The African World

Race and 2012:

    What Too Few Progressives are Prepared to
    Discuss

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. BlackCommentator.com Editorial
Board 
BC 
May 18, 2011

http://www.blackcommentator.com/427/427_aw_race_and_2012.php

In the context of the criticisms that many of us have
of the Obama administration for what it has not
accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda and
for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the
Republicans, there is something that I have seen few
progressives address. To borrow from a comment offered
by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012
elections are likely to be the most racist that most of
have seen in our life-times. Given this, what are the
implications?

It has been striking that many progressives,
particularly those who have not only written off
President Obama but also written off all those who
offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008,
have said so little about race, racism, and the
discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the
upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the
United States questioned about his citizenship and
birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many
friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly
those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you
put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the
murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was
put in a place where he had to file a petition in order
to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate. The murmurings
do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other
opportunists started asking questions about how it was
that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law
School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten
into those schools), for most of us enough was enough.
Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very
little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the
target but they are attempting to create a white united
front to, in their minds, take back the United States.
Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the
democratically elected President, but it also goes
towards tampering with election laws and voting
processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where
there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are
underway to restrict voting, whether by further
limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day
voter registration, to the demand for picture
identifications at the time of voting, to the
shortening of periods of early voting. The objective is
to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate.
This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately
crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens
through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In
other words, as opposed to a discussion about real
voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000
election, the right-wing uses black and brown
characters as the way of convincing segments of the
white populace that something needs to be done,
otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger
right-wing narrative: the United States of America is
being lost to white people. This has been the core of
the Birther message, but it has also been the core of
the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN,
as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to
overturn voting rights. In its more extreme version it
is the core of the message that comes out of the
fascist and semi-fascist movements among white
nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the
subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60
Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the
period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the
building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the
South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a
frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity
between the black and white poor in the South at the
end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an
agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind
various coded concerns, such as the literacy of the
electorate. African Americans were completely
disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many
poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the
antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives
are discussing the implications of any of this for the
2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me,
are quite profound, and range from what does this mean
about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how
to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by
the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start
yelling that ".Fletcher is covering for Obama.," this
column is about racial politics in the USA. The
particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is
at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more
than the political future of a corporate liberal
president. Silence on the part of progressives in the
face of this situation, despite our own legitimate
criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we
must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this
administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde
domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need
to be discussing how this is done in the context of
fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing
that Obama is an alien and that he [and the changing
demographics of the USA] represents the end of the
white `American Dream.' We should have no illusions
that the Republican candidate for the Presidency,
irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign
on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics
in the fight for power and against the Right, and not
only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it
is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the
real world rather than in one's own playpen.
_____________

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill
Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute
for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of
TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided:
The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward
Social Justice (University of California Press), which
examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.

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