Why whites hate obama

She's seen social media posts where whites declare that Michelle Obama is a man or that Muslims will take over unless Trump is elected. It's an insult to the office of the Presidency. One black scholar says even Obama was thrown by the reception that greeted him when he became president. It may be hard to remember now, but Obama wasn't actually considered the first black president -- Bill Clinton nabbed that honor.

Obama wasn't a beloved figure in the black community when he first ran for the presidency. Civil rights leaders were slow to warm to him. Others said he wasn't black enough. His mixed-race heritage, exotic upbringing overseas and professorial Ivy League persona didn't fit the traditional black leader mold. Some black intellectuals said Obama wasn't even African-American because his father was from the east African nation of Kenya.

Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves," Debra J. Dickerson wrote in a column for Salon magazine. If Obama wasn't black then, he sure is now -- because he's been treated with such racial contempt, some blacks say. Obama also dropped plenty of cues during his presidency to let blacks know he was part of their tribe.

At a meeting of black journalists, Obama caused his audience to erupt in laughter when he said:. But you guys keep on asking whether I'm black enough. So, I figured I'd stroll in about 10 minutes after the deadline. There were other black-bonding moments: Obama going falsetto to sing a verse from Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" at the Apollo Theater; breaking into "Amazing Grace" at the eulogy for victims of the Charleston massacre; his love of NBA basketball and hip-hop music.

Some blacks now see themselves in Obama's stride. He doesn't walk with the stiff, chest-thrust-outward, buttocks-clenched-tight stroll of some white politicians. He struts. Michelle Obama calls her husband's walk "swagalicious. He once tweeted that the way Obama exited Air Force One, "hopping and bobbing," was inelegant and unpresidential.

Now, though, black pride in Obama is turning into something else: relief at seeing him go. There were constant worries Obama would not physically survive, a grim thought most preferred to keep to themselves.

When he's gone, that anger just doesn't go away. What has gone away in the black community are questions about Obama's identity. Go inside many black homes and you'll see the president's picture in the living room right next to a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. No one is really asking if Obama is black enough anymore. Is America some fragile thing?

What some people are asking, though, is what happens after Obama's presidency ends. Will the racial divisions of his era continue? Many of the groups Trump targets are members of what one political scientist called " The Coalition of the Ascendant " -- racial minorities, millennials, liberal whites. And there are signs that they, too, are angry. A record number of Latinos are registering to vote in some states. Exit polls have found Asian voters shifting increasingly toward the Democratic Party over the last two decades.

A majority voted for Republican George H. Is MLK's greatest victory being undone? If blacks saw the rebirth of Jim Crow under Obama, some Latinos saw a rebirth of "Juan Crow" -- the denigration of Latino people and systematic attempts to stifle their political power, says Francisco Ramos, who manages graduate programs at Duke University and writes about multiculturalism and the politics of identity. Ramos says he knows some Latinos who have been Republican since the s but may never vote Republican again.

I don't think so. Some now wonder if there is room for them in America's future. Coleman, who works at the Oklahoma nonprofit, says it seemed like the nation had turned a corner when Obama was elected.

Now she wonders if that corner led to a dead end. I believe in God. The group may feel that attacks on Obama are onslaughts to the manhood virtue of the race itself, and manhood remains a sensitive and potent issue for blacks, who still generally feel that their men are more at risk than their women. As Obama is the first black president, and as blacks who overwhelmingly supported him are highly invested in his success, they are strongly inclined to be piqued by attacks, while also proud of his ability to withstand the attacks, proud of his being in the arena where such attacks are made.

This is the tension of what I call post-racial racialism: blacks want Obama or any prominent black person of achievement to receive special treatment because he is black, and they expect such achievement to be lionized not merely as exemplary but as heroic; on the other hand, they do not want the achievement of any prominent black to be diminished or dismissed, somehow qualified or patronized, because of race or any special consideration given to it.

So the brutal give-and-take of partisan politics, which blacks know well enough, in this instance makes them uneasy. Bush used against Michael Dukakis in ; many remember the racist affirmative action ads Jesse Helms used against black challenger Harvey Gantt in North Carolina. Beating Hillary Clinton and John McCain, two highly experienced white politicians, in the arena of political debate and exchange was probably what made blacks feel most proud of Obama.

Others feel that the whites who do not like Obama use their harsh criticism of him to take racist potshots at the group as a whole through him. Besides, many blacks feel that they should defend Obama as vigorously as most conservatives defended Bush. If your opponents consider ideological loyalty a virtue for their side, why is it not a virtue for you as well? The second anxiety is related to the group of whites with whom African Americans generally align themselves politically. This political alignment is one reason why whites who hate Obama call him elitist, because they feel that the group of whites who back him are, by and large, elitist; they also feel that whites who support Obama treat blacks as favored pets while disdaining other whites who are not supporters.

After all, these liberal, educated whites took to Obama largely because they felt they were dealing with one of their own: someone who went to their schools, read their kind of books, had their kind of habits, spoke their language. Obama impressed even upper-class conservatives such as David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, and Peggy Noonan for the same reasons.

Lower-class whites have always been jealous of this alignment as a violation of white racial solidarity and because the blacks seemed to be rising at their expense. One of the most remarkable racist allegories of this situation I describe is the series of Frankenstein movies made by Universal Studios in the s and early s. Doctor Frankenstein and his colleagues all represent the upper-class whites — scientific, rational, liberal, seeking new knowledge and wanting to overturn the old ways.

The violent monster is the African American, the botched experiment of breathing new life into a dead people, of resurrecting them through science and rationality. Through the sheer will of a liberal vision, Frankenstein thought that he could create a being equal to those around him, that he could fabricate or engineer an equal being from the bits and pieces of bodies.

The villagers are the lower-class whites — superstitious, fearful, and jealous of the monster, resentful of the better-off whites who scorn them as backward simpletons. And in virtually every Frankenstein movie, the villagers, with their torches, shotguns, and pitchforks, destroy Frankenstein and his monster.

In this fevered vision, no one is admirable; no one has the moral high ground, although the monster, in its way, represents a form of innocence, pathos: the upper and lower classes are flawed, either arrogant in their intelligence or mob-like in their ignorance, and the monster is deformed.

A twisted reading of the Obama presidency — and some white conservatives are reading it in just this way — makes it out to be a modern Frankenstein story, the hubris of the modern Prometheus — the hubris of liberalism. Perhaps it is a hubris to answer the hubris the Left saw in the conservative policies of Bush, the hubris the Left sees in the American empire — what might be called the hubris of neoliberalism.

I know that in the life styles of any number of groups in the nation, there are many things which Negroes would certainly reject, not because they hold them in contempt, but because they do not satisfy our way of doing things and our feeling about things. This is why I say that in order for the Negro to become an American citizen, all American citizens will be forced to undergo a change, and all American institutions will be forced to undergo a change too.

Podhoretz, then-editor of the magazine, put it as well as anyone when he described the crisis in liberalism thus:. For the traditional liberal mentality conceives of society as being made up not of competing economic classes and ethnic groups, but rather of competing individuals who confront a neutral body of laws and a neutral institutional complex. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key figure at the American Academy conferences and author of what would prove to be one of the most important and controversial documents about the status of blacks in the United States, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , was torn about the best way forward.

On the one hand, the idea of making race a permanent category in American politics by introducing preferential treatment for blacks was not simply distasteful but contrary to American ideology and the preferred aim of getting rid of racism by getting rid of race itself.

Ultimately, liberalism essentially chose affirmative action under President Nixon and his Philadelphia Plan in , and what emerged was the political fixture of racial categories in a scheme of preferred treatment, designed largely to stop the violent black rebellions in major American cities that had become commonplace by and horrendous by when the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in racial violence that at times resembled out-and-out warfare. Instead of lasting only ten or twenty years — a kind of domestic Marshall Plan, as early advocates like Bayard Rustin and Whitney Young wanted — affirmative action has now lasted forty years and, despite challenges and changes, shows no sign of being abandoned as a policy position of blacks, white liberals, and the Left.

Affirmative action is bolstered by a philosophy called multiculturalism, which involves radicalizing the concept of pluralism and tolerance as the active destruction of all marginalization; by the slogan of diversity a form of bureaucratic bean-counting for proper representation ; and by a network of government-enforced or government-encouraged forms of solidarity. As a result, affirmative action as a remediation policy has widened its reach to include virtually anyone in the United States who is not an able-bodied, heterosexual white man.

They had been placed in a position of government-approved powerlessness and total abjection and thus had been incomparably damaged as a people by that institution. According to this view, blacks were the only true caste victims in America. They were also the only people in this mythical land of the immigrant who came here against their will.

There are some exceptions to this, such as immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. They therefore required a remedy that was beyond the normal avenues of redress others could obtain through constitutional means or the regular political process, with its built-in mechanisms for reform. On the other hand, some have argued that affirmative action would never have endured as a policy had its client list not been widened in order to garner more political support.

The country on the whole was not very interested in helping blacks overcome a socially imposed and politically managed inferiority status unless others who felt they had equally legitimate claims were also helped.

Yet some argue that including these allies has caused the policy not to work very well for blacks, or at least not work as originally intended. Conservatives today are fighting for the alternative liberalism, the original liberalism, if you will, of competing individuals, race-neutral laws and institutions, and an essentially race-neutral public square; they would have race become what religion or any other form of identification is: a private realm, unforced and unenabled by a system of governmental rewards and disincentives.

For these conservatives old-fashioned liberals , the government has no compelling interest in maintaining racial categories or helping people on the basis of race. The biggest mistake America ever made was to recognize race as a way of legitimatizing slavery; continuing to recognize race does not rectify that mistake. The affirmative action liberals retort by saying the government invented and sanctioned race as a legitimate category; it cannot blithely get out of the race business now by declaring that race, in effect, does not exist because we now find race a repugnant idea.

The two worlds of race have produced two views of liberalism. And within blacks themselves the two worlds have produced two interpretations of America: one that reveals America as it really is, a view shaped by the special knowledge blacks have derived from their condition in America; and another view that denies them a true sense of what America is, shaped by the knowledge kept from them based on their condition.

I have worked in their kitchens and I have served them their brandy, and I know what goes on in white living rooms better than white people know what goes on in mine. Even most of our novelists do not give enough of a report of how life is actually lived in the country for a Negro to pick up a novel and get some clues. The constrictions and the exclusiveness very often have gotten into our perception of social complexity. Our moment today is in every way as significant as that moment, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, when America seemed on the edge of a brave new world, poised for redefinition and ready to see itself a new.

His essay is reprinted here, and my essay is meant in some ways, even with its title, to be a thematic continuation, a reimaging and reworking of the intellectual preoccupations in his essay, and a tribute to his work.

To do so, they ran tests on three different types of question: scores on a test measuring attitudes towards racial minorities, hostility to mass immigration, and measures of economic stress e. The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.

Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers. Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent.

The Reny et al. The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in and 20 points in The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson , and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.

It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year. They need a break.

Following her talk on Tuesday, lots of people weighed in on what she said. Attempting to make successful African Americans feel guilty about their accomplishments is one of the oldest bigoted tactics in the book. Former conservative talk show host Glenn Beck accused Obama of playing the race card, implying that she was attacking all white people.

She was not. But those who she was attacking know who they are. It is clear during eight years as first lady, Obama tried to embrace people of all races. She tried as best she could to present her family as a model for all African Americans.

That we are just as, and often times better than, many of the people who doubt us. It was an insurmountable task.