Town Halls and Democracy

Let me start by giving Anderson Cooper a shout out - Thanks for asking Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri last night if she thought race was part of the motive behind these raucous town hall meetings. And while we're giving shout outs, let's also give one to Paul Krugman who wrote about it in his OpEd in the New York Times last week. Check out this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=racism%20and%20%22Paul%20Krugman%22&st=cse

I never doubted that race was a partial motive in these incredible outbursts of upset with the government. I want to start by saying that I really believe that people who have racist sentiments are not bad people, they just make my life (and the lives of many others) difficult. With that said, I think some historical perspective about "government takeovers" is warranted (being-an-historian-in-training, particularly when I'm writing my dissertation which I'm not doing at this moment).

Recall the "Regan Revolution." The concern moved by the right wing was that entitlements had become too big a part of the budget and needed to be cut. What are the programs included in entitlements? They are food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, etc. What was the demographic group that became the poster child of these programs? BLACK WOMEN. We were portrayed as lazy, non-working, good-for-nothing, immoral, promiscuous, Cadillac driving child bearing machines who took all of this money from hard working White people and gave nothing back (see Ange Hitchcock's book The Politics of Disgust. Only by eliminating these government programs for lazy people would we actually go find work (which was, of course (sarcasm intended) prolific and well-paid) and contribute to society instead of sucking off of its teets (not my language . . . I don't have a citation, but government officials talked about sucking off of the societal/social teets).

With Black people (women in particular) being the face of government programs, it was easy to mobilize Joe-six-packs (a hard working White guy in Rural, USA) to vote for Republicans no matter that the party had never done anything useful to their bottom line. And so the polarization of American politics continued. White guys generally had their wishes fulfilled (I would argue even under the Clinton administration) through President Bush. However, then the non-American Black guy with a Kenyan father (what White mother?) popped on the scene and won the Democratic primaries and went on to win the election. Couple this with the fact of ominous reporting that Whites are becoming a minority among minorities and some of us become rather agitated. Notice that at the Town Hall meetings, the questions about health care center around debt (I suppose that we don't want to pay for health care for promiscuous non-working Black people)or other issues such as carrying guns or Obama's birth certificate. How one could compare Obama to Hitler is beyond me, but really, can we compare Obama to a White supremacist?

These are peculiar times we are living in (also note that AC 360 broke a story last night about the rising tide of militias, that's right, angry White guys arming themselves against a socialist state and Mexicans) and we have a little sense to not be completely explicit about our antipathy towards people of color. They have an axe to grind and if shutting down the debate about any issue allows the current demographic trends to subside (as well as preventing abortions, don't forget, many of these people are concerned that WHITE women are terminating pregnancies while Black women can be forced by the courts to take hormonal forms of birth control that prevent ovulation for a year and do not have data on the long term effects on womens' health), so be it. The people protesting at the Town Hall meetings aren't crazy; but I certainly think they should be watched. What does Skip Gates have to say about this?!