By

Dr. Sherman N. Miller

12/1/2007

As the 2008 Presidential primary season starts to move into the hands of the voters, it is time to look at some antics that racist goons are exploiting to influence the outcome of the elections. I was chatting with two white college professors at a Pennsylvania institution, one male and one female, when the male stunned us by sharing a story of blatant racism perpetrated against a white supporter of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy in the Florida panhandle.

The male professor said his sister was driving her car when she suddenly found herself being forced off the highway by a white good ol’ boy in a pickup truck. His sister wanted to know why this good ol’ boy ran her off the road, so she challenged him to come up with an explanation for making her flirt with death. The good ol’ boy replied she was displaying an Obama sticker on her car.

Then the good ol’ boy attempted to rattle this lady’s nerves by making her understand that this was not an isolated incident. He told her that she could expect more harassment once he shared with his good ol’ boy buddies that she had this Obama sticker on her car.

The professor says that some people think that the Florida panhandle is like southern Alabama in its racial tolerance, so racial prejudice is still very alive in the 21th Century. What was very disquieting in this chat was to think that this professor’s sister could lose her life over some racists violating her civil right to support whatever presidential candidate she desires.

I advanced that this sort of overt racism was hearing death rattles because interracial marriages and relationships are starting to put fissures in yesteryear’s racist safe haven enclaves where using racial slurs is the norm. Television star Duane "Dog" Chapman The Bounty Hunter learned this lesson well when he used the N…. word to characterize his son’s girlfriend, and his son exposed this overt racism using a recording of him.

Reuters reported in a November 8, 2007 article, Bounty Hunter "Dog" still loves son who sold him out that suggested that racists safe havens are no longer safe. "Cable channel A&E took the popular show, "Dog the Bounty Hunter," off its schedule for the foreseeable future after a private phone call in which Chapman used an offensive term to describe his son's black girlfriend hit the Internet."

I was discussing this Dog the Bounty Hunter incident with another white male college professor at a Pennsylvania Shop and Bag supermarket on November 29, 2007 when I got floored a second time. This white male college professor shared that his institution was trying to recover from a guest speaker proclaiming that "the solution to the national education crisis is to get rid of the Jews." I said perhaps this speaker is a Nazi!

However, the A & E decision makes it clear that the airways will not be used as a platform to perpetuate yesteryears’ abuse of the media in vilifying African Americans. The A & E action tends to rectify partially the atrocious precedent set by D.W. Griffith’s movie "The Birth of a Nation" that was a Ku Klux Klan propaganda film. The original name of the movie was, "The Clansman."

Mark Calney, writing in the American Almanac, "D. W. Griffith and ‘The Birth of A Monster’ How The Confederacy Revived The KKK and Created Hollywood," shares how the movie "The Birth of A Nation" offered legitimacy to white racist antics against black males. Black males are depicted as lusting after white women and hurting poor whites while the Ku Klux Klan is the savior of the ill-treated and downtrodden whites.

"So, on February 18, 1915, ‘The Clansman’ became the first motion picture ever to be shown in the White House. The audience in the East Room included President [Woodrow] Wilson and his family, members of his staff and Cabinet, along with their wives. Wilson’s comment, after viewing the film was: ‘It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.’"

Perhaps the white good ol’ boy thinks that images of a white daring to support a black candidate for President of the United States of America is a clear affront to the anti-black sentiment D. W. Griffith legitimated as white southern canon. The white good ol’ boys may feel that any white displaying campaign slogans of a black running for president are committing racial treason or nativistic heresy.

Senator Obama is a worst case scenario for these white supremacists for he is the product of a black father and a white mother. The good ol’ boys may reason that there is no way they will allow a mongrel to become president, so it is okay to terrorize white Obama supporters as N…. lovers who are working against the interests of White America. Yet I am puzzled as how these white good ol’ boys might think that Senator Obama would ignore the needs of his mother’s white family as this lady gave birth to him and her parentage is also his.

It will be interesting to see if a few family member revelations on the racist antics of good ol’ boys who may harbor disdain for African American citizens seeking public office lead to some public embarrassments of closet racists. On the other hand, overt racism may cost some of yesteryear’s indoctrinated racists some serious time in prison for hate crimes once their racist tricks come to light. The million dollar difficulty for today’s white racist becomes, "Whom can I trust with hearing my white supremacy values without my statements and pictures finding their way to the Internet?"