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I asked him why he thought there was such an angry, vengeful response in the RNC crowd to the ugly, angry bullying on the last night.
I was starting to think it was the class war: Resenting Obama's PHD in law from Harvard because alot of small-town thinking is limited and frustrated by the larger, educated, informed world.
That's how I was trying to explain their anger and fury.
But he said something I had never thought of.
I am a New York State product, all my life. Never been to the south. Never experienced much in the way of racism first hand. Never lived in a big city where race issues played out in my personal life. Ok, now I love the city, but I have to admit my income (just a teacher) sheilds me from experiencing the harsh realities of poverty and prejudice.
He said, that, (speaking generally, here) in the south, racism is a functioning part of society for very poor whites. It was his opinion that bigotry is the last compensation for very limited, uneducated, disadvantaged whites.
Many whites who sense they're on the lower rungs of society's ladder (and sometimes these people do cling to fundamentalism as an escape) find some relief from their negative self concept by assigning the lowest rung of all to blacks. It's an arbitrary assignment to an arbitrary group based on psychology instead of logic.
That's why, no matter how many times you argue about freedom, health insurance, war, oil company handouts, and Palin's own failure to meet her own family values standards falls on deaf ears.
He also added that some rich people proudly protect their assets because they lack compassion for those who were born to limited opportunity. It's justified racism and selfishness.
So, you find a coalition between the rich and poor that just plain makes no sense at all. Logically, the poor whites should resent their rich party counterparts, and non-religious people should resent the prostlyatizing of fundies. But they don't.
The common denominator is race: Blacks must provide them with a target for their disdain, even when they will often revere black athletes and performers.
So the claim that Barack is a celebrity is actually an interesting question: Should he be afforded the acclaim and status that black sports/music/film heroes enjoy? To the average bigot, the only way they can acknowledge the humanity in Barack and his family is to assign them this different space in their perception of the world. The choice is between contempt and reverence.
It's alot like the feminist madonna/whore identity. Films tend to place female characters in either role. Bigots feel Barack is asking to jump the line and be taken from the group assignment of contemptuous to celebrity.
Thus, "He thinks he's a celebrity: He thinks we can accept him." And that's why "community organizer" is their hang up. It's code word for black, but it also their impression that he's putting himself ahead of the other blacks, and in their minds, he's trying to say he's as good as white people. He's better than they are.
Because, in their (bigots) limited map of reality, there is no identity called "normal, regular, average, guy-next-door" black man. The choices are felon or Eddie Murphy.
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