporate wing. Armey and his co-author, Matt Kibbe, proudly dated the birth of the Tea Party to 9 February 2009.

Barack Obama's $800m stimulus bill was not approved until three days later. Which is my point. The most notorious political movement of the Obama era, grounded in racial fears if not flat-out racism, sprung into being within weeks of Obama's inauguration, before he'd had a chance to do anything, really. If Obama was for it, they were against it.

(More here.)