What if Obama’s Mother Was Still Alive?

QUESTION: Does anger toward the Obama administration reflect racism and anxiety about the nation’s first African-American president?

ANSWER: It depends on who you ask.

GLENN BECK:

[Obama] is a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture. He is a racist.

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER:

… racism still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.

DAVID BROOKS:

… race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.” What might those be? “The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

Let me pick on David Brooks first (despite the fact that he endeared himself to me by stating that sociology is more important than fitness – you go, David!). According to Brooks, we are witnessing an age-old “urbanism, industrialism, and federal power” versus “small-town virtues and limited government.” But these dichotomies are just too neat. Brooks equates “urbanism, industrialism, and federal power” with “fat cats and the educated class.” Yet George W. Bush clearly sided with the “fat cats,” and despite his Cs at Yale and his amazing ability to mangle the English language, the former president hales from a long-line of highly-educated, Northeastern elites. He also used federal power to quash civil liberties in unprecedented ways. But somehow, his administration never evoked the kind of hostility that Obama’s has.

Nonetheless, there are many reasons for anger at the current administration. While ordinary Americans are facing job losses, home foreclosures, and declines in home equity and 401(k)s, they’ve watched helplessly as Wall Street received a bailout, financial markets remain unregulated, and consumer protections fail to keep pace. Seniors are angered by talk of health care reforms that depend on savings in Medicare, and the concerns of millions of young people who mobilized to elect Obama have largely been ignored.

Let’s return to my original question. What about racism? Despite the dismissive attitude expressed by some progressives towards Jimmy Carter, they agree that the former president has a point. Although outright hatred for black people has greatly diminished in the U.S., racism still exists in institutional practices, stereotypes, personal bias, and just plain naivite – and there’s still outright bigotry and hatred. Jimmy Carter is right that racial prejudice is hardly confined to the South.

Barely mentioned in all this is the fact that President Obama’s mother was a white woman from Kansas. It’s as if we’ve returned to the one drop of blood rule, whereby any person in the U.S. who has a black ancestor is “black.” Somehow, the fact that Obama is “half white” has been completely ignored.

My question is this: would the debate be different if Obama’s white mother were still alive? Just imagine how the vilification of Obama as a BLACK MAN might differ if his white mother was cheering for him in the stands. Her presence would complicate the whole notion of the first black president. In fact, Barack Obama is not our first black president, he’s actually our first bi-racial president or our first multi-racial president. Perhaps that’s what scares many white folks more than anything.