re: #142 The Ghost of a Flea

None of this is to say there’s no animus directed towards him due to race: Obama and family get dinged for any perceived display of “blackness” (in the African-American culture sense)—AA culture being one of those liminal “not fully American” categories in TP eyes—but Obama, as a biracial person, also gets flak for inauthentic or insufficient blackness. More ugly is how often I hear dogwhistles about OBH’s mom’s interracial marriages (and particularly how they didn’t work out). So yeah, racism as a subset of xenophobia is also an issue.

Ghost, you know I luv ya but I have to call MBF on this one.

Whatever authenticity troubles Obama might have do not translate to the polls. Remember: the GOTP has been furious that we won’t vote en masse for any of their candidates, for the past 40 years. The numbers didn’t change all that much with the ‘08 election, and it’s easy to speculate they wouldn’t have, had Hillary gotten the nomination.

We’ll never see a Black Tea Party, waving Obama-is-a-high-yella pickets or demanding to return the good old days when anti-miscegenation statutes were the law. :P