Sometime during the first Obama administration, I was sitting at a bar on St. Simons with a friend when the proprietor came up to chat and said \u201csomeone ought to shoot him!\u201d I was startled but then realized he was talking about the president. I vividly remember that at the time I thought how awful that someone would say that. It struck me as being not only impolitic but also blatantly racist. But I bit my tongue and didn\u2019t say anything.<\/p>\n
Just recently, almost eight years later, I had a similar experience. This time I asked a friend if he was going to vote for Trump again. My thought was that he might have buyer\u2019s remorse in view of Trump\u2019s record. His immediate response, however, was to suggest that one certainly would not want to vote for Kamala. From there things got testy and acrimonious. At worst, I was being impolite, as he contended, and, at best, I was terribly naive as I saw it.<\/p>\n
Part of the tragedy is that the people in question are decent fellows who either don\u2019t fully realize their own motivations or they can\u2019t honestly acknowledge them. To suggest that their feelings might be racist would elicit resentful denials and maybe talking points from Fox news in defense. What puzzles me is that these guys should know better, but they end up unwittingly supporting the likes of white supremacists, unscrupulous politicians and hopeless bigots whom they would denounce.<\/p>\n
Ever since the remark about Obama, I\u2019ve felt guilty that I didn\u2019t speak up. Did my silence make me complicit in the person\u2019s racism? In the second case I was wrong in thinking my friend\u2019s virtues might prevail over his politics. In retrospect, I probably was wrong in both cases, but where does one draw the line?<\/p>\n
The fact is that racism in politics works and has been used by both parties in the past. The Republicans have especially been adept at using race to curry favor since the Nixon years. Presently, Republicans are running ads depicting immigrants as murderers and rapists reminiscent of the Willie Horton ad that was used so effectively by George H. Bush in 1988. Trump\u2019s recent taunt about Kamala Harris just recently becoming Black refers to more than her alleged opportunism, it is a dog whistle to remind his voters that she is a Black woman.<\/p>\n
The ugly truth is that many White Americans can\u2019t bring themselves to vote for Black Americans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometime during the first Obama administration, I was sitting at a bar on St. Simons with a friend when the proprietor came up to chat and said \u201csomeone ought to shoot him!\u201d I was startled but then realized he was talking about the president. I vividly remember that at the time I thought how awful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\n