Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.
I’m coming way late to this story, but Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer I admire and a view I value. I was taken by Coates’ clarity on Morning Edition when host Steve Inskeep interviewed him last week.
Coates continues:
Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation: these bonded white people into a broad aristocracy united by the salient fact of unblackness. What Byrd saw in an integrated military was the crumbling of the ideal of whiteness, and thus the crumbling of an entire society built around it. Whatever the saintly nonviolent rhetoric used to herald it, racial integration was a brutal assault on whiteness. The American presidency, an unbroken streak of nonblack men, was, until 2008, the greatest symbol of that old order.
Watching Obama rack up victories in states like Virginia, New Mexico, Ohio, and North Carolina on Election Night in 2008, anyone could easily conclude that racism, as a national force, had been defeated. The thought should not be easily dismissed: Obama’s victory demonstrates the incredible distance this country has traveled. (Indeed, William F. Buckley Jr. later revised his early positions on race; Robert Byrd spent decades in Congress atoning for his.) That a country that once took whiteness as the foundation of citizenship would elect a black president is a victory. But to view this victory as racism’s defeat is to forget the precise terms on which it was secured, and to ignore the quaking ground beneath Obama’s feet.
In Cuyahoga County, we don’t understand this, but from where I came, rural Washington County in South Eastern, Ohio, we expect it:
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard, is studying how racial animus may have cost Obama votes in 2008. First, Stephens-Davidowitz ranked areas of the country according to how often people there typed racist search terms into Google. (The areas with the highest rates of racially charged search terms were West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, and southern Mississippi.)
Yes, it is possible to equate, with no sense of irony, southern Mississippi (and to not consider that redundant) with eastern Ohio. That is not to suggest that Ohioans along the borders with Pennsylvania and West Virginia are bigoted knuckle-draggers, but it is to recognize that I had a grandfather who was livid when Sammy Davis Jr. was named the best cowboy in Hollywood and spoke with pride — like Sen. Byrd — of being a member of the Klu Klux Klan.
Just yesterday, I received (and posted about, see 12 a.m. on the third day) the reality of this observation:
White resentment has not cooled as the Obama presidency has proceeded. Indeed, the GOP presidential-primary race featured candidates asserting that the black family was better off under slavery (Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum); claiming that Obama, as a black man, should oppose abortion (Santorum again); or denouncing Obama as a “food-stamp president” (Newt Gingrich).
It is also to recognize, however, that men like Jeffrey Woollard live, work and raise families in Washington County or that the gay black partner of one member of my extended family could be a regular participant at holiday celebrations.
