Blacks feel white backlash

Opinion: March 31, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Lewis Diuguid

McClatchy Newspapers

More than a year ago, after throngs cheered Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African-American president, the Rev. Eric D. Williams foretold a future that we’re just starting to see.

Asked at a 2009 Black History Month celebration what he thought Obama’s presidency would mean to blacks, Williams said what a lot of African-Americans were thinking. He feared there’d be a backlash against black people.

“My fear was, what will white people do if he is elected?” Williams said in an interview this month. For more than a year commentators on conservative talk shows have whipped up outrage.

No mass media have attacked black governance like this since D.W. Griffith released “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, which showed black lawmakers during Reconstruction as foot-scratching buffoons.

Because of the backlash, African-American leaders have found little success getting state, local and federal officials to address urban issues. Blacks’ unemployment is twice that of whites. Black and Hispanic men continue to be more likely to get longer prison sentences.

Longer sentences

A study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that black men receive sentences that are up to 23 percent longer than white men. Hispanic men sentences are almost 7 percent longer.

Children of color are still in mostly segregated, lower-quality schools. Yet, the chains that racism continually forges are dismissed. The nation has a black president so discrimination doesn’t exist, right? Conservative commentators and a lot of politicians dismiss inequities as the fault of people with the problems.

Their constant haranguing of Obama’s leadership feeds the racial backlash. We’ve seen it in the tea party protests against health care reform and the federal stimulus package.

A crowd of demonstrators recently shouted racial epithets and obscenities at the members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Someone even spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

Race is the unspoken but growing issue in the Obama presidency. It is nuclear, and unaddressed it is a real WMD threat.

Racial problems have surfaced elsewhere. At the University of California-San Diego, a student TV segment mocked Black History Month. The university responded, halting funding for student programming.

At a New Jersey Wal-Mart, a male voice over the speaker system recently said: “Attention, Wal-Mart customers. All black people, leave the store now.” A 16-year-old boy was charged with harassment and bias intimidation.

Shankar Vedantam, in his new book “The Hidden Brain,” says that racial categorization, in which some children assign positive attributes to white faces and negative ones to blacks, begins as early as age 3.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center said online hate sites are up 20 percent, to 11,500. People of good conscience and good will have to remain vigilant and address such problems as they arise. It is the only way the backlash will be quelled.

Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.