re: #241 WindUpBird

There are layers of hatred, sure. I would say that it’s like a cheesecake. The cheesecake filling is racism. The crust is the other stuff. He’s a black guy, with a weird name that people associate with terrorists and Bad Guys. They use that as their hook to convince people that he’s an enemy of the state. They’re “othering” him because of his skin, and his name. That’s racism. I’m sure there are plenty of kooks who are 100% about believing that he’s a secret muslim and they’re not racist at all. But it’s primarily racism.

Here’s what I want to know: if a racist does believe “islamic” just means evil middle-eastern-guy, and he hates everyone from the middle east, and thinks a dude from Jordan is the same as a dude from Istanbul is the same as a Palestinian, is he not actually racist because “Islam is Not a Race”? (tm) Does he get a pass?

I think what’s happening here is you’re trying to make fine distinctions, distinctions that are not made by the actual haters in question. This is simple tribalism, simple motivations. These people are blunt objects.

People hate for different reasons. I know people who would hate Obama if he was a white man with the same name and any inkling that he could possibly have anything to do with Islam. These people would hate any Muslim, black, white or otherwise.

And I know people who couldn’t care less if Obama was a full head on practicing Muslim, they hate him because he is black. They don’t need any “theories” to hate him, he’s black and that’s good enough. Anything else they can hang on him is just icing.

So, it runs the gamut, and classifying someone’s hatred of Obama all under racism is ignoring the many other sick reason that people hate.

That’s the problem, we want to come up with easy answers for complex issues, much easier to lump everyone of some sort of mindset into one label. That’s bigotry, plain and simple, and it hides the real issues.