Was it something I said?

Early last week I posted a brief blog noting the appearance of those “Obama Socialism” posters, in which the president's face is made up to resemble Heath Ledger's Joker character from The Dark Knight. That Batman-film derived image had been Photoshopped by Firas Khateeb, but up until July hadn't appeared as any sort of guerilla art. When the picture was first reported as having been pasted on Los Angeles freeway structures (the public gallery of choice for street artists and taggers) it generated a firestorm of controversy. The outrage extended to L.A. Daily, which received more than 120,000 hits within the week on this subject – a high number for a short post on an alternative newspaper blog. I was soon on the receiving end of hundreds of comments to L.A. Daily – for days my Inbox was chiming every few seconds.

The outrage wasn't about the poster's content — most of the

comments were attacks on me for saying the image appealed to

conservatives: I didn't have a sense of humor; I was rubbing people's

faces in race when race had nothing to do with the poster; I had said

nothing when the L.A. Weekly featured a cover image of George

W. Bush with vampire fangs, etc. The most interesting aspect of this is

how often anti-Obama commentators accused me and anyone else whose

remarks displeased them as playing some kind of race card. In fact, all

I did was accurately point out that Obama was in white face. True, my

description of the poster ended with, “All that's missing is a noose.”

However – to use the thinking of the anti-Obama crowd – my crack about

the missing noose didn't necessarily refer to this country's history of

lynching blacks. It could have simply implied a Blue State desire to

see the president strung up – metaphorically, of course.

To be honest, though, I do believe the poster appeals to people who

see in it a validation of their own racial prejudices, even if they

can't acknowledge them. That my short post hit such a deep, raw nerve

clearly shows that race was very much part of the illustration's

attraction. Denials that the poster has any racial overtones join that

endless parade of self-deluding apologies and clarifications presented

by Republicans about the Birth of a Nation imagery they've been employing ever since Obama ran for president.

There was the president of the Inland Republicans women's group who

sent out a newsletter featuring a “food stamp” depicting, as the Riverside Press-Enterprise said,

“Obama's head on a donkey's body surrounded by a bucket of KFC chicken,

a slice of watermelon, a slab of barbecued ribs and a pitcher of

Kool-Aid.” (A tableau, ironically, that was originally created by a

Democrat to illustrate Republicans' malarial fears of a black

president.) Then there were the ubiquitous No Easter Egg Hunt This Year

e-mail card showing the White House lawn as a field of watermelons. And

who can ever forget Rush Limbaugh's favorite ditty, “Barack the Magic

Negro”?

More recently, in the immediate wake of the Henry Louis Gates

dustup, Boston cop Justin Barrett sent out a mass email in which he

described the Harvard professor as a “banana-eating jungle monkey.”

Barrett, of course, later claimed he didn't intend for the imagery to

be taken in a racist way. You really don't know which is the scarier

prospect: That he is glibly lying, or that he honestly believes this.

Barrett managed, however, to get defensive about the outrage his email

unleashed: “People are making it about race,” said Barrett. “It is not

about race.”

No, dude, it's all about race. Racial anxiety and racism are social

pathologies that adapt to changing conditions and evolve over time.

Conservatives don't burn crosses at their rallies – contemporary

political theater and its language have moved on with the times. Still,

I remember that even back in the days when cross burnings were in vogue

— and when it seemed that civil rights workers were being killed every

month in the Deep South — even then you would rarely find a

segregationist proclaiming, on television at least, that he was a

racist and believed blacks were inferior. Instead, the racist argument

was usually couched in terms of “state's rights,” “mutual benefits,” of

how Negroes themselves didn't want race-mixing, that they were

basically good, hard-working people who were being duped by Communists.

Kelefa Sanneh recently noted in the New Yorker

that “to some Americans 'racism' doesn't mean what it used to.” He

meant that a popular definition of racism no longer describes the

unemotional systemic discrimination against blacks, but to the “reverse

racism” commonly referenced by rightwing pundits alluding to the mere

dislike of whites by individual blacks.

The truth, again, is that the fears of the art lovers who champion

the Obama Socialism poster are all about race – about losing their skin

privileges, about the possible airing of old crimes and grievances

committed against blacks. How else can you explain the mad surge to buy

guns, to deny Obama's American birth, the teary prediction that the

White House is ordering up concentration camps, and the rock-solid

belief that Obama's lab-coated bureaucrats are coming to kill our

grandmas? Who's the real Joker here? And whose deck is that race card

being played from?

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