The Water Line Keeps Rising, And All We’re Doing Is Standing There
by Erin Aubry Kaplan
Worst thing first: the loosely confederated but commonly paranoid, almost proudly malevolent anti-America forces that pass for a conservative movement in this country is about two seconds away from calling our shining President Obama a nigger.
But that’s not the worst thing—actually, it may be best thing.
My husband is an American history teacher who’s been arguing for years that the racism that’s supposed to be such a thing of the national past has always stewed just below our surface, give or take an inch or two. The virulent resistance to Obama’s health-care reform efforts—and increasingly to Obama himself-- exposes this inconvenient truth more effectively than any argument that my husband or anybody else could make.
The big conservative march on Washington this past weekend paraded a grab-bag of grievances that all reduced down to one thing: Obama is an Other who doesn’t think like Us.I wish this was so much political theater staged solely for the benefit of Fox News, et al, but I’m afraid it’s more than that. How else is it possible that the very centrist senator from Illinois, momentarily demonized as a liberal, was very quickly made into a socialist/fascist dictator with an oily smile and even oilier words who was trying to sneak Big Brother government past the loyal watchdogs of liberty and individual rights?
For many true and overwhelmingly white believers, Obama is Hitler meets the mythical black trickster Br’er Rabbit, a dread colored Communist who must be kept from power at all costs, because of course Negroes were most in need of social and economic redress, and must always be barred from the inner sanctums of capitalism.Electing Obama was one thing, realizing we all must now follow the path he defines, whether we like it or agree with it or not, is entirely another.
The panic is setting in. Even the white folks who voted for him are rethinking their position, wondering seven months into this experiment if it was such a good idea.
It reminds me of a dynamic that black people know all too well—you get hired for a job in a burst of white generosity, but as soon as the going gets tough, you’re the first to be let go. Except that in the case of the President, he can’t be fired, at least not right away. So a certain segment of the population, including certain members of Congress, are trying to neutralize Obama with panic and character assassination.
I should have known this was coming, and I did. But I’m disheartened nonetheless.
I hardly agree with all that Obama’s doing, starting with ramping up the war in Afghanistan; I’m one of those disaffected progressives that he still calls friends. But to see him not even being treated like a president, when so much unearned respect was accorded George W. Bush for so long, is painful. It’s personal.
And it’s not just Republicans and conservatives colluding on the diss, it’s Obama’s fellow weak-kneed Democrats who either are blue dogs or who have no stomach for racial matters, and therefore say nothing; in not regularly calling out the bullshit of the opposition, they are standing with them.
Alas, President Obama looks as isolated right now as black people in high places have always been—isolation is the price of their success. The irony is that a president is elected to lead, not to be the prominent but innocuous face of affirmative action.
That’s the change Obama assumed came with the mandate of his election.
He was wrong.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and on the blog 3 Brothers and A Sister. Among her many projects, Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.