Those who insist on discussing issues related to racism, sexism, class-ism and other issues are unpopular and are shunned for raising issues that others refuse to talk about, let alone address with action.

Suzanne Brooks, “The Status of Women of Color in the American Political System: 2008,” Guest Commentator, Black Commentator (Issue 296)

You taught the world to hate a whole race of people…

Malcolm X

Some of us meet the Hockey Mom everyday. She’s just people, part of the American fabric. She’s at work; she’s in the neighborhood; she’s someone with the cable company, the phone company, the light and gas company, and she recognizes your voice. She or he (Hockey Dad) is a clerk at the local store or a teacher at your child’s school. She or he is the professor or dean, the doctor, the lawyer - all of whom seem overwhelmed when it’s your time to see them. Hockey Moms or Hockey Dads are liberal and Republican, but when their eyes meet yours, you feel different.

The Hockey Mom running for Vice President on the Republican ticket happens to be among the elite of the ruling class. This one’s connections with the elite of the ruling class brought her to the forefront of American politics. But she is familiar to most of us. We know her.

As the film, No Country for Old Men shows, Anton Chigurh is still on the loose with his non-conventional weaponry. He has a history of violence. Even the well-mannered family man and store owner in A History of Violence has his history of killing. Writers like Cormac McCarthy see America as a “soulless America that is no country for anyone, never mind old men” (Rolling Stones, November 1, 2007). So it seems that those otherwise well-mannered people are appearing at the McMaverick’s and Hockey Mom’s rallies to see their leaders and to imagine the days when burning Black bodies entertained them.

They are coming out.

NPR interviewed people who still know “a lot of good colored people.”

He’s an Arab, isn’t he? And you can imagine: I don’t know exactly who they are since I am an American and couldn’t point out an Arab country. But they are everywhere and even an African American is an Arab!

Besmirch the whole race and culture! What a brilliant example of racial superiority!

Hey shout - he’s a terrorist.

Kill him!

Hundreds of Rensselar County, New York absentee ballots read: McCain and Osama.

Hockey Mom can’t pass up the opportunity to stress Barack Obama’s middle name: Hussein.

Then this Arab terrorist has a Black American wife and two Black little girls.

Play it up - oh so innocently!

A “longtime, high-level Republican fundraiser” in Tampa Florida, writes William March, March on Politics, offered a joke. Schoolchildren are discussing the “definition of ‘tragedy’ as opposed to ‘great loss’ or ‘accident.’”

The punch line comes when one child says that if an airplane carrying Obama and his wife, Michelle, “was struck by a ‘friendly fire’ missile and blown to smithereens,’ the event might be a tragedy ‘because it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.’

I’ll say it again - a white person, experiencing the privilege that comes with his or her race - can’t inform a Black, an Arab, a Latino/a, or a Native American that their experience of racism is not racism! This denouncement is itself racist! This must be understood as a declaration of white supremacy!

Some of us know the violence of narratives that conjure up America’s racial agenda. These “Get the Vote Out” Mc Maverick/Hockey Mom rallies don’t bother to conceal that it’s more than getting the vote out: Bring on the rage, white America! Respond to the outrage of political miscegenation! Incest is all right, Charles Bond tells Henry Sutpen, in William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom! Absalom! “But it’s the miscegenation you can’t bear… [And] Henry doesn’t answer.”

Here comes the Arab, the Black woman - terrorists! Rally the troops!

It’s not like that, you say?

What racial group dominates the ruling class in America? What group of people, like “American people,” controls the economic and security agencies such as the IMF, the CIA, FBI, and the NSA? Who sits at the pinnacle of the American Empire? Americans are first and foremost concerned about race! If nothing else, Mc Maverick and Hockey Mom know America!

Barack Obama positioned himself with the Daley Machine in Chicago after using Blacks on the Southside to get ahead politically. In this presidential race, he’s positioned himself as a centrist, evoking the ghost of Ronald Reagan as someone who has influenced his political perspective. He has former federal chairman Paul Volcker on one side of him and American investor and billionaire Warren Buffet on the other side. How can he fail to be one of the good ole’ boys?

Obama proposes $50 billion dollars to jumpstart the economy and prevent 1 million Americans from losing their jobs. This relief, according to his campaign website, would provide “a $25 billion dollar State Growth Fund to prevent state and local cuts in health, education, housing, and heating assistance or counterproductive increases in property taxes, tolls or fees.” In addition, he proposes a Job and Growth Fund to include a school repair fund. For senior citizens making less than 50,000, Obama proposes the elimination of income taxes. But it’s not about debating these issues, is it? It’s not about eliminating what keeps so many downtrodden or pointing out who controls the means by which others acquire land, housing, jobs, health care, education.

Say this today and say something else tomorrow! Get the votes! Get elected! It’s Obama trying to appeal to the middle class (the poor and low-wage earner is out of luck, again). But look at Obama’s associates? Never mind this silly business about Ayers! Obama’s associates are the mighty warriors of the Empire - not those truly patriotic warriors like Sojourner Truth or Ida B. Wells or Malcolm X!

The gladiator spectacles between Obama and Mc Maverick seek the best man for the Empire’s crown of mightiest warrior!

Obama has to be seen in partnership with “important” people on Wall Street. He has to support the bailout/welfare bill for Wall Street bankers, backers of a racist strategy to keep people of color underfoot. He has supported the Violent Radicalization and Prevention Act that targets Blacks, Latino/as, and immigrants. And for Iranian and Pakistan - air strikes are coming, if he’s president. He’s even wearing his flag pin again! He’s becoming the mightiest warrior!

Is this a portrayal of Black humanity that would confront the issue of killer mentality at the core of America’s foundation?

Offering the sacrificial deaths of more Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Iranians for the Empire doesn’t denote a move toward a just society. Obama can’t stand within the violent narrative and echo the call for air strikes there and not expect those same listeners here to question his sincerity, to question his right to sit in the seat belonging to the mighty warrior class (white male rulers of government and corporations) of America.

But where is the country positioning Barack Obama and his family?

Look to the Mc Maverick/Hockey Mom rallies. Look to the incidents of attacks on Black Americans in the recent weeks. They’ve come out to the Mc Maverick/Hockey Mom rallies shouting: Kill him! Kill the Arab, the Muslim, the Black American! Kill them all!

Why are we surprised?

It’s a call out to all the righteous citizens in a world that has been theirs for the taking, to imagine the unthinkable just as their ancestors had done in the years before the American Revolution, in the 1820s in Virginia, in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, in those years before the Reconstruction, in those years during Jim Crow, and in those years during the Civil Rights era. Now, imagine an even greater threat: Arabs, Muslims, and Black Americans!

The righteous are not limited to the “nuts” or “fundamentalists,” as the narrative would have the American public believe. So many white Americans echo in daily life: It’s not racism. It’s not racism! And with that the collective echo the mighty warriors among them and together they remind us who’s boss!

Think of “crazies” and leave the rest of us to continue to justify and to legitimize white dominance as if it were as normal as the sun rising in the morning. Focus your little minds on these shouting “racists” and leave us to plan our kills and regime changes and maintain the project of Pax Americana. Leave us to save capitalism at your expense, even when it has proven to benefit a mighty few of us. Will Homeland Security investigate this proliferation of a dangerous ideology that services only the white ruling class?

Right, it’s not just Racism! It’s white supremacy! You can’t wake up one day and be absolved of racism in an atmosphere of white supremacy. Racism seeps out every day in every way and you know it if your life is devalued by the continual reiteration everywhere of white privilege.

It’s a collective of silent backers and mighty “Christian” warriors that kills the bodies and spirits of people devalued in the narrative of white supremacy.

The candidate for president with the “dark” skin makes people feel “uncomfortable” and “threatened.” Some of us have heard this time and time again. Recently, a dean informed me that my students are “uncomfortable” and “threatened.”

By what?

Their own fear! It is scary to encounter that part of your imagination where the monster resides. Fear has Americans kicking up an image of Arabs crashing the U.S. border from the East, of Black Americans (a Black woman and a First Lady at that!), rising from within, and of Muslims scrubbing out the word, “God,” and replacing it with Arabic letters spelling out: “Allah”!

What a hellish imagine! It calls for a public prayer among the righteous - or rather a threat - to the god of good, innocent Christians of America. And Reverend Arnold Conrad, at another rally for the “innocent,” mighty warrior, Mc Maverick (who can’t imagine from where these people come!) prays the words Conrad speaks:

I would also pray Lord that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their God -- whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah -- that his [McCain’s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons.

And Lord I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and Election Day.

Save us from the “Mongolians” who threaten our very existence! We rightly MUST have pure white rule - God! As everyone knows, there’s only ONE god, and he’s white with a white beard and looks a lot like the guy Michelangelo painted centuries ago. It’s the same god for many liberals and their children!

Someone needs to tell Rev. Conrad that the massacre of millions of Native Americans, the enslavement of African people, and the theft of resources from Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims paved the way for the “innocent” to sit shocked and stunned by the recent “rise” of hateful language directed at Obama (Black Americans and Muslims) by average white Americans. Fear draws white America together one way or the other while Blacks, Muslims, Native Americans, Latino/as are divided - our bodies separated from our heads.

So they’ll keeping saying “terrorists,” and watch as Americans collectively create an image of others different from themselves, particularly in times of crises when the Emperor is showing that he really hasn’t any narrative covering that isn’t a lie.

And Obama wants to conjure up those “innocent” things he’s learned and that most Americans are finding harder and harder to see: We are all Americans! America is better than this, he says, even while the distinctively Euro-American hang up with racial difference is playing out on a world-wide screen. As Black Commentator Columnist, Tolu Olorunda sums up:

It is no surprise that the same media which revels in the destruction of Black male identity seeks to fulfill the same with today’s most important Black male: Sen. Barack Obama. More disturbing is the reality that Sen. Obama, like prominent Black public figures before him, is too uninformed to acknowledge the degree to which such acquiescence would redound toward the disadvantage of generations to come after him.

Okay.

And so, they come out - outraged and feeling betrayed!

How did it happen? They know! Those doors that opened in the late 1960s and 1970s weren’t closed by them fast enough before the Black, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhists and every other kind of “other” mixed with the “pure.” They know the narrative, so they know.

They know that ultimately it’s their brethren who have been convinced by Obama that he’ll not challenge white supremacy! He’ll not make them feel guilty about the legacy of the slave trade and enslavement. He’ll not speak about the treatment and conditions of Black Americans in the last 40 years. He and his handlers will caution Michelle Obama to keep her feelings to herself. They’ll not have to forego their liberal righteousness at the end of the day. All will be well because he’s come a long way - and therefore, they can believe Black Americans have too.

Ya-Yeah.

Sigh!

Obama will be like Jack Kennedy. Yeah, the days of Camelot may be upon us again. Listen to the “average” white American: It could be just like Jack Kennedy, again…

In America, Anton Chigurh’s cold blues are still searching, seeking targets because he can’t help himself and because he knows he lives in a land where killing rules!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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