A Response to Keli Goff's Article, "Is Racism Actually Worse in the Age of Obama?"

The substance of Keli Goff's HuffPo article of September 26, 2011 is that at the present time, she and other African Americans are often confronted with what critic Toure calls "the unknowable" – a sense that one is being treated differently and not quite appropriately due to race, but one that is not backable with hard proof because, obviously, the other party isn't going to 'fess up to any misdeeds or bad intentions or bias, etc.  I think the point is that while this sort of thing ranges from the silly to the serious (like losing out on a good job or not getting a home loan), the nagging suspicion it engenders takes a toll on a person's well-being.

I'd suggest that we (including our assumptions and sensibilities) are more or less a product of the generation or two preceding us.  I have some affinity with the WWII / Depression generation – probably more affinity than I feel with my own – because of the stories and insights my parents passed on to me.  Both of them were products of those times.  I'm not African American or any other ethnic minority, so I don't experience the contemporary racial "unknowable" that the writer references to Toure – i.e. "am I really being treated differently in this instance, or am I making unfair assumptions about others?"  But it's perfectly reasonable, I think, to feel this way – if you're black, you're dealing not only with the present (which may well hit you with racist moments of its own, and ambiguous or ambivalent moments that are impossible to decide and make you feel sort of like Larry David in one of those ridiculous "WTF" situations he gets into on Curb Your Enthusiasm) but also with the blatant and dreadful insults and material injuries that may be part of your family's past and that is definitely part of black people's collective past.  We most certainly do not live in a post-racial society, and the past is still embedded in present consciousness to some extent.

The Obama presidency has really called out the full-on racists from under whatever rock they'd been hiding for a few decades, and on rare occasions when I allow myself to read a major newspaper comments section, it's pretty clear that these guys spend ALL their time tapping out racist garbage on their keyboards at five in the morning.  They hate Obama for so many manufactured unreasons that they've lost count of them.  Apparently, it's hard to keep track of all the people feeding us our unreasons these days.  Blink, and we miss ten of them….  But seriously, one can only hope that this kind of blatant, open contempt for a president of African descent marks the last gasp of the Old White Guard: you know how it goes – progress always calls forth a backlash, just as MLK Jr. would tell you.  Only when certain people feel threatened do they get downright ugly, and when they do, you know you're making progress.  The Obama presidency has been painful at times because of the vileness of the opposition, but who really should have thought it wouldn't be?  A smooth ride was never in the cards.

But here's a thought – a conservative columnist in one of the papers I occasionally read seems quite taken with President Obama's gaffes – stuff like "the intercontinental railroad" (I actually like that one!  All aboard the Kansas City to London Express!) and other verbal slipups that most presidents make simply because they have to go around the country talking a lot.  Someone might say, "liberals made fun of GWB's silly remarks and Reagan's fact-challenged gems, so how's this different?"  They have a point.  But still, what I take to be the disrespectful manner of the columnist in question makes me suspicious, and perhaps this feeling approximates an instance of what Keli Goff and Toure would call an "unknowable," even though I'm not African American and don't experience the full force of what they're talking about.  Might there be some hint, in other words, of playing to those who just can't abide the president's skin color and consider it high time that we take all that power out of his supposedly incapable black hands and give it back to a white guy where it belongs?  Maybe even to a white guy who drips with ignorant scorn for the scientific method and has no idea how a modern economy works?  In sum, I think a fair amount of the criticism launched against the current president is a product of racial contempt, acknowledged or otherwise.  Not all of it, of course, but enough to deserve serious consideration.