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Hey Folks,

So school got busy and my blog fell by the wayside. I am gonna make it up to you. I’ll post everyday or every other day until the election. In return you got to promise to make comments so that I know I am not just writing for my dad and my girlfriend. Deal?

Here is a great article from theroot.com

Will White People Riot?

By Wendi C. Thomas | TheRoot.com

Ridiculous question? Then stop asking it about black people.

Cornell Republicans on 9/5/08

Oct. 20, 2008–

“Would black people riot if Sen. Barack Obama didn’t win the election?” That was the question a white man in Memphis recently asked a racial reconciliation group with which I am involved.

After five years of being a columnist for the daily paper in Memphis, I wasn’t surprised by the absurdity of his query. Many whites still labor under the illusion that black folk act en masse and that if you ask the right one, you can get the official position of some 40 million people. If a few of us get angry, that logic allows, it must surely result in a riot.

Riot because we didn’t get our way? Please. Black people have more than their share of experience with disappointment and dashed dreams. (See: King, Martin Luther; Evers, Medgar; Chaney, James.) Matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say we’re experts in making the best out of a losing hand.

The reply to the curious white gentleman: “No! There is no reason to believe black people will riot if Obama does not win.”

But soon after getting this man’s e-mail, I started to wonder if he was on to something, if he had noticed what I had: a seething, barely constrained, ugly anger and frustration that makes good riot fuel. The kind of anger that prompts people to shout “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” at rallies. The kind of hatefulness that would prompt a man to bring a stuffed monkey with an “Obama” sticker on the toy’s head to a campaign event.

That kind of group-fueled nastiness must surely beg the question: Will white people riot if Obama wins?

Not all white people are McCain supporters. (See primaries, Iowa.) Not all black people are backing Obama. (See Negroes, self-loathing. Just joking.)

But there is a small but vocal segment of white Republicans who just might have an aneurysm if the next occupant of the White House is a black man.

If the polls are accurate—and Obama wins—will these few angry white people make good on their oral declarations? And will those who stood by them silent, join them? With dreams deferred, can angry whites do what Langston Hughes taught us—to let it fester like a sore, even to let sag like a heavy load? Or will the dream of a perfect streak of white men in the White House, if deferred, cause white people to explode?

Might they torch stores and overturn cars? Or worse, will angry whites take out their disgust on black people by, say, denying loans, or jobs or housing? Burned-out stores and cars, that’s unsettling. But the damage angry whites could inflict if they really go off—that’s scary.

Will angry white people riot if Barack Obama wins the election?

There may be some people who think this is an absurd question. I honestly don’t know. But it is no more absurd than asking it about blacks.

Wendi C. Thomas is the metro columnist for The Commercial Appeal. She’s been a writer or an editor for The Charlotte Observer, The (Nashville) Tennessean and The Indianapolis Star. Among her many journalism awards is her 2008 induction into the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame for her opinion writing.

Watching from the sidelines this semester as Evan struggled through his racism crisis, I have frankly tried to stay out of it. The one time I didn’t, I got ripped apart by a young man in CTB who proclaimed that Evan and I were both racists working to destroy America.

But watching Evan go through all this crap, and subsequently watching him do some wonderful reflections and reporting on race on our campus. I found I was finally able to finger point the full impact of the issue of race in our own country. It comes down to both how we respond and how our media responds to the words stated by different races.

If Hillary or McCain say a pretty sentence it’s just that. Obama says something nice the media is a buzz with how eloquent he is. The implication being that it is such a surprise for a black man to form such complete and coherent sentences.

But this Reverend Wright stuff is most amazing. It is at its core a pretext for racism. It is being fed to Americans as an excuse to not vote for a black man. Wright’s claims about the neglect of the black community are largely true. Some are far fetched. For example, his claim that the government created AIDS to destroy the black community would fall into that category. A claim I support based on the fact that Regan did not even understand AIDS until some time around 1985.

Wright is angry and expresses his anger in broad and flagrant language, and that’s his prerogative.

But the media’s focus on Wright is to hold Obama to a different standard. A John McCain supporter, fundamentalist John Hagee, recently called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon. That is ridiculous and outlandish; yet I have only heard about it every now and then. Meanwhile Obama has had to disagree with, disavow, and disown Rev. Wright. When McCain was pressed about Hagee’s comments he merely responded, “I welcome his support.” The media made no fuss.

I think this represents the ways in which white people are used to understanding prejudice. In read quotes from PA voters, the ones who were most at odds with Wright, indicated that what they just didn’t get was how Reverend Wright carries on like he does. As one woman said, “when I go to church my Priest does not jump up and down and carry on like that.”

Let’s face it, white Americans, we just don’t get very animated. Wright’s most ridiculed and most frequently quoted comment was that September 11^th was punishment. Now, when I first heard this coming from my TV about 3 months ago, I thought is was just Pat Robertson again. Remember, the quiet white guy down in Florida filled with soft spoken hate speech. The things he has said are in fact more outlandish and far fetched then Wright. Yet he recently has been accepted in the main stream. This has been fueled in large part because of his new found stance against global warming. The point is Wright’s extreme language has played on the news for months now, and we hear nothing of the white lunatics, who are hanging out under the GOP tent.

The biggest issue is how race is used in this country. There are two ways to mobilize people: either along class lines or along social lines. Social lines come in a few forms that often inter mix. In America, populist Democrats (Obama and Edwards) mobilize based on class; while populist Republicans and some Democrats (McCain, Bush, both Clinton’s) mobilize publically along social lines, which includes race, religion, or most commonly in America elitism. As Bill Clinton most recently commented in Clarksburg, West Virginia: “The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules.” I like to call this type of social moralizers like the Clinton’s and the Bush’s anti-arugulaist (Although Bush the First with his hatred for broccoli would be an anti-broccolist).

My point is that most American will not vote based on race unless given a reason to. The most immediate political issue to all voters is economics. As a result a politician must either tell them their economic situation is because of a particular race (a tactic that fell out of style some time after WII for obvious reasons) or as is the case in this election scare voters with race.

In this election Hillary has tied race to class and allowed racist voters to vote on race, while claiming it is class. I saw this most despicably with her most recent appearance on Fox News’ O’Riley Factor. While on the show, when asked about Reverend Wright Hillary claimed Wright’s comments offend her as an American. The issue is she is offended as a white American. When you divide people along social lines you ask them to forget about the economic issues to instead focus on differences.

What’s most alarming about this strategy is it is exactly what Reverend Wright does and what Obama’s campaign claims to be trying to move away from. Recently when talking to my father about the mess I asked him, “but isn’t Wright correct that Black’s are screwed over by America?”

Must to my surprise my dad said, “Andrew you’re missing the point. Wright is like Stokely Carmichael, he jumps on the backs of those trying to bring people together for change and pushes his own agenda that has no substance just rage.”

He went on to tell me a story of a Vietnam War protest he attended. They marched to the UN in NYC. When they got there MLK gave what he remembers as an amazingly beautiful speech about how the cause of African American’s and White American’s was the same and the inequality of blacks had mirrored itself in the unjustness of the Vietnam War. Soon after MLK got off the stage Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther’s, trotted on and started a chant, “What do we want? Black Power! When do we want it now?”

My father remembers feeling used. He remembers suddenly the cohesion he felt with blacks around him just minutes ago, as he stood with and for civil rights and an end to the war, suddenly slipped away. He was divided from them by the words of one man. One America was being divided into two America’s.

Just as Stokely Carmichael undermined the vision of MLK and excluded whites from the process of building one America for all people, so does Reverend Wright do the same to Obama. If we truly plan to build a society without racism, we must not just be for retribution, but more importantly, for healing and forgiveness.

We claim now to live in a post-racial and post-sexist society. This vision is pushed upon and does not reflect the reality on the ground. The media’s focus on Wright and their fear of Wright’s style is a manifestation of our continued inability to accept difference.

Hillary Clinton’s use of Wright to divide Americans along social divisions is as bad as Wright’s attempts to do the same. At the end of the day a poor white man and a poor black man have far more in common then a poor white man has with Clinton or McCain.

Racism in our country is not just a product of social difference and social misunderstandings, but is also a product of deliberate action on the part of politicians to divide and mobilize us in ways that most benefit themselves at the ballot box.

I sincerely hope that Hillary’s defeat has, at least in some part, been a rejection, by the American public, of her use of Reverend Wright and therefore race as a tool to mobilize votes.