Fear of a Black President

Last week's AP/Yahoo Stanford University poll's revelations about race in the upcoming elections was bad enough. Surprise: 40 per cent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks. The adjectives used to describe blacks agreed to by many respondents included "boastful," "lazy," "irresponsible," and of course, good old "violent." These widespread attitudes among Democrats and Independents had the potential to cost Obama 6 percentage points. What about the Bradley effect? Apparently, according to analysis of the poll, this was suppressed by virtue of the fact that the poll was conducted via computer, where whites were less inhibited about expressing their true views. Any casual reading of the posts below newspaper stories in many of our great tabloids, including New York's own Daily News and Newsday, reveals a thriving subculture of racist braying. 

              Then there was yesterday's report about the town of Roxbury, New Jersey being blanketed with racist fliers asking the question "Are you ready for a Black President?" Perhaps your initial reaction was something along the lines of, oh well, we've known for quite some time that fringe white supremacist groups have been penetrating eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, and even the Klan has been known to march in Philadelphia. 

               But if you look closely at this story, you'll find that the fliers were distributed by a group called The League of American Patriots, a group that seems to be part of a new brand of post-racial racists that have been trying to mainstream themselves in the manner of so-called racialist expert Jared Taylor. Taylor, who runs an utterly racist site called American Renaissance (check out the ads for books like "The Jena 6 Fraud" and "On Genetic Interests"), is taken so seriously by the mainstream media that he has appeared on CNN and Fox as a legitimate commentator. Even Daily KOS gave him space.

                The League of American Patriots, whose flier asserts that "black ruled nations are the most unstable and violent in the world," and asks why Americans should "allow a black ruler to destroy us," are apparently fans of Taylor, having attended the American Renaissance Conference in February of this year. In a report that appears on their website, American Patriots commented that one of the speakers, Michael Walker "effectively discussed ways in which we can make the nationalist movement more palatable to the masses as opposed to 'appearing like a bunch of angry white men.'" 

                   So far, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. But is this the tip of the proverbial iceberg?