Freedom of Speech by David K. Shipler

Author:David K. Shipler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Limbaugh went on, in a rare violation of the unwritten cultural rule against the word “uppity”: “Obama is uppity, but not as a black. He is an elitist. He does think he’s smarter and better than everybody else. That’s what he was taught. He’s a Harvard man.” Later, Limbaugh also accused Michelle Obama of “uppity-ism” because she flew separately to a vacation in 2011.

Obama’s supposed anger, as one of Limbaugh’s favorite themes, surely strikes the nerve of those listeners who share many whites’ low threshold of tolerance for black men’s rage. “I think he’s motivated by anger,” Limbaugh said of Obama in 2012. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them.” (The “chip” turns up regularly in Limbaugh’s comments.) “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry,” he said in June 2009, four and a half months after Obama’s inauguration. “And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry; he’s going to cut this country down to size. He’s going to make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made—its mistreatment of minorities. I know exactly what’s going on here.” Two years later, Limbaugh predicted racial violence as “part of the program,” saying, “There are going to be race riots, I guarantee.”

To drive home the terror that whites should feel, Limbaugh pictures a vast policy conspiracy driven by black grievances. “Obama has a plan,” he said in January 2012. “Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here.” What’s more, he and Michelle Obama view the presidency “as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking, Well, we deserve this, or we’re owed this because of what’s been done to us and our ancestors.”

Soon after his inauguration in 2009, Obama was branded by Limbaugh as “more African in his roots than he is American.” This implication of “otherness” has animated the right. It recalls the historical ethnocentrism of this land of immigrants, which has marginalized and disqualified one group after another, from one era to the next: Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Latinos, blacks, and on through the phases of decades.

In the case of Obama, born in Hawaii of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, the drive to make him seem part of “them,” not “us,” took several forms: He was falsely portrayed as a “socialist.” He was pictured as threatening the American way by favoring a redistribution of wealth. He was targeted by a disinformation campaign asserting that he was a Muslim. And of course he was dogged by the wacky “birther movement” that questioned his place of birth.

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