"Socialist" Does Not Start with an N. In the past couple of months, and especially during "Tea Parties" and anti-"Obamacare" demonstrations, a lot of preposterous language has been thrown around. The Radical Right has called President Obama (aloud and on posters in which fotos of various infamous people appear) a "socialist", "communist", "radical", "leftist", "Hitler", "tyrant", "Stalin", "Lenin", and other extravagant and absurd things. None of those words starts with N, but the N-word lies behind them all. Why don't these Rightwing demonstrators just call him a "nigger" and have done with it? That's what it all boils down to, and we all know it. Be forthright. If your racial attitudes are legitimate, so is the word that encapsulates them: NIGGER. We all know that's what you mean.
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We have heard insistence on justice being called "tyranny" before. Here's George Wallace on his inauguration as Governor of Alabama in 1963:

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth [he means "white people"], I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

So we know what you mean when you call Obama a tyrant. Just say it, so we can deal openly with your unease. Yes, some of us on the Left will dismiss you on the absolutely unsympathetic ground that you are just simpleminded bigots who are The Enemy who must be crushed, or at best ignored. Other people will be more understanding. Things have changed, and sometimes big changes are hard to accept and adjust to. Liberals who understand, that change is hard, will reach out to try to assuage anxieties.
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We see plenty of anxieties out there in the crowds of unhappy white people assembled by the Radical Right. They say things like, "We have lost our country" — by which they plainly mean "White America", a United States in which white people ruled governmentally and were at the top of the heap socially.
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I am part of the white portion of the United States, but not of White America. I'm not threatened by Obama's rise to the Presidency. When I was a child, I thought I would/should be President someday myself, but in that I am homosexual, that was even farther out of the picture than becoming the Nation's first black President. Even today, the jivest street nigger feels free to use "faggot" as a putdown for anyone who irritates him. Yup, those damned faggots, with their education and a job, self-respect and internal contentment — they sure do deserve contempt by unemployable ghetto-mentality losers.
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I am still amazed, on occasion, that we have a black President, and it makes me smile, broadly. I'm almost 65 years old. When I was born, the South was segregated. Throughout my childhood, our cities were mainly white. The world heavyweight boxing champion was Rocky Marciano. In my teens, white Northerners who went to the South to register black voters were being killed by the KKK. President Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock. George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama to block 'nigras' from getting into that lily-white institution. Medgar Evers was shot. Then MLK.
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To a lot of people my age, of all colors, the idea of our having a black President seems preposterous. It's like we're in some ridiculous dream. "A black President! Dream on! That will never happen." Remember, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". And the Presidency has a "Whites Only" sign on it.
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When we watch the news and see a competent black man behind a podium with the Presidential Seal on it, we are, nearly 8 months in, still amazed, and so very, very proud of our country for having moved so far on the road to social justice. Maybe we can have an openly homosexual President someday soon. (Now all I need is to win a couple hundred million dollars in the lottery. Stranger things have happened, right? Like a black man becoming President of the United States. You can't get much stranger than that.)
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Millions of other Americans, of my age and younger but of the insecure-whitey variety, are not so much amazed as appalled that we have a black President. And they don't smile broadly when they see Obama standing behind the Presidential Seal.
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The bulk of Americans are very proud of the status that our magnificent society has permitted people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey — and even some black people with normal names! — to achieve. But for some people, no one can rise unless someone else falls. This might be called the "Teeter-Totter View of History" or "of Society". It's not like cream rising to the top of unhomogenized milk, in which each drop of cream melds with all the other drops and the whole quart remains milk. A quick shake of the bottle (with the cap on) will return the cream to a mix with the rest of the milk, and we had that on 9/11/2001. The whole Nation was shaken by the events of that day, and we overcame our differences, briefly.
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The images of black Americans, stunned, staggering down the street covered in white ashes from the World Trade Center, made us all cry (well, all of us with a heart). And they were Us. That 21st Century era of good feeling did not, however, last. For many white people, and not just in the South, blacks are back to being Them again.
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To justify their feeling that They are out to "get" Us, these 'conservative' (reactionary) white people project onto President Obama, as loathsome Fox News drama queen Glenn Beck put it, "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" — that is, half of himself — which they figure Obama must feel, because they feel 'a deep-seated hatred for black people and the black culture'.
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Obama is so 'dangerous', a word you hear over and over from the Radical Right, because he's not a caricature. He speaks perfect (white) English, not Ebonics. He hasn't the scantest trace of a black accent. If you heard him only over the radio or telephone, you wouldn't know he was black. That's dangerous. You might even take him as white and treat him the same as you treat (other) people.
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Obama is educated — Columbia and HARVARD-educated (and his wife is both PRINCETON and Harvard educated). He is likely to inspire millions of young black people to eradicate the black accent they hear around them, in deciding what their own speech, going forward, should be. And then we'll have millions and millions of black people you might mistake for (white) people.
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What are we going to do if all blacks stay in school, become educated, use absolutely standard English, plan for the future, and work diligently toward reasonable goals? One has already become President. "Once you go black, you never go back." It's like Jackie Robinson. Look at sports today! Before you know it, They will take over the whole country, every institution, from politics to finance to education to the military. White people won't be able to compete — because blacks are intrinsically superior to whites? Is that what they're really afraid of? Black men are especially scary because they are reputed to have great big, um, sexual organs, which proves their superiority over white men, right? No, manhood isn't measured in inches.
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They were bred, during the slave era, to produce stronger children, just as horses or dogs were bred for certain preferred characteristics. How are we supposed to compete with eugenically designed reproduction? Well, I don't know how many arranged marriages/breeding couplings there were in the slave era, but that's a very long time ago, and in the several generations since then, no eugenically-intended selective breeding program has been going on. So are you really just worried that white people are inferior generally, and the only way we have achieved anything in the world is by force of arms? Now blacks are being trained in the military to use arms. So they will inevitably turn those arms against their trainers and reduce us to the same inferior condition that they once suffered at our hands — and which Nature consigned us to a long time ago anyway, to boot?
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At end, the people behind the Tea Party protests (which were obviously misnamed and misconceived, because the Boston Tea Party was about "no taxation without representation", and the protesters assuredly have representation in the bodies that decide taxes) and all the rest are not proud of their (white) race and defending against unfairness but actually suspect that they are inferior, and their inferiority is about to come out and consign them and their descendants to social, financial, and political inferiority to the end of time.
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Once Liberals understand "where these people are coming from", as we used to say in the Sixties, we can address their anxieties and apply rationality. There is one human species, which is everywhere roughly identical in natural abilities of all kinds. What makes for different levels of accomplishment are various factors, key among which is motivation. Given the same advantages and the same motivation, levels of achievement among races are not noticeably different. Blacks may dominate boxing at the moment, but only because whites don't feel that getting your face battered and your brain jangled is a good way to make money or seek fame. Blacks may seek out a career in professional sports because that doesn't require an advanced degree that they can't afford to pursue. In some cases, they can go directly from high school to pro sports, music, or other industries that pay well, without delaying several years and incurring vast debt for college loans. Economic inequities have pointed a larger proportion of blacks in some directions and whites in others.
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We can deal with the root causes of the irrational and exaggerated fear that motivates the rage against all things Obama. But first the anti-Obama activists must admit what they really fear. The (white) people so upset with President Obama need to heed Dr. Phil's fourth Life Law, "You cannot change what you do not acknowledge." They must as well consider this discussion of Life Law #9 from that same good old Southern boy (who has some brains and an education): "There is power in forgiveness."

Hate, anger and resentment are destructive, eating away at the heart and soul of the person who carries them. They are absolutely incompatible with your own peace, joy and relaxation. Ugly emotions change who you are and contaminate every relationship you have. They can also take a physical toll on your body, including sleep disturbance, headaches, back spasms, and even heart attacks. * * *

Forgiveness is not about another person who has transgressed against you; it is about you. Forgiveness is about doing whatever it takes to preserve the power to create your own emotional state. It is a gift to yourself and it frees you. You don't have to have the other person's cooperation, and they do not have to be sorry or admit the error of their ways. Do it for yourself.

Do it for the Nation.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:57 PM