Overcome ignorance

Apparently I was quite wrong when I stated in my first post-election column that I would have to find something else to write about besides the election.

Despite the fact that Barack Obama’s presidency represents history-making progress in America’s race relations and the status of minorities in this country, the after-effects of the election have also re-emphasized some ugly realities about how far America has to go.

The authorities have said Obama has received more death threats than any other president-elect in our nation’s history. Though the Secret Service says it investigated or is investigating many types of these threats and that not all are racially motivated, you would have to be living under a rock not to notice the racial overtones in certain incidents across the country during and after the election.  

For example, two skinheads in Tennessee are being held for planning to behead African-Americans across the country and assassinate Obama (while wearing tuxedos and white top hats, might I add).

The popular white-supremacist Web site, www.stormfront.org, gained 2,000 new members the day after the election, forcing the site to temporarily shut down due to the increase in traffic.

In Maine, a general store was accepting $1 bets on predicting the day Obama would be killed. A sign in the store referred to it as the “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool” and further read “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count.” The sign finished off at the bottom with a viciously optimistic “Let’s hope someone wins.”
It’s all too easy to dismiss such events as restricted to marginalized, extremist members of society. But this sort of bigotry is rearing its head among college students and even schoolchildren.

Four students at North Carolina State University confessed to writing anti-Obama comments, including one that encouraged people to shoot him in the head, and in Rexburg, Idaho, a school bus full of second and third graders began chanting “assassinate Obama.”

Overwhelmed by their hate and frustration, it seems these people are targeting their black neighbors to vent their rage at Obama’s victory. In a suburb of Pittsburgh, a black man received a note with a racial epithet that said “now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house.”

Perhaps what stands out most about these vile incidents is that they can’t be typecast. We can’t just point fingers at hate groups or Klan members when we have students in higher education and small children joining in. We can’t say these reactions are isolated to “the red states” or “the South,” as we living in blue states might be inclined to do. As I pointed out above, they are happening in places that went pro-Obama on Election Day.

These people are venting their fear and insecurity about the new, the different and the unknown, in the form of racist aggression. I would urge them to overcome their ignorance, not only for the greater good to their society and country, but for their own personal well-being and functionality.