Alt-America. David Neiwert
new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected,” Black said. “White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we’ve lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it’s bringing them over to our side.”
Mainstream conservatives chose to race-bait more subtly, through the use of “dog whistles”—code words that race-baiting politicians and pundits use to refer to red-meat issues for the rabid right, audible only to those who have ears already attuned to the frequency. Conservative pundits in short order began referring to Obama by his middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness and also to create an association with the Iraqi dictator American forces had not so long ago toppled. Rush Limbaugh ran a ditty with the title “Barack the Magic Negro,” whose lyrics suggested his entire candidacy was built on a foundation of white guilt. In the Washington Times, the columnist Steve Sailer, who has often espoused eugenicist ideas, wrote, “While some whites envisage Mr. Obama as the Cure for White Guilt, blacks are in no hurry to grant the white race absolution for slavery and Jim Crow, since they benefit from compensatory programs like affirmative action.” In their eyes, Obama’s candidacy was all about race—and for the duration, that’s all it ever would be.
At mainstream news websites, things quickly became ugly. CBS. com had to shut down comments on any Obama story on its website because the stories inevitably attracted vicious race-baiters and death threats. In real life, matters were even worse; Obama’s campaign attracted so many threats he was assigned a Secret Service detail earlier in the campaign than any other candidate in history.
The intensity of the racial and ethnic animus directed at Obama picked up after he secured the Democratic Party nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, on August 28. An early warning sign that this might occur came on August 24, one day before the convention, when three men who turned out to have white-supremacist backgrounds were arrested in a nearby suburb for allegedly plotting to assassinate Obama (in the end no charges were brought).
Obama’s nomination probably influenced the outcome of the Republican National Convention, which took place a few days later in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the ensuing campaign. The Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, selected as his running mate Alaska’s governor Sarah Palin, a populist bomb thrower popular with the religious right. Palin now entered the national stage as America’s newest right-wing heroine. Upon hitting the hustings the week after the convention, Palin began lobbing rhetorical grenades in Obama’s direction, accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” a reference to his association with William Ayers, a onetime Weather Underground leader. She also emphasized that the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain—and herself, of course—was that they, being good Republicans, preferred to campaign in “pro-American places.” She didn’t hold back on rabble-rousing red meat meant to emphasize Obama’s foreignness and his supposed radicalism.
And the crowds responded, shouting out “terrorist” in reference to Obama and, at one rally, “Kill him!” in reference to Ayers. An Al-Jazeera camera crew caught the honest sentiments of many McCain-Palin supporters as they were leaving an Ohio rally—that Obama was anti-white, that he was a terrorist, or, more basically, that he was a black man:
“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”
“When you got a Negra running for president, you need a first stringer. [McCain’s] definitely a second stringer.”
“He seems like a sheep—or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to be honest with you. And I believe Palin—she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”
“He’s related to a known terrorist.”
“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”
“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda—a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but … I dunno, it’s just kinda … a little unnerving.”
“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”
“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash … because we’re not!”
Such sentiments weren’t unique to Ohio. In Las Vegas, the videographer Matt Toplikar interviewed McCain-Palin supporters as they left a Palin rally. One camouflage-capped fellow captured the spirit of the event, declaring, “Obama wins, I’m gonna move to Alaska. Haven’t you ever heard that the United States is gonna be taken down from within?” he continued. “What better way to get taken down from within than having the president of the United States be the one that’s going to do it?”
Another man warned, “Don’t be afraid of me! Be afraid of Obama! Obama bin Laden, that’s what you should be afraid of!” When accused of being a racist, he responded, “Yes, I am a racist. If you consider me a racist, well [unintelligible]. Those Arabs are dirt-bags. They’re dirty people, they hate Americans, they hate my kids, they hate my grandkids.”
On Election Day, 2008, much of the nation celebrated the election of the first African American to the country’s highest office. John McCain’s supporters naturally felt the usual loser’s bitterness and disappointment.
For many Americans, however—especially those who had opposed Obama on racial grounds—the reaction went well beyond despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it, or thought they knew it.
So maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that they responded to that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American right.
In Texas, students at Baylor University in Waco discovered a noose hanging from a tree on campus the evening of Election Day. At a site nearby angry Republican students had gathered a bunch of Obama yard signs and burned them in a big bonfire. That evening, a riot nearly broke out when Obama supporters, chanting the new president’s name, were confronted by white students outside a residence hall who told them: “Any nigger who walks by Penland [Hall], we’re going to kick their ass, we’re going to jump him.” The Obama supporters stopped and responded, “Excuse me?” Somehow they managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.
On the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, some students spent Election Night spray-painting graffiti messages such as “Let’s shoot that Nigger in the head” and “Hang Obama by a Noose.” The university administration protected the students’ identities and refused to take any legal action against them or discipline them in any way.
But such student antics were just a warm-up. On Staten Island, New York, on Election Night, four young white men “decided to go after black people” in retaliation for Obama’s election. First they drove to the mostly black Park Hill neighborhood and assaulted a Liberian immigrant, beating him with a metal pipe and a police baton, in addition to the usual blows from fists and feet. Then they drove to Port Richmond and assaulted another black man and verbally threatened a Latino man and a group of black people. They finished up the night by driving alongside a man walking home from his job as a Rite Aid manager and trying to club him with the police baton. Instead, they hit him with their car, throwing him off the windshield and into a coma for over a month. The last victim was a white man. All four men wound up convicted of hate crimes and spent the duration of Obama’s first term in prison.
There were cross burnings and even arson. The morning after the election, in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, a black man taking his eight-year-old daughter to school emerged from his front door to discover that someone had burned a six-foot-tall cross on his lawn—right next to the man’s banner declaring Obama president. That had been torched too.
Another cross was burned on the lawn of the only black man in tiny Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania, the night after the election. A black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground the night of the election;