Outbreaks of Racial Anger

It's increasingly difficult to believe in the "New South" when these things happen and expected to accelerate. A recent visit - after 25 years - made me understand why whites are terrified of Obama's possible election as president. There is nowhere else to run. Most of the whites I know had long ago left the big cities for more rural or suburban white areas. The white flight began many years ago and it continues today. Obama winning the election a majority of Americans (of all colours) have told the rest of the world that 'we're grownups' and ready for change, but the Old South wants none of it. Long before the election I listened to prophesies that if Obama won, all hell would break loose with riots in the streets on election night. Didn't happen. Instead, celebrations of joy, hope, and unity popped up seemingly everywhere. Isn't it interesting that 'violence' is always projected on hordes of blacks while it's whites sneaking around under cover of darkness doing deeds most foul against blacks? There's this:

Crosses burning. Children chanting, "Assassinate Obama." Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Reports of incidents such as those across the country are dampening the glow of racial progress and harmony that bloomed after the election of Democrat Barack Obama, an African American, to the presidency.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of incidents, including vandalism, threats and at least one physical attack. There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

In Snellville, Ga., Denene Millner said that a day after the election, a boy on a school bus told her 9-year-old daughter that he hoped "Obama gets assassinated." That night, Millner said, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door.

"It definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with," said Millner, who is black. "And makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."

Potok, who is white, said he thinks there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old Georgia native who is white, expressed similar sentiments. "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades, and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change," Griffin said.

A black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries."

The rest is at the Statesman.

I've heard that black people are just waiting for Obama to be sworn so they can riot, take over and do whatever they please. On the other hand, I've heard that teachers in area schools talk about a handy new phrase used when black or white kids act up or get out of hand; 'do you think President Obama would do this or act in this way?' and they tell me it pulls the kids up short, makes them more aware of their actions. If anything Obama's election might be the catalyst that forces kids to work for a better education.

I believe in HOPE more than ever.

And so it goes.

*