But a scar is healed and I think racism has left a much deeper and more recent wound than Palin might want us to believe.
I still remember the Willy Horton ads and Florida 2000 and Georgia any-year-you-care-to-name (where voters in black precincts are much less likely to have their votes counted). In the country we live in, where African American unemployment is double that of whites, where you are much more likely to be in poverty if you are black than white and where public services that disproportionately help black citizens are being cut to finance tax cuts that disproportionately go to wealthy white citizens, this issue is not going to go away any time soon.
Certainly not if white agitators such as Andrew Breitbart go out of their way to try to discredit African American organizations such as Acorn or the NAACP.
It is true that despite the fears of many whites interviewed prior to the election and of Glenn Beck since, President Obama has not advanced a "black nationalist" agenda. There has been no move for reparations or more aggressive affirmative action programs. If anything, he has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he is not racially biased, even rushing to fire Shirley Sherrod, the African American Agriculture employee whose father, incidentally, had been murdered by a white farmer.
McCain's 2000 primary run was torpedoed by a successful push polling campaign, probably launched by the Bush campaign, that asked South Carolina voters if they would vote for a man who had a "love child" with an African American woman. When they said no, they asked the voters to observe McCain's family closely. (He has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, I believe.) The fact is that ugly campaign worked, and that was only 10 years ago.
I disagree that racism is not a factor in the attempt to "get" President Obama if for no reason that Beck, a telepundit on the most watched "news" network said so, calling a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
When armed white men from the south showed up to shout down town hall meetings to discuss ways of insuring our children, saying they wanted "their country back" the echoes to the segregationist standoff of a generation earlier are hard to overlook. In both cases, you had a predominantly white, rural population feeling it was being victimized by an overreaching federal government that was presuming to tell them through "activist courts" "legislating from the bench" how to run "their" communities (never mind that in many cases half of their communities were non-white).
When Sarah Palin was asked to name a Supreme Court decision she felt represented an overreaching federal government or judicial activism, she of course drew a blank. One possible explanation is that she really didn't know (most likely).
But another more disturbing possibility is that she did, but did not want to say it: Brown v. Board of Education. Perhaps even she appreciated that if what she was really calling for was a return to the days of the Thurmond segregationist platform (what another Republican, Trent Lott, recently referred to wistfully as something that might have avoided all that trouble over all those years), that voters would consider that too radical. But giving a nudge-nudge, wink-wink nod then playing dumb may have been a much safer strategy (just as she quoted Reagan in his ad campaign against the great evil of Medicare during the debates without identifying either speaker or issue (knowing probably that many of us would go dig it up on her own)).
It is correct that I have not faulted or credited Bush or Clinton for the color of their skin. There is frankly nothing remarkable about another white male president in a country that has only - until 2008 - elected white male presidents.
The election of an African American president, on the other hand, receiving more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, in a country that is only about 15% African American is absolutely remarkable, noteworthy, and a reason to be proud. We went from being a country literally founded on the backs of slaves to one in which a man whose parents' marriage would have been illegal in many states when he was born became president.
When I see an articulate, thoughtful president who has committed no crime and whose policies are centrist to a fault being called (by white commentators) everything from a racist to a Maoist to a Muslim to a non-American to a Marxist, the burden is on those who come up with these ridiculous charges (charges not leveled against any white president) to prove they are not racist. When someone responds with antipathy way out of proportion to any available information, then some other, unstated factor must be at play. It's possible it's his tone of voice, his maddeningly calm manner, or his ability to sink a 3-pointer (nothing but net) while soldiers and journalists look on. Possible, but I don't think it's likely.
Those who hate President Obama generally have consistently hated him before he even had a chance to do anything to allow them to rationalize their rage.
Those who claim they are mad, mad, mad because of healthcare reform ignore the fact that they were almost all on camera being mad, mad, mad before healthcare reform was even a twinkling in Congress's eye.
Those who claim they are furious about the Wall Street bailout and stimulus plan have to explain why their fury was so remarkably absent when a white man occupied the oval office (and started both policies).
Those who claim they want to see yet another birth certificate have to explain why such a bizarre request (most of us do not have multiple birth certificates and the state of Hawaii has been more than generous at putting this matter to rest long ago when Obama filed his candidacy) was never made to a white president. Isn't foreign just another code word for Other, for Not Like Us?
Even if Sarah Palin is not personally racist (I just think she's relatively oblivious to the suffering of African Americans since she comes from a state with so few (3.5%) and where all the white residents receive welfare payments just for living in Alaska), I'm sure she understands that many of her supporters are, just as Reagan knew damn well what crowd he was playing to when he used the term "welfare queen" over and over again in campaign speeches.
The fact is that we are not over our past because our present still needs a lot of work. Sarah Palin says these are scars, but I think they are partially healed but infected wounds.
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