Robert L. Terrell

The latter stages of the historic battle waged by senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the honor of being the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency in 2008 election has shed unanticipated light on racist white people. Exit poll results obtained after several primaries revealed that a large, and impressively consistent, percentage of such citizens are, according to their reports, viscerally opposed to voting for a person of color. Our perspective of this largely shielded segment of the white community was radically expanded via the efforts of Senator Hillary Clinton. Faced with the prospect of defeat, she, and her ubiquitous, seriously-out-of-touch-these-days husband, launched a series of cynical ploys carefully tailored to win the support of this biased voting bloc on the basis of racial solidarity.

While ostentatiously slugging shots of whiskey, senator Clinton proclaimed herself the representative of such voters, and thereby presented the Democratic Party with a major dilemma. Despite the fact that she and her husband possess financial resources vastly superior to those of the Obamas, Hillary asserted that her opponent is an elitist incapable of winning the respect and support of the vast majority of white Americans—ostensibly because they are viscerally racist. This tactic proved marginally successful, and senator Clinton managed to cobble together victories in several primaries. Nonetheless, she came up short and Barack Obama is now poised to become the first non-white President of the United States. Senator Clinton acknowledged reality this morning and called on her supporters to supporters to provide full support to Obama and the party’s push to retake the White House in the upcoming election. All seems well at this point, and the television talking heads that moderate public dialogue in this nation are obviously preparing to move on. Many of them have already turned their attention to the upcoming confrontation between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Nonetheless, this African American is still pondering the relatively large number of white Americans who say they do not believe in voting for non-white people. My best sense is that they are an extremely important component of the overall community. As such, they need to be studied far more seriously than has been the case by those who moderate mainstream political, academic and journalistic dialogue in this country. For example, we need to know more about the origins of their bias, and the ways in which it is passed from one generation to the next. We also need to know how the biases of such people impact schools, hospitals, courts, financial institutions and the law enforcement community. In addition, we need to know how the biases of such people are used to operate and maintain race-based systems of exclusion and oppression.

I will be elated if groups of allegedly brilliant scholars, legal authorities and journalists study the extent to which the racist biases of this segment of the U.S. population is responsible for the widespread, multigenerational poverty which cruelly haunts the lives of non-white people in every section of the nation. I will be similarly impressed if significant attention and discourse is devoted to the manner in which Republican and Democratic politicians use the reservoir of white racism to maintain their domination of the nation’s political affairs. Finally, someone serious needs to bring to the fore a discussion of the manner in which white racism of the sort being discussed here influences the formulation and exercise of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world, which is approximately 80 percent colored.

The point I am attempting to make here is that white racism is a metaphorical anchor tied to the neck of this nation. It is holding us back and pulling all of us down. Little of the promise inherent in the Obama candidacy for President has a ghost of a chance of significant success unless and until this issue is addressed. It needs to be dragged out into the open, dissected, discussed, denounced and decommissioned. Until this is done, the full promise of what the U.S. could and should be cannot be realized. Finally, I would like to note that our overall approach to this age-old social cancer should be positive and innovative. In other words, I am advocating that these particular racists be disarmed via the use of diplomacy, charm, goodwill and commitment to remaining engaged with them until those infected with racist hatred agree to join the rest of us because they genuinely believe that all their most important legitimate issues have been positively and definitively addressed.

Given the fact that economic insecurity is almost certainly the foundation of much of the edifice of white racism in this nation, I recommend that we commit from the very beginning to the development and implementation of a comprehensive Affirmative Action program for lower-class and poor white Americans.