There's no denying Obama's race plays a role in protests

By GottaLaff

The post that these excerpts are from has a lot more to it, but here's a sample.

"I certainly detect a racial element in some of the hostility directed at President Obama," said Richard Alba, the distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "I'm certain there are white Americans for whom having a dark-skinned president in the White House is an enormous shock. This is really a complete overturning of what they thought was the natural order of things. The natural way that American society worked. It upsets all their ideas about how American society is structured." [...]

"I don't think anybody has used the symbols of race and racism to criticize this president more than the individuals on the right," said D'Linell Finley, a political science professor at Auburn University at Montgomery. "Listen to the radio, look at the signs and listen to their individual words. It comes through both in a subtle and not-so-subtle manner."

The not-so-subtle incidents are numerous:

• Last October, John McCain's campaign ousted a Buchanan County, Va., McCain campaign official, Bobby May, for writing a newspaper column that said that if Obama were elected he'd hire rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black and change the national anthem to the "Negro National Anthem" by James Weldon Johnson.
• Diane Fedele, who was then the president of a Republican women's club in San Bernardino County, Calif., resigned last October after she sent out a newsletter with a drawing of Obama on a bogus food-stamp coupon surrounded by ribs, watermelon and fried chicken.
• In May, Sherri Goforth, an aide to Republican state Sen. Diane Black of Tennessee, sent an e-mail to Republican staffers showing the first 43 U.S. presidents in stately poses, but Obama's image, as the 44th president, was a pair of bright white cartoonish eyes on a black background.
• In June, Diann Jones, the vice chairman of the Collin County Republican Party in Texas sent an e-mail to local Republican clubs calling a proposal for a $50 gun tax "another terrific idea from the black house and its minions."
• Also in June, South Carolina Republican activist Rusty DePass compared an escaped gorilla from a Columbia zoo to first lady Michelle Obama's ancestors.
• At an August political forum, Republican U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas denied any racial intent when she said that the party was looking for a "great white hope" to lead the party into the future.

David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political Studies, a public-policy research institute, said: "You have a whole bunch of incidents of that sort, and they're accelerating in their occurrences."

To many, South Carolina Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie" outburst was only the latest racially tinged episode involving the party. Bositis said that much of the antagonism came from the Southern wing of the party, in part because Obama was the first Northern Democratic president since Kennedy and because the Republican Party's Southern clout had been marginalized.

"It has been a long time since they've had such a limited influence in the U.S. Congress," Bositis said. "A number of these people have gone out of their way to diss Obama, and that's a Southern thing, it's not a black thing. But what is it about Obama that they most want to diss? A lot of it has to do with his race."

It's been a long day. I'll leave the commentary to you.