Obama's Historical Significance (As taught in an Af Am History class)

Tomorrow in my African American History class, I am going to teach about Obama's historical significance (and the significance of his historical point of view). I thought you might be interested in my lesson plans and my prezi. I would of course appreciate your feedback before class tomorrow.



The reading for the day is Obama's 2008 Speech on Race, sometimes titled "A More Perfect Union." After discussing the content of the speech itself, we will ask what philosophy of history Obama is constructing in this speech. One of the questions on their take-home final is "Houston Bryan Roberson argues that African Americans have a distinctive history that runs counter to U.S. History. Agree or disagree and explain why." Obama, in contrast, argues not only that African American history is definitively American history, but also that US History has been a history of upward progress--of becoming a more perfect union; "This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected." He identifies the kind of history espoused by Roberson and Jeremiah Wright as "a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America." This is an even stronger pushback to Roberson's viewpoint than our textbook's.

Our textbook, by Darlene Clark Hine et al., suggests in its epilogue that African American history is a central part of American history, but that African Americans make up a "nation within a nation." In these lines, Obama argues that African Americans need not be separated as such: "What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time" At the same time, he recognizes the distinct culture of black people, particularly as it is expressed in black churches like that led by Jeremiah Wright.

After discussing these varying interpretations of the trajectory of African American History, we will ask two questions--what has Obama's presidency meant for African Americans and has it ushered in a "post-racial America. For the first question, I am suggesting there are symbolic meanings and functional meanings. For the symbolic, I base my prezi around this image:

In the New York Times article I link to above the journalist remarks, "the photo is tangible evidence of what polls also show: Mr. Obama remains a potent symbol for blacks, with a deep reservoir of support. As skittish as White House aides often are in discussing race, they also clearly revel in the power of their boss’s example." At the same time, I think it is such a profoundly different image of a president--basically bowing to a small child, instead of being a grandiose bombastic face of American aggression.

After speaking about Obama's symbolic power, I will let Tavis Smiley and Cornel West question the tangible results of Obama's policies for African Americans through this video.

For the sake of time, I will probably stop the video after West calls Obama's presidency "disastrous."

After discussing these two different viewpoints on the meaning of Obama's presidency, I will divide the students into groups of 2 and 3 to discuss the idea of "post-racial America." One group will get Toure's ardent dismisal of any sort of ushering in of "post-racial America." The rest of the groups will get one of the pieces of this New York Times' "Room for Debate" entitled "Under Obama, is America "Post-Racial?" The debate is about Obama's lack of race-based policies, which Randall Kennedy has argued continued and increased politics of "transracial universalism."*

Any suggestions before I teach?

I'll let you know how it goes in the comments section.

*added at 1:06pm. In the review of Randall Kennedy's book I link to, he argues that Obama's speech on race was "little more than a carefully calibrated attempt to defuse the public relations crisis precipitated by the Wright affair. Far from frank, it understated the extent of the country’s racial divisions and sought to blame blacks and whites equally for them, when in fact, Kennedy writes, “black America and white America are not equally culpable. White America enslaved and Jim Crowed black America (not the other way around).” The speech was in keeping with the candidate’s wildly successful race strategy, which involved making white voters feel better about themselves whenever possible." I'm going to point this out to students during the first part of the lesson.

Notes on the State of Thomas Jefferson

On the heels of a vigorous discussion of how best to tell the story of emancipation prompted by the November release of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, an interesting debate on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson erupted online late last week.* While the Spielberg movie had clearly prompted the earlier discussion, the occasion for the Jefferson discussion was a bit more obscure, though all involved knew that Henry Wiencek's Master of the Mountain was somehow the cause of the dispute.

The foundation of this recent discussion about Jefferson seems to have been not Wiencek's book itself (which appeared back in October), nor even the controversies about the book, but rather a November 26 New York Times piece by Jennifer Schuessler about these controversies.

The Schuessler article does a somewhat better job conveying the heat of this dispute than casting light on what exactly is at stake.  Wiencek, an independent scholar, indicts Jefferson for his involvement with the institution of slavery and for his treatment of his slaves. While the book received some positive reviews, most academics have been very critical of it.  Wiencek, at least as portrayed by Schuessler, suggests that these scholars "inside the Jefferson bubble" are reflexively protecting the third president from criticism.  Meanwhile, Schuessler presents academic scholars as dismissive of Wiencek in part because he is not an academic.  What gets a bit buried in the article is that the criticism of Wiencek is largely that little in his book is new, and what is new isn't very convicing. Wiencek apparently argues that, in the middle of his life, Jefferson suddenly realized how profitable slavery was and promptly abandoned his previous objections to the institution (“It was all about the money,” Schuessler quotes Wiencek as saying. “By the 1790s, he saw [slaves] as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”).  Historians seem to be particularly irked at Wiencek's attempts to cast all of his opponents as reflexive Jefferson defenders. I don't have a view of Master of the Mountain, which I haven't read. But Wiencek's suggestion that Annette Gordon-Reed is "inside the Jefferson bubble" is ridiculous. Gordon-Reed came to Jefferson studies as a complete outsider.  Her pathbreaking first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, was a broadside directed against Jefferson's actual reflexive defenders.  

The nature of the controversy over Wiencek's book and of its coverage in the New York Times is worth noting in part because this week's online discussion of Jefferson, while centering on Wiencek's subject--Jefferson and slavery--has said relatively little about Wiencek and his book. The opening salvo seems to have been fired by Paul Finkelman, an academic legal historian and author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.  Finkelman was quoted by Schuessler as a critic of Wiencek's claims of great originality.  As if to emphasize that his disagreements with Wiencek did not concern the negativity of Master of the Mountain's evaluation of Jefferson (nor, for that matter, the desirability of alliterative titles evoking the third president's home), last Saturday, December 1, Finkelman published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "The Monster of Monticello," which argued that Jefferson was a "creepy, brutal hypocrite."  The main source of Finkelman's disagreement with Wiencek involves the latter's claim that Jefferson's devotion to slavery dated from the 1790s.  In fact, argues Finkelman, "Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free."

David Post, a blogger at the conservative academic blog The Volokh Conspiracy and a Professor of Law at Temple and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, responded with hostility to Finkelman, accusing him of purveying "truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense."

Much of the rest of the academic blogosphere followed with a series of posts agreeing wholeheartedly with Finkelman's indictment of Jefferson. For example, Corey Robin wrote a long post arguing that Jefferson's thought was a tributary of fascism (though he later emphasized that the connection between Jefferson and fascism was more related to his views on race than on slavery per se).  Scott Lemieux blogged for Finkelman and against Post on Lawyers, Guns and Money.  Yesterday, Kathleen Geier of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog noted the controversy.

Geier pointed out that negative views of Jefferson and his relationship to slavery have become much more mainstream than they were even in the very recent past.  I'd agree with this assessment and think that, in general, it reflects progress in scholars' coming to terms with Thomas Jefferson's life, thought, and legacy.

However, to me what stands out about this entire debate is how it violates a lot of our expectations when it comes to academic historians' forays into the public sphere.

Compare it, for example, to what I think is a much more stereotypical example of the form: the debate earlier this year over David Barton's The Jefferson Lies. As most readers of this blog know Barton, an evangelical Christian minister, popular historian, GOP activist, and favorite of the far right, enjoyed his national fifteen minutes of fame last year.  The publication of his Jefferson book, however, was greeted with lots of very effective scholarly pushback, eventually leading his publisher to pull all copies from distribution.

The controversy over Barton's The Jefferson Lies thus fulfilled a lot of what one might expect from a conflict between academic and non-academic history in the public sphere: a popular, ideologically-driven author attempted to pass fabrications off as history in order to defend a peculiar, hagiographical portrait of a Founding Father.  Academic historians effectively fact-checked him and manage to win the war...or at least the battle.

What's interesting about the more recent Jefferson scuffle is that the main divisions between the non-academic historian, Henry Wiencek, and his academic opponents are considerably more subtle.  Though some have tried to defend an idealized vision of Jefferson, the main conflict is between two negative portraits of him.  And the main areas of disagreement involve issues of interpretation (e.g. did Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery change in the 1790s?) and tone, rather than relatively simple issues of fact and honesty.  The result is an opportunity for a more complicated, but still largely negative, portrait of Jefferson-on-race to reach a broader public.  This is a good thing. But my guess is that the underlying debate over Wiencek's book is still rather mysterious for non-historians playing along at home.

________________________________
* I posted on the debates about Lincoln last Monday, which prompted a fascinating discussion in comments that I did not adequately respond to.  Ray then added a fascinating post on Hollywood history later in the week.  I plan to return to the questions raised in that conversation and in Ray's post, though I may not get to it until next Monday.

Obama and the Politics of Race in the 21st Century: On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "Fear of a Black President," Part II

The following post is the second part of a two part post from Carl Pedersen.  The first part was posted yesterday. 

Carl Pedersen is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Business and Culture at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Obama’s America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). His article on Obama and race, "The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century" is forthcoming in Michael Ledwidge et al., eds., Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America (London: Routledge, 2013)

IV

In what is perhaps his most scathing attack on Obama, Coates accuses him of using his bully pulpit not to address racism, but instead of employing a Booker T. Washington approach of "railing against the perceived failings of black culture." Coates does both Obama and Washington a disservice by castigating them as merely subservient conservative politicians. As Robert J. Norrell points out in his new biography, Up From History, the accommodation-protest binary (which Coates addresses by contrasting Bookerism with "another political tradition [that] casts its skepticism not simply upon black culture but upon the entire American project") ignores the similarity between Washington’s challenges to white society and the protest tradition of the NAACP. Norrell argues that "Washington made public protests against Jim Crow on railroads, lynching, disfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation, and discrimination by labor unions. He arranged and partly financed lawsuits challenging disfranchisement, jury discrimination, and peonage. And he campaigned constantly against the pernicious images of black projected in the media and popular culture. The NAACP would do those same things after him."

Obama has taken a slightly different approach. He has voiced opposition to racial profiling, explicitly in the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and implicitly in the Trayvon Martin case and in response to a question at the second debate about Arizona anti-immigration laws. But his opposition to racial injustice is primarily conducted through what Thomas Sugrue in Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race has called a "hybrid approach" that focuses on not only African American attitudes and responsibility (as Coates would have it), but on, as Obama put it in his NAACP speech in 2009, "structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind."

Obama’s seemingly race-neutral policies, such as stimulus dollars for public sector workers, grants to underperforming schools (without, however, mandating school desegregation), and, not least, the health care reform that will over time provide coverage for millions of uninsured Americans and increase health-related employment, have arguably benefited African Americans disproportionately.

Other examples of his approach are in a sense hidden in plain view, with policies that have received relatively little media attention. Even Coates acknowledges that the appointment of Shirley Sherrod as Georgia State Director of Rural Development at the USDA "represented the kind of unnoticed but significant changes that Obama’s election brought," notwithstanding her rather ignominious dismissal by Obama following misunderstood remarks that were perceived as racist.

Sugrue argues that the "White House bully pulpit has never been sufficient, in its own right, to transform institutions. It has taken the coercive power of the law to make appreciable changes in African Americans’ status in American society. The record of Eric Holder’s Justice Department is a case in point. Early on in his tenure, Holder called the US "a nation of cowards" for failing to address the issue of race. Under George W. Bush, the Department of Justice increasingly neglected enforcement of civil rights, from housing and employment to voting rights. Holder has taken the opposite tact, filing briefs supporting affirmative action, and lawsuits requiring communities to construct affordable housing that would make it easier for minorities to seek employment in the suburbs. Holder called the attempt of Republican-controlled states to pass Voter ID laws that the Brennan Center for Justice estimate could disenfranchise up to 5 million mostly minority and younger voters a new form of poll tax. The Justice Department has brought suits against states for violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that subjects voting changes to administrative review.

In her book on how the War on Drugs has led to mass incarceration in the US, Michelle Alexander accuses Obama of "revving up the drug war through the same failed policies and programs that have systematically locked up young men of color into a permanent racial undercaste." However, in 2010, the Obama signed into law the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduces the disparity between mandatory minimum sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the legislation should apply to those convicted before passage of the act but after sentencing.

V

Mitt Romney is making history in 2012. The headline of a recent piece in The New Republicsays it all: "Romney Has Historic Lead Among White Voters." In 1944, the Supreme Court outlawed white primaries in the case of Smith vs. Allwright. In 2012, the GOP had had no need of judicial remedies to keep African Americans from voting in their primaries. The African American vote in the GOP primaries in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina was negligible. A poll released in August 2012 put Romney’s support among African Americans at 0%. A survey conducted by Associated Press in October found that racism against African Americans has increased since Obama was elected in 2008. With only slight hyperbole, the British journalist Gary Younge called the election of 2012 the most racially polarized in history.

The context is clear. Obama is the first African American president. The trajectory of demographics points in one direction—a majority minority nation by mid-century. The US Census for 2010 revealed that 4 states—Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and Texas—have already become majority minority. The Republicans are appealing to an ever-shrinking base. Hence the talk of an Anglo-Saxon heritage and more civilized nations and racially-charged rhetoric about welfare and government handouts. White rage is informed by this larger context which makes it all the more potent.

Coates presents a strong case for how the US has not changed measurably in dealing with race. However, in his 1997 study of race relations, A Country of Strangers,  David Shipler concluded that "things are getting better and worse at the same time. Racially, America is torn by the crosscurrents of progress and decay. Practically every step forward is accompanied by a subtle erosion of the ground beneath." The first African American president governs a nation still beset by racial prejudice but which has nonetheless made progress in race relations since the 1950s. Those who would turn back the demographic clock and reestablish white dominance are admittedly still powerful adversaries. But in spite of their efforts, Obama is, incrementally and often under the radar, changing the way we think about race.

Obama and the Politics of Race in the 21st Century: On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "Fear of a Black President," Part I

The following post comes from Carl Pedersen and will be published in two parts on consecutive days.  

Carl Pedersen is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Business and Culture at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Obama’s America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). His article on Obama and race, "The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century" is forthcoming in Michael Ledwidge et al., eds., Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America (London: Routledge, 2013)

The announcement came at 11 pm Eastern time on November 4, 2008. "We can report history" intoned MSNBC. CBS echoed the sentiment. "This is an incredible milestone in the history of this country" exclaimed news anchor Katie Couric. "A century and a half after the Constitution abolished slavery and guaranteed blacks the right to vote, four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, voters have chosen our first African American president." When Barack Obama came onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago moments after havng been declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election, the euphoria in the crowd was palpable. Cameras dutifully panned to the civil rights activist and presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson, who stood with tears in his eyes, overcome with emotion. This was indisputably an historic moment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently thought so too. In his incisive essay on Obama and race in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, "Fear of a Black President" (paraphrasing the title of the Public Enemy album from 1990, Fear of a Black Planet), he writes that the election of Barack Obama had "convinced [me] that the country really had changed." More than three years after the euphoria of Grant Park, the initial reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida was, in Coates’s words, "trans-partisan." However, as soon as the president commented on the tragedy by pledging to get to the bottom of the case, "the illusion of consensus" disappeared and reverted to "something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder."

His essay, not surprisingly, is bereft of the optimism of 2008. He laments that "[a]fter Obama won, the longed-for post-racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified." According to Coates, all Americans are left with more than half a century after the Civil Rights Act is a "compromised integration" that reveals "a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard."

Coates condemns the double standard in US politics, rooted in two conflicting facts: a "love of democracy [and] an undemocratic white supremacy" that excuse white resentment and anger but unequivocally condemn black rage and that force African Americans to be "twice as good" if they want to achieve anything resembling parity in US society. What Coates calls "the thoroughly racialized backlash" against Obama is indeed unrelenting. Coates cites the racialized discourse of conservative media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Republican politicians such as Joe Wilson and Newt Gingrich.

At the same time, he criticizes Obama for virtually ignoring race since he took office. As he puts it, "the myth of ’twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors." He points out that it was Obama himself, in his now famous speech in March 2008, who declared the US could not afford to ignore race.

It is incontrovertible that Obama has avoided talking about race as president. Coates sees Obama’s avoidance of the subject as indicative of his conservatism. His essay, however, has an inner tension between upbraiding Obama for ignoring race while underscoring the underlying constraints that could justify his reticence.

Coates is of course aware of the burdens of history that could impose restraints on a president who possesses a high degree of historical consciousness. Coates goes so far as to say that "[r]ace is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics." Yet, like Adolph Reed and Cornel West, he comes close to calling Obama a race traitor for refusing to address race both rhetorically and in terms of public policy.

However, it could be argued that Obama has made a conscious decision to temper his public comments on race while promoting policies that benefit the African American community.

II

If we look at the current state of race relations in the US through the prism of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called the Long Civil Rights Movement, it is clear that the election of the first African American president did not (and indeed could not) usher in a postracial society.

Hall outlines the ways in which the struggle for racial equality in the 20th century was countered by conservatives bent on preserving white privilege. The two-track system of unemployment insurance established as part of New Deal reforms in the 1930s excluded agricultural and domestic workers and relegated African Americans to means-tested programs. Coates makes no mention of Obama’s proposal to make the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform act (the official title is Personal Responsiblity and Work Opportunity Act) more flexible by allowing states to fashion alternative ways of putting people back to work than the federal government mandated. The GOP interpreted Obama’s proposal as an attempt to get rid of the work requirement altogether. The underlying message of ads run during the summer of 2012 and at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August essentially accused the first African American president of removing work requirements in order to accommodate lazy blacks. As Martin Gillens observes in Why Americans Hate Welfare, "the perception that blacks are lazy is consistently the most powerful predictor of white Americans’ opposition to welfare."

To say, as Coates does, that "Obama’s election effectively racialized white Americans’ views, even of health-care policy," is not the same as saying that racial attitudes did not impact views of health care in the past. Coates notes that President Bill Clinton’s health care reform proposal was not criticized as "reparations" and, quoting a study by Michael Tesler, racial attitudes had a greater impact on public opinion of Obama’s health care plan than Clinton’s. This is undoubtedly true, but it underestimates the degree to which health care reform has been racialized at least since the 1940s. Opposition to President Harry S Truman's proposal for national health care from southern politicians was rooted in the fear that it would mean integrating hospitals. In the 1960s, Mississippi Senate Democrat John Stennis proposed legislation that would allow states to give Medicare funds to segregated hospitals.

White flight from urban centers in the 1940s and 1950s, and blockbusting and redlining in the suburban real estate market spatialized race. Welfare and housing thus functioned as affirmation action for whites. African Americans were disproportionately affected by the implosion of the subprime lending market. It is no accident that Rick Santelli, in the 2009 rant that launched the Tea Party, cast the subprime crisis in terms of handouts to the undeserving poor.

Conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s articulated a colorblind narrative that equated equality before the law as the culmination of the Civil Rights movement and the triumph of American ideals. Any inequality could henceforth be explained away by references to black culture and deficiencies in black family structure.

Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy built on this narrative and targeted white middle class suburbanites and the white working class by attacking welfare, busing and affirmative action. The Southern Strategy first articulated by Kevin Phillips in a series of memos to Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968, later expanded in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips argued that  demographic trends such as suburbanization and population shifts to the South and West combined with resentment against federal government overreach were in the process of creating a constituency that would favor Republican candidates. Phillips made the case that government programs primarily benefiting African Americans imposed onerous taxes on the middle class. The Southern Strategy appealed to white voters through racially-coded language, anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric.

Rhetorically, Republicans increasingly used race-coded language to maintain and broaden support among these white constituencies. Ronald Reagan went to Neshoba, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan, to launch his presidential campaign in 1980 by talking of states’ rights. George H. W. Bush used the image of a black convicted felon to criticize his Democratic opponent’s record on criminal justice in the 1988 campaign. In the 1990s, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which linked the disproportionate number of blacks in poverty, prison and on welfare with their inferior intelligence, called for an end to the "custodial state" (i.e. welfare state).

At times, the racialized rhetoric would become more overt. In 2002, then Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, at the 100th birthday celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond, a former Democrat and now fellow Republican who had run for president in 1948 on the openly segregationist Dixiecrat ticket, declared that "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years."

Lott’s endorsement of Thurmond underscores how neoConfederate ideology permeates the conservative movement. Coates makes only passing mention of the Tea Party, which, as an NAACP report declared in 2010, is "permeated with concerns about race." References to the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary garb of many Tea Party protesters conceal the degree to which much of contemporary conservative rhetoric is informed not by reverence for the Revolutionary era, but is rather infused with the Lost Cause ideology of the post-Civil War era. Accusations of voter fraud, threats to nullify federal legislation, and giving more power to the states have an eerie resemblance to opposition to Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War and are part and parcel of a backlash of white resentment that is formidable and intransigent in its hatred for the first African American president.

III

"The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic," writes Coates. I couldn’t agree more. However, Coates confines his comments on race and foreign to questioning Obama’s extensive use of drone strikes whose victims include American citizens by arguing that "a black president with a broad sense of the world" should be more sensitive to issues of citizenship.

There is a more useful way of adducing how race affects the conservative view of Obama’s foreign policy. Obama has been criticized by conservative pundits, most recently the Washington Post’sCharles Krauthammer, for returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office during George W. Bush’s presidency. So persistent was the rumor that the White House felt compelled to issue a statement declaring the stories completely false.

The Churchill bust was removed from the Oval Office to the White House residence and replaced by a bust of Abraham Lincoln, arguably a more inspiring figure to the first African American president. That having been said, there may well have been another reason that Obama chose to move the Churchill bust. As Richard Toye recounts in Churchill’s Empire, the Churchill of stoic resolve against fascism during the Second World War was also an unrepentant imperialist who thought that the English were a superior race. Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained for his subversive activities during Churchill’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya. It is likely that Obama would rather gaze at the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 than the imperialist dedicated to the perpetuation of the British Empire.

Whatever Obama’s feelings toward Churchill, it is nevertheless a leap to suggest, as does Dinesh D’Souza in his 2010 essay in Forbes, "How Obama Thinks," that Obama believes in the "anticolonialist ideology" of his father who taught him "to see America as a force for global domination and destruction." In the summer of 2012, D’Souza released a documentary, 2016: Obama’s Americaand companion book Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream (not in any way to be confused with my 2009 book on Obama with the same title) that elaborated on the essay by claiming that if Obama is re-elected to a second term, he will indeed make good on his message of change by remaking the United States into a weak and impoverished nation. Newt Gingrich, clearly taken by D’Souza’s theory, parroted his views during the primary campaign, calling Obama a "food stamp president" with a "Kenyan anti-colonial worldview."

Casting Obama as an anti-American subversive comports well with the segregationist critique of the civil rights movement. Indeed, accusations that Obama is a communist and/or socialist (the two terms are often used interchangeably on the right) stem not only from his purported redistributionist agenda, but from the Cold War era, when advocates of racial justice were routinely labeled communist.

During Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s rather hapless trip abroad in the summer of 2012, one of his advisors let slip that Romney understood the deep Anglo-Saxon ties between the US and Britain in contrast to Obama, who "didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have." Romney, who said he was drawing on David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, said that the economic disparity between Palestinians and Israelis could be explained by cultural differences. Diamond, in an op-ed in The New York Times, opined that he suspected that Romney hadn’t even read his book, or if he had, had misunderstood his arguments. Diamond’s study of is a broadside against racist biological explanations of human history. One could suspect Romney of drawing on other work for his worldview. Perhaps he’s been reading Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which defends an Anglo-Protestant core culture threatened by demographic change, or Niall Ferguson’s Civilization that laments "the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy." This is the ideology of declinism (that also fits in well with D’Souza’s theory of a hidden Obama agenda) that stretches from the anxieties of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby worrying that "civilization’s going to pieces" to Pat Buchanan, whose latest book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025 is replete with his diatribes against demographic changes and immigration that would lead to "the end of America."

The US is thus faced with demographic transformation within and the decline of its influence abroad. The two are related and conflated in the conservative mindset. Obama, the African American of Kenyan descent, is the embodiment of both. His Republican opponent wants to reconstitute the neo-con vision of the US role in the world (and has employed George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, to help him). The fear of a weakened US in the world is paralleled by a fear of a weakened (and increasingly nonwhite) US.