I’ve written about racial animus toward our first black president many times, and I can’t let a situation which took place this past week go by without saying something about it.
On Wednesday, as Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch reported it, “a small group of right-wing demonstrators gathered in front of the White House at a rally scheduled to coincide with the visit of a number of sheriffs who were in Washington, D.C., to protest President Obama’s executive action on immigration.”
One activist spoke to some of these “good old boys” who expressed a desire to lynch President Obama, and it was all captured on film, including the punishment for high treason: “death by hanging.”
Some of the other “gems” you will hear are:
“Hang the traitor!”
“Hang the lying Kenyan traitor!”
“We’ve got rope.”
“Plenty of trees in the front yard, wouldn’t be the first one hung on one of them trees.”
“Whatever happened to those good ol’ days?”
“Don’t snap his neck, you watch him choke to death.”
“He’s just biding his time until Satan takes him home to where he belongs.”
This isn’t the first call for a lynching. Back in January, as RMuse reported here, “a racist conservative Facebook group, “America the next generation,” created a photo-shopped image of President Barack Obama with a hangman’s noose around his neck that represents the group’s racist hatred of the President” and called it “The Making of a National Holiday.” Facebook, of course, originally claimed that wanting to lynch our first black president wasn’t offensive in any way, shape, or form.
In October of last year, Rep. Larry Pittman of North Carolina told a “joke” about Obama being a traitor from Kenya. When the Freedom and Faith Coalition got together in D.C. to hold their Road to Majority conference, somebody threw a plastic Obama figurine in the urinal so folks could show Obama how trickle-down really works.
You might compare this to how liberals felt about George W. Bush – and some conservatives have – except for the fact that former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh got upset that a radio station wouldn’t let him use the N-word, and Republican North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis says white folks are the only “traditional” Americans, and hell, even Santa and Jesus are white, right Megyn Kelly?
I mean, not like Native Americans, who were here first, and especially not like black folks.
Liberals hated Bush because he was a criminal, not because he is white. On the other hand, Republicans have sometimes not even tried to hide the racial animus behind their hatred of President Obama.
Based on things conservatives have said, this is more or less how their thinking goes:
“I mean, we did them a big favor and all by making them slaves (for which they haven’t properly thanked us, by the way) but they’re not, you know, “real” Americans.”
No, it takes a well-armed white man like Cliven Bundy to know all about the “negro.” Or Rush Limbaugh, who says blacks should just get over having been oppressed already and that whites shouldn’t feel bad about slavery, even as he is complaining that the GOP is not racist enough toward the president.
As Rush’s words, the ones coming out of his other mouth prove, blacks are still being oppressed.
Republicans keep telling us we live in a post-racial country even as the racial epithets fly.
You remember this tweet from the RNC sent out last year at this time, right?
Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism. pic.twitter.com/uxIj1QmtkU
— RNC (@GOP) December 1, 2013
Except racism didn’t end in 1955. Why, if racism ended and you are black, must you “assume the position”? A subsequent tweet attempting to clarify the message just served to make Republicans look even more foolish.
As did Rick Perry’s “pre glasses make me look smart” claim that there is no racism in America’s justice system. No Rick, we can certainly see that in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Eric Garner. No racism at all.
They react with violent hostility to any suggestion that anything they have said is racist in any way. I mean, look at how those nice white folks in Rosebud, Missouri, greeted the Ferguson protestors, with fried chicken and Confederate flags. Which, at least – however repugnant – was less violent than the murderous greeting promised by the KKK.
And I can’t imagine any racial animus was behind the desire of Open Carry Texas – the same folks who say demanding ID from a white man is a felony but gunning down black men is not – to march through a black neighborhood in Houston! Dear me, no.
And if there is racism, they are the victims and they blame Obama. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) pointed to an imaginary “war on whites,” saying Obama “divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.” Right-wing extremist Mychal Massie took it a step further when he accused Obama of being the racist – even as he called him a “spade.”
Yeah, it must be Obama who is to blame for racism. The man is black, after all. It’s all his fault. And according to Massie, if you weren’t in “in a terminal state of denial based on an Erebusic (primordial darkness) ideology, and color of skin,” you’d see it too!
Of course, a panel on CBS’s Face the Nation has debunked that claim but then look at all the panels that have debunked repeating right wing claims that anthropogenic global warming is not taking place.
They’ll be denying global warming even as rising sea waters are lapping around their necks, a sort of self-lynching, if you want to look at it that way.
Racism is alive and well in America and the justice system is anything but fair. The GOP is Racist to its unreconstructed neo-Confederate core. It is proven again and again to be true.
Republicans claim they are persecuted, but that is only because we don’t let them get away with their racist rhetoric, with their desire to make anyone who isn’t white enough assume the position so they can show us all just how manly they really are.
And that includes a bunch of good old boys reliving the “good old days” as they talk about lynching the black guy down the street who is where he doesn’t belong.
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