The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States has been heralded

in some quarters – and not just in America – as almost the Second Coming of
Christ. It is held up as a beacon of hope and change – and a final validation of
American democracy and sense of fair play. More than anything else, commentators
and newspaper editors are going into raptures over the fact than an African-
American, member of an ethnic group that less than 50 years ago was relegated to
second class status, was about to occupy the highest office in the country. It is
being heralded as the dawn of the new era.

Not all Americans are euphoric, however. There is no question that the attitude of
white Americans towards their colored countrymen has changed dramatically since
Rosa Parks. However, some fringe groups can’t seem to terms with living under a
black President. Nothing really surprising about that. White supremist outfits
like Aryan Nation have been around for a long time. What is surprising and
slightly alarming is that the recent spate of hate crimes sparked off by Obama’s
election has not been restricted to their traditional strongholds in Montana and
Wyoming.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from
vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts
have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders. The crimes
range from cross burnings and schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama” to black
figures hung from nooses and racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

In one incident in Snellville, Georgia, a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-
old girl the day after the election: “I hope Obama gets assassinated.” That night,
someone trashed her family’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left
two pizza boxes filled with human faeces outside the front door.

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law
Center, which monitors hate crimes, believes there is “a large sub-set 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 white Georgia native, 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. If you had real change it would
involve all the members of (Obama’s) church being deported.”

Some black high school students reported hearing hateful Obama comments; and that
some teachers cut off discussions about Obama’s victory. Another student, from a
Southern middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school
on November 5. The student’s mother said the principal told her: “Whether you like
it or not, we’re in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy
with this decision.”

Much as mainstream Americans may scoff and distance themselves from “those
lunatics”, there is no denying that the election of a black President is an
epochal event in America’s long standing saga of race relations. According to
William Ferris of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University
of North Carolina. “Someone once said racism is like cancer. “It’s never totally
wiped out, it’s in remission.”

It took over two centuries for America to elect a Black President. And even though
they elected him, not all Americans are comfortable with him. For sure, it is an
encouraging sign that thousands of people in the so-called Red states voted for
Obama too, but I can’t help wondering if it was a pro-Obama vote so much as an
anti-Bush vote. Perhaps it will take another two centuries for white Americans to
accept Blacks as true equals, not just in their minds, but in their hearts.

Source: Associated Press