The general store in the middle of the tiny South Carolina town of Allendale still has Barack Obama T-shirts and baseball caps proudly on sale in the window. But inside the shop, Eddie Bernice Hammond’s thoughts are not on last year’s triumphant election of America’s first black president. They are focused on a fresh race row, roiling the country and coming from her own home state.
The debate is simple: is the fury being directed at Obama by his many conservative opponents a product of his skin colour or his policies? Obama and top Republicans say it is simply hardball politics. Former president Jimmy Carter has said it is racism. The argument has raged across the media. On Sunday Obama will appear on six network television stations making the case yet again for healthcare reform, and at the same time playing down the significance of the colour of his skin in the debate.
“Are there some people who don’t like me because of my race? I’m sure there are,” he tells one ABC presenter in an interview recorded on Friday. But far more Americans, he says, are “passionate about the idea of whether government can do anything right. And I think that’s probably the biggest driver of some of the vitriol.”
Maybe. For her part Hammond (68) black and proud, thinks that Carter got it right. “I agree with President Carter,” she said, more in sorrow than in anger. “A lot of white people don’t like Obama being where he is because of his race.”
Hammond should know. Allendale, surrounded by deep, swampy forests in the heart of South Carolina’s Low Country, is as southern as you can get. Its residents are intimately familiar with the legacy of slavery and segregation in the Deep South. Allendale voted last year for Obama over John McCain by 75% to 24%, a figure that pretty much mirrors the racial split between black and white in the area. “We’ve come a long way. I know that. But we are not there yet in the minds of a lot of folks,” Hammond said.
Despite his best efforts and intentions, Obama cannot escape the simple and historical fact of his race. He has told senior staffers that he does not want to be thought of as America’s first black president, but more as just a president who happens to be black. That has been the mark of his political life. But equally he has never been able to escape it. Obama thought his famous Philadelphia speech during the election campaign would end the race issue. It did not. A fresh start was sought in the White House. Then Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in his own home by a white cop. Beers on the White House lawn should have solved that. But now comes the latest racial drama, inspired by the violent tone of a summer of raucous meetings on the issue of healthcare. That eventually led South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson to call Obama a liar on the floor of Congress; which in turn led Carter to call Obama’s opponents white people unhappy at a black man in the Oval Office.
The White House and Obama moved rapidly to disown the comments, saying they did not believe race was a motive. Republican leaders jumped at them, saying it was Democrats, not them, who were now playing the race card. But most experts, especially those who specialise in the politics of the south, knew this moment was coming.
It was inevitable that America’s first black president would face these issues, and Carter was just telling it like it is. “In America now, we are constantly having this debate over race. It is a conversation that needs to continue,” said Joseph Crespino, associate professor of history at Emory University, in Atlanta. Then Crespino borrowed a phrase Obama himself used to sum up the Gates incident: “There are going to be a lot of ‘teachable moments’ in the months ahead. It is going to be a good time to be a teacher.”
In South Carolina, a little history goes a long way. It is hard to get away from the past here, and that past is one of deep racial division that refuses to die. Just last week, a South Carolina court was forced to rule on a case brought by Candice Hardwick, a teenage girl who insisted on wearing T-shirts, belt buckles and even a cellphone case all emblazoned with the Confederate flag to her mixed-race school. The court found against Hardwick, but her lawyer, Kirk Lyons, said she would appeal.
He then launched into a hyperbolic description of what the case meant: “If the courts allow this to stand, then it is proof that we are a system of gulags that they call public schools.”
Such language seems astonishingly extreme. But, almost alone in the US, South Carolina still makes flying the Confederate flag a political hot potato. Indeed, to the surprise of many visiting tourists, the Confederacy’s former battle flag flies in front of the state Capitol assembly building in the main city of Columbia, fluttering beside a memorial to the southern civil war dead.
Its presence has prompted a long-standing ban on holding conventions and conferences in South Carolina by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a civil rights group. After Wilson’s comments, that ban was added to, with a fresh boycott of the state by a black newspaper trade body, the National Newspaper Publishers Association. The body’s chairperson, Danny Bakewell, said the decision was taken to show the importance of “not spending black dollars where black people are not respected”.
Wilson has denied any hint of racism in his comments, but seeing his actions through the prism of South Carolina seems to add weight to Carter’s theory.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that the man who yelled “you lie!” to Obama while he spoke to Congress has been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a body dedicated to celebrating the Confederate cause. Or that he was an aide to notorious South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond, once an avowed and unapologetic segregationist. Or that Wilson has been an arch proponent of keeping the Confederate flag flying in Columbia.
While many black Americans unsurprisingly find the flag an offensive reminder of slavery, supporters insist it reflects traditional values. Unfortunately the truth is not so simple in South Carolina. The flag was first flown on the Capitol, not back in far-off history, but in 1962, just as civil rights was sweeping the south. It was not a long-standing tradition. It was an explicit message to intimidate black southerners seeking their political rights. That is the tradition being upheld.
But it is the nature of the current row that the debate is steeped in covert symbolism and myths. Modern America is no longer a place where the Klan holds sway. Instead the “Birther” movement has sprung up, questioning if Obama was born on Kenyan soil, not American. Placards have appeared at recent conservative rallies calling Obama an “undocumented alien” or telling him to “go home” to Africa. The phrase “taking our country back” has become popular on the right, raising the question of how it is possible to claim that a democratically elected president could really have stolen it in the first place.
Then there is the “Tenther” movement which claims that individual states have the constitutional right — under the tenth amendment — to reject nearly all federal laws. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint is a prominent sympathiser to that cause. But it is a philosophy that reeks of the “states rights” belief that southern segregationists once used to justify the brutal laws of Jim Crow.
None of this is overtly racist. Neither is the conservative habit of calling Obama a socialist, a communist or — confusingly for political scientists — a Nazi. But many experts believe it is seeking to define Obama as a shadowy “other” who must be linked to the colour of his skin. By speaking out, Carter was simply breaking the unwritten rule that one cannot point out the racial element of modern American conservatism. It opened the floodgates for some high-profile media figures to pile in.
“Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president … some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it,” wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Georgia Democratic congressman Hank Johnson went further. He said Wilson’s comments would see people wearing “white hoods again and riding through the countryside”.
Yet those crying racism are also missing something of the whole picture, even in South Carolina. Zo Warren, a black photographer in Columbia, shrugged his shoulders when asked about the Confederate flag flying just a block from his downtown office. He said he was genuinely unmoved by its existence. “To me, it says that we are one of the freest countries in the world, when the side that lost the war can still fly its battle flag. I think that is a good thing,” he said with a smile.
For Warren, the key word is “lost”. The spasm of outrage that has created the rapidly metastasising plethora of conservative movements — from Birthers to Tenthers to the Tea Partiers — has created loud headlines and vast amounts of broadcast time on cable television. But it does not mean they have much future as a meaningful mass movement.
If Obama’s election meant anything — and almost everyone agrees it meant a lot — it meant the dawning of an era when forging multi-ethnic electoral alliances is the key to future success. Obama’s coalition of middle-class urban whites, young people, blacks and Hispanics has simply got greater numbers — and vastly greater future electoral potential — than the dwindling demographic of rural, older, mostly southern whites that have become the Republican base.
Under the political operator Karl Rove, the Republican party was able to squeak two narrow election victories by mobilising that base. But no one, including Rove, now thinks the strategy is a recipe for long-term health, given current demographic trends.
“We have a fringe element here. They have become a force to be reckoned with, but only because of all the attention they get. They are very clearly a minority interest,” said Dewey Clayton, a professor of political science at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. “The Republican party needs to do some serious soul-searching if it is to avoid driving itself to extinction.”
It should also not be forgotten that Obama’s victory in 2008 was notable for its successes in the south. Not only did he win the vital battleground state of Florida but, more surprisingly, he turned two other southern red states — North Carolina and Virginia — into blue ones.
He could only do that by winning significant amounts of white support. “This row now is just a bump in the road. Ultimately we have turned over a new leaf in this country, and there is no going back. It is only a matter of time before the Deep South, including South Carolina, comes on board,” said Clayton.
Perhaps Clayton is right. The current hysteria, with its racial undertones, is making a lot of heat and noise, but something similar was surely expected, whatever Obama’s skin colour. He has taken over the country at a time of deep economic crisis, when many Americans are scared and angry and facing poverty. He has been forced to take steps — such as a massive government intervention in the economy — that he otherwise would not have done, and which go against the grain of many Americans’ free market sympathies. At the same time, it’s not as if previous presidents — such as Bill Clinton and, from the conservative point of view, George Bush — did not endure hysterical opposition campaigns which made frequently outlandish claims.
All in all, given the extent of the crisis gripping America, and the dreadful legacy of its slavery-stained history, perhaps the progress on race under Obama is more amazing than the setbacks.
Hammond certainly feels that way. The Obama souvenirs in her shop are not selling like they used to. But she puts that down to tough times in Allendale. Never a rich place, it now resembles a ghost town in its centre, scarred by abandoned buildings. “It’s a tough year to get through,” she said.
But Hammond still smiles at the memory of Obama’s victory. She still recalls with pride the night a black man became president. “When he won I was so proud of white folks,” she said as she swept the floors of a shop devoid of customers “It showed they can cross the lines and embrace a black person.” – guardian.co.uk