Fifty shades of black

There are people who oppose Obama purely because of his politics. It’s not about race with them.
There are people who oppose Obama purely because of his race. There’s nothing he does that will get them past the fact he’s a black guy.
This post is looking at some of the ones in-between. People for whom race is an issue, without being as outright filled with hate as the KKK. This is largely a subjective list: I don’t have statistics or interviews to back up my analysis, only my assessment of human nature.
•Clueless and unthinking.
A couple of years back, a doctor parodied Obama by photoshopping him as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose. More recently a woman used a photo of a chimpanzee as a photo for Obama. Both play on racial stereotypes, but both people insisted they weren’t trying to be racist.
They may have been lying. Or they may just have dug into the kind of images that have been around for years without thinking twice. Which is not an excuse (any more than writing blacks as stereotyped gangstas is excusable because the writer didn’t “mean” to employ racist stereotypes), but it is possible.
•Nostalgia.
As I’ve noted before, some whites, even if they don’t have hostility toward minorities, miss the days when being white gave you a big advantage—not that it’s gone, but society doesn’t openly endorse white guys getting all the nice things any more. For some whites, Obama is a reminder (to paraphrase Pat Buchanan) that they used to own the country and now they don’t.
•Blacks are different.
The mere fact that a black man does something gives it an overtone that doesn’t exist when whites do it. Take the oh-so-controversial Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons about America were such a shocking issue in 2008 (and for some people still). I don’t recall conservatives (or even most liberals) raising as much fuss about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both of whom said America deserved the 9/11 attacks (and who play a much larger role in Republican politics than Wright has ever played in Obama’s administration). Because when a black guy condemns America it presses a whole different set of buttons.
Likewise, we have the proclamations by Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich that Obama is “anti colonial” which ought to be a plus for any American president, surely. But because his alleged anti-colonialism is African animus to white colonialism … okay, I still don’t see why that’s objectionable (as an Englishman, I think Africa has every right to be pissed-off about European colonialism if it chooses), but it’s only race that makes it sound so to anyone.
•Lying shits.
This refers to the large number of pundits and politicians who play the racial issue without believing a word of it: They just want to whip up those who do.
In fairness, some pundits are sincerely bigoted: ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire made no bones about being a bigot and a homophobe (though he insisted he was a “tolerant” one)—plus, of course, a sexist. But I suspect other writers who discuss how blacks are on the brink of rising up if Obama doesn’t get re-elected, or how Obama is coordinating black riots or how he’s clearly biased against whites are just lying because they know there are readers who want their biases reaffirmed. Though as with the clueless ones, that’s not an excuse: If you choose to spread hate and bigotry, it doesn’t matter whether you have it in your heart or not.
None of this is meant as an excuse in fact. It’s just that there’s some shade of difference between people with racial issues and people who really hate. And it’s worth keeping in mind.