For White Americans, Things Aren't What They Used to Be

But no. According to his recent memoir, the nadir came when Kanye West, a black singer, accused him of racial neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. West said:
"America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well
off as slow as possible ... George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Given
what was happening at that time, this hardly seemed outrageous. With
bodies floating in the street and people stranded on highways, Bush's
director of the Federal Emergency management Agency, Michael Brown, said
of the mostly black crowd that had gathered at the convention centre:
"We're seeing people that we didn't know exist."

But for Bush, West's remarks went beyond the pale. In an interview this month,
he said: "It's one thing to say, 'I don't appreciate the way he's
handled his business.' It's another thing to say, 'This man's a racist.'
I resent it. It's not true."

There are many issues relating to
Bush's pique, but let's just concentrate on two. First, his umbrage at
an accusation that had not been made. West did not call him "a racist".
To accuse someone of not caring about something is not the same thing as
accusing them of discriminating against it. West has a good command of
the English language. Had he wanted to call Bush a racist he could have.
Bush's inference was by no means absurd; but it was his to make.

Second,
the fact Bush decided to respond in this way tells us a great deal
about the passive-aggressive nature of modern racial discourse. For we
have moved to a place where accusations of racism, real or imagined, are
routinely understood to be more egregious than actual racist acts
themselves. As a means of avoiding conversations about what they have done, people instead insist on what they are not.

In
this case, Bush is more upset by the claim that he didn't care about
black people than the fact that a disproportionate number of black
people died during Katrina unnecessarily because his administration did
not care enough to save them.

Debates about what is motivating the
rightwing resurgence against Obama's presidency often take a similar
course. In the many conversations I have had with the right, I have not
once even inferred they might be racist. But the retort that they are
not racist comes back just as sharply as if I did. So let's start by
pointing out that American conservatives have plenty of reasons to
oppose Obama that have nothing to do with his race. For all his
shortcomings he remains the most progressive president for at least 60
years. He has expanded public spending and healthcare; drawn down troops
from Iraq; and campaigned on redistributing wealth by raising taxes on
the rich. Bill Clinton was nowhere near as liberal - and look what they
did to him.

Nor is racially charged rhetoric a preserve of
American conservatives. During the democratic primary campaign, Hillary
Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, argued
that Obama should be undermined on grounds of race. "His roots to basic
American values and culture are at best limited," Penn said. "Let's
explicitly own 'American' in our programmes, the speeches and the
values. He doesn't."

To ask where racism ends and politics begins
sets up a false dichotomy - US politics has always been steeped in race,
and racism has always been a political and electoral force. The psychic
scars of centuries are not removed as a result of one person being
elected. Indeed, if the racial polarisation of the electorate in the
mid-terms is anything to go by, they may have deepened and been made
even more raw as a result of it.

Let's also concede that his race
is a factor. It would be remarkable if it were not. The reason his
election had such symbolic resonance was precisely because it was
assumed so unlikely in a country where black people are overrepresented
in jail and among the poor, and underrepresented in politics and power.
Since the 1960s, American conservatism's national electoral strategy has hinged, in no small part, on leveraging white southerners from Democrats with scarcely veiled racial messages.

Attempts
to deny that Obama was born in the US and that he is Christian (common
among Republicans and predominant among Tea Partiers) are, to some
degree, proxies for race. They are a way of casting him as "other"
without touching less acceptable bigotry. A recent Washington Post survey
of Tea Party groups found that 11% said Obama's race, religion or
ethnic background were "very important" or "somewhat important" in the
support their group has received. A relatively small number of racist
posters have consistently been seen at Tea Party rallies.

So while
racism may significantly shape the character and inform the intensity
of opposition to Obama (the week he was elected gun sales rose 50%
compared with the previous year), it does not drive it. But his
particular constellation of identities are better understood not so much
as objects of racial animus but as signifiers for a far broader set of
geopolitical, economic and demographic anxieties.

For the poorest 90% of US families - the overwhelming majority of whom are white - median income has been effectively stagnant for a generation. Meanwhile social mobility
has stalled. In this situation, many white Americans do not sense their
experience compared with non-white Americans is one of relative
privilege - because over the last 30 years, they are relatively no
better off.

Many blame this on the outside world. From 47
countries polled by Pew in 2007, Americans showed the sharpest decline
in their support for foreign trade and had the least positive view of
it. The US may have been one of the principal motors of neoliberal
globalisation, but its citizens are also its victims. In the absence of
any vehicle for international class solidarity, threats of outsourcing,
product dumping, deflating the dollar and Chinese creditors provide the
material basis for a strain of xenophobia that goes beyond a simple
loathing of foreigners.

To the sting of economic vulnerability is
added the indignity of geopolitical decline. As the sole global
superpower, the US would once have been able to rig the competition with
carrots, sticks and, if need be, B52s. Now it must accept that Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others can also change the rules.

Add
to this failed wars against predominantly Muslim countries after
terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, a broken immigration
system, and projections that non-whites will be a majority by 2042, and
you have the roots of a race-based backlash. Put bluntly, being American
is no longer what it used to be - at home or abroad. And for those
particularly invested in the relative privilege of being a white
American it is not difficult to see how the election of a black
president - with an African name and a foreign father who was a
non-practising Muslim - could become a focus for discontent.

Race
was too narrow a lens through which to examine opposition to Obama, as
it was to understand what happened in Katrina. Racism cannot explain all
of it. Indeed it's not even the half of it.