It is excrutiatingly difficult for me, and probably many other white males, to imagine the life of a black person in the U.S.  Here is an example from an article on Alternet that was forwarded to me by my wife that takes shots, well deserved shots surely, at the Republicans and Democrats alike:

The swelling white Republican base that triumphed on Election Day is a nightmare. Although their actual numbers may well have been augmented by electronic means in counties with computerized voting (including the whole state of Georgia, for example), there can be no doubt that the Bush victory was propelled by something very much like a mass social movement, with its own vocabulary and leadership structures. This is Bush’s army, says Dr. Dawson. “The Bush administration has achieved absolute mastery of white Protestants, particularly those with less education. This is damning for the country and its future.”

It is actually a familiar enemy, drawn from the same “stock” that have cut off their economic noses to spite black faces since the end of the Civil War. They were once the Dixiecrat base, who then became the southern Republican base, and are now tied together with similar white elements throughout the country by interlocking networks of churches and the Republican Party. The corporate media feign surprise and fascination at the emergence of this huge group of whites – a posture that strikes many blacks as disingenuous, since those of us with southern roots know that crowd all too well. According to the Washington Post’s David Broder, “the exit poll indicated that about 22 percent of [Tuesday’s] voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians, three-quarters of whom went for Bush.” That amounts to about one-third of Bush’s total national vote.

This indispensable core, which now acts as a mass citizen militia for Karl Rove and other Bush commandants, scares the hell out of many of the 44 percent of white folks who didn’t vote for Bush. Black Americans do not need European models of fascism to understand the grave threat these people represent to life and liberty. They are the folks standing under the tree, while we swing from the limbs.

These whites – or rather, their leaders – are masters of euphemism. They swamped the polls (with some technical and political assistance) on Tuesday with the words “moral values” on their lips – white evangelical code for the “good people” versus the “bad” people. The ancient but still fiercely operative black-white paradigm has been overlaid with “Arabs,” “clash of civilizations” and “homosexuals,” but it’s still the same onion. The new texture of the old paradigm of oppression simply allows more whites to act/vote on what NAACP Chairman Julian Bond calls their “racist impulses.” These are the impulses that fueled the Republican electoral machine.

On the other hand, we believe that there is a far deeper and wider white opposition to the current regime than existed at any point in the supposedly “turbulent” 1960s and early 1960s. Many anti-Bush whites are aware that when black folks were disenfranchised by a criminal conspiracy of George W. Bush’s national government, they were also disenfranchised. Even larger proportions of white youth know the deal. Black people’s only obligation to them is the same one we have to ourselves: to lead.

We all need to be educated.

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