White Fear by Roland S. Martin

Author:Roland S. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637740293
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE AUDACITY OF OBAMA

There’s a scene in the movie The Good Shepherd that essentially reimagines the CIA trying to get the mafia to kill Fidel Castro. The mobster played by Joe Pesci says at one point, “We Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?”

Matt Damon’s character replies, “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

If there is any scene in Hollywood history that adequately encapsulates America, it is this one. It sums up the attitude of this nation from its founding to present day.

The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 was clearly a referendum on the audacity of Barack Obama becoming the first Black president. When Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009, he sparked two things throughout the nation—he simultaneously represented the future possibilities of this country and the fear of a changing America.

Just weeks before the 2016 election, a former New Jersey police chief who was on trial for slamming a Black teenager’s head into a doorjamb reportedly called Donald Trump “The last hope for White people.” While this officer was eventually charged with a hate crime, we can clearly see how Donald Trump’s candidacy emboldened White racists to come out of the closet and become dangerously brazen with their actions.

President Obama’s election made a lot of White America wake up to the reality that the country was headed in a new direction and this change was not going to go down easy.

In his book, We Were Eight Years in Power, writer Ta-Nehesi Coates perfectly articulated how Obama appealed to White voters and solidified this comfort in his presidency for two terms:

Although we’re perceived to be different Obama pushed that citizens were connected by a common dream. Obama appealed to a belief in innocence—in particular white innocence—that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding . . . than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. This appeal attracted people because it allowed them to feel that America was good. Entertaining this idea of white innocence was a matter of political survival. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined.

Obama’s successful run and election was a radical juxtaposition to the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Even though his policies and platform were strong, Jesse Jackson was an undeniable threat to White Americans. There were jokes in the Jackson campaign about how low they could cut his hair to make him more appealing to White America. It didn’t matter that he was an ordained minister or that his organizations provided food and economic resources to thousands of people throughout Chicago. White America couldn’t fathom letting him get anywhere near the White House.

When Obama mounted his first campaign nearly twenty years later, this Harvard-educated lawyer with a Princeton-educated wife and two daughters were more palatable to White America.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.