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Thanks, this is intellectually fun, very well-written, and incisive. I think it's also very true. I have been saying for a while now to friends that it seemed like the entire country has been taken over by the south. "Look at Clinton," I'd say. He threw poor mothers into the labor force to produce cheap labor for the well heeled, and so he could look "good" by cutting welfare rolls. How progressive is that? Not only that, but his comments and behavior during his wife's campaign as well as his influence on her smacked of George Wallace. It amazed me to listen to her sound like Wallace, and then I remembered to whom she was married. The anti-intellectualism (Clinton was not an intellectual in the same way JFK in the guise of being savvy, clever and a smooth talker.
Didn't the Southern dixiecrats go into a revolt before the ink was even signed on Johnson's civil rights legislation? And hasn't that revolt continued until now? And while white supremacy isn't the same as during Wallace's time, it is certainly the case that white supremacy has not disappeared. Just because we have a biracial man whose father is from Kenya, not Jim Crow south, running for office does not mean that white supremacy isn't alive and well. Anyone who thinks that the faux shock over Rev. Wright on the part of white America isn't symptomatic of some form of white supremacy is deluding themselves. Wright said what is said in the Black community every day, yet whites acted like they were having a collective heart attack for overhearing it. And then after the shock came the vicious attacks on Wright that were way over the top, like some kind of hysteria really, followed by Obama's "break" with Wright. These are not the politics of a "post-racial" America. These are the politics of southern racism defused throughout the entire society.
