A Year of Hyper-Racialism

Barack Obama came into office with a promise of ushering in a new post-racial era. One year into his term and Chris Matthews has already declared, “Mission Accomplished!” He forgot Obama was black, you see. America is now post-racial! Sadly, the facts tell a very different story. Over the last year, we have witnessed a proliferation of indiscriminate accusations of racism, or a period of what I like to refer to as hyper-racialism.

Paul Krugman insured that 2009 got off to a fast start when it came to race-mongering, writing on January 1st that the GOP is the “party of racial backlash.” It turns out, according to the Nobel Prize bearing economist, that skeptics of big government aren’t concerned about upholding the constitution or protecting liberties. Oh, no. Our real motivation for opposing liberalism is that it means giving money to “Those People.” Wink, wink.

Paul Krugman must have been on to something, because as we saw throughout the rest of the year, pretty much everything said by the right turned out to be code for racism.

MSNBC’s Carlos Watson wondered whether “socialist is becoming a code word.” CNN questioned whether there were “racial overtones” at the Tea Parties, while David Shuster dubbed them an “intolerance festival.” Janeane Garofalo out and out pronounced all Tea Party attendees as racist.

Cynthia Tucker used her telepathic powers to venture into the minds of town hall protesters, where she found that 45-65% are racists. Congressman John Dingell was reminded of the Ku Klux Klan when he saw the town hall protests, while ABC considered the upset voters as equivalent to “hate groups.” Chris Matthews, who apparently at the time had not yet forgotten that Obama is black, declared that the protesters were really just all ornery “because we have a black president.”

Chris Matthews was also determined to undercover the racial motivations of Rep. Joe Wilson’s challenge to Obama’s truthfulness, while Maureen Down imagined an spoken “boy” affixed to his outburst, which was more than enough to convict him of racial intolerance. Former President Jimmy Carter even took time away from his busy schedule of attacking the evil zionists and appeasing terrorists to condemn Wilson as a racist.

Even battles over the stimulus were not above racial overtones. House Majority Whip James Clyburn was particularly insulted by the hesitation of four GOP governors to accept federal stimulus funds because “these four states are in the heart of the black belt.” Clyburn proved to be extra-sensitive on the issue of the stimulus when he tried to make Mark Sanford’s comparison of Barack Obama’s spending to the economic policies of Zimbabwe, which has set a record for devaluing currency, into a racially motivated statement.

On and on it goes.

Time after time, the President’s ideological brethren trotted out the race card, attempting to stick it to his opponents like it was the queen of spades in a game of hearts. And while his followers did most of the heavy lifting, Obama himself proved not to be above the racial fray with his infamous “acted stupidly” comment.

No matter which way we turned, race was perpetually in the faces of Obama’s critics. Not because we brought it up, but because the party of identity politics cannot let it go. While Barack Obama can promise to move us into a post-racial era, only when he and his colleagues abandon such games, and drop the race card as a political tool, will it ever be possible. For no matter how hard we try to forget that Obama is black, Chris Matthews and his hyper-racial ilk keep reminding us.