Red Scare, Black Scare

[Blue_Tires]

It must have been about the time that Barack Obama was being born or toddling around that I got my first, alarming introduction to the white man's idea of Africa. As I remember it, I was sitting in my grandmother's parlor, watching TV while she bustled about the kitchen. The images are fractured now: beating drums, a blood oath, white people sleeping in an isolated farmhouse and large, gleaming African men on a rampage with machetes, closing in, in high-contrast black and white; letters scrawled across the screen in a classic scare font, "Mau Mau!"

Maybe this was 1959, when British colonial forces in Kenya finally crushed the seven-year peasant revolt through a counterinsurgency campaign of murder, mutilation, torture, concentration camps and mass public hangings. Or maybe it was 1963, when the Africans of Kenya secured their independence. And maybe a television programmer somewhere thought that the 1955 grind-house shockumentary Mau-Mau, narrated by a proper newsman, Chet Huntley, was good enough to excerpt in a proper news broadcast years later, or even to run as entertainment on a slow afternoon, censoring out the naked black women and half-naked white women on the edge of ravishment, the filmmakers' whole reason for calculating they could make money off such a flick in the first place.

These shards of memory came to mind when I saw the image of Obama as Witch Doctor, which Dr. David McKalip, a right-wing Florida neurosurgeon, forwarded to a listserv of tea-party zealots a few months ago. Liberal bloggers who had made a cottage industry out of caricaturing George W. Bush were predictably appalled, but the unknown graphic artist and McKalip did the country a perverse favor. More than all the words on the subject spilled so far, this lone image banishes the nonsense of postracial America and reminds us of the sturdy foundation blocks upon which racial America in the modern period has rested: white supremacy/anxiety, anticommunism and sex.

The image is a pastiche. Obama's head is grafted onto a picture of a man wearing nothing but bead necklaces and a loincloth, his legs spread wide, his long, thick fingers grasping a stick in front of him. There's a bone through his nose and a confection of feathers and flowers on his head. The picture evokes the world of National Geographic that once gave children a guiltless excuse to indulge their curiosity in the flesh. Under the witch doctor picture is the slogan "Obama Care," with the red, white and blue campaign symbol serving as the O and a sickle and hammer as the C.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/wypijewski

more at the link...bloody brilliant...I've been hesitant to get into this particular subject matter, (because I didn't think I could state it deftly enough) but I admit it has been something in the back of my mind...

[firedupdem]

1. Quite a read! Thanks for posting this... n/t

[Number23]

2. "One thing is certain. Sex is at the very heart of racism."

The author declares this at the end of the article after discussing how whites' fears of "sexual inferiority" are the root of the "black scare."

I find this really interesting and perhaps a tad simplistic. There is no question that the fetishization of black men and women (particularly black men) has played a major role in British and American racism. The "big black brute out to take yo' wommin" is a tired cliche as old as time. Even in the 21st century it still plays a role -- like I mentioned in another thread despite the fact that the majority of interracial marriages in America consist of white man/Asian woman, black people are still bombarded with jokes about how all brothers want a white woman, facts be damned.

But I'm skeptical that sex was the impetus behind the British, French, and Spanish ravaging of Asia, Africa, South America and damn near every where else. White people may be consumed by sex as the author suggests, but we must never underestimate the seductive forces of stolen land, money and power either.