Olbermann Backs Carter's Assertion That Anti-Obama Sentiment is Racist, With Examples

Jimmy Carter's recent statements that much of the enmity and anger being directed at President Barack Obama is racism-based has drawn denials and criticism from the GOP. However, on his Wednesday show, Keith Olbermann said he could detail no less than three dozen separate incidents which appear to support Carter's assertion.

Some of Olbermann's examples make sense, but some do not. For example, he listed the attempts by Obama’s opponents to link him to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. In reality, that appears less like racism than fear mongering.

However, Limbaugh’s claim that Obama has made it okay for black kids to beat up a white kid on a school bus --- that's pretty solid. Here's what Olbermann and Melissa Harris-Lacewell from Princeton University discussed.

OLBERMANN: We‘re going again, what was said by former President Jimmy Carter; quote, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact he is a black man.”

President Carter placed that claim in context, context of the nation‘s long historical struggle with racism, and his own personal experience, his own witness. In our third story in the COUNTDOWN, the acrid cutting context.

The problem with claiming that Congressman Joe Wilson‘s outburst might have been racially tinged is not that it‘s such a stretch, but rather that it fuels the false equivalency. If you say any criticism of Obama is racial, your words will be twisted into all criticism of Obama is racial. And if deniers can then prove one instance isn‘t racial, they will exaggerate that loan proof into proof that all criticism isn‘t racial.

Was this poster of the president at a tea party in Brighton, Michigan not racist? The kind of poster that showed up in various town hall meetings, with the 9/12 protests serving as a road rage conventions. The most blatant examples were there, along with the heavily coded ones. The president as the devil, the president as the blood-sucking alien, the president as undocumented worker, the president as Hitler.

And if you think that illusions to violence are not racially motivated, you may soon reconsider. The relationship between hate on the ground and hate from the airwaves of right wing bloviators is complicated, a symbiotic, increasingly dangerous one-upsmanship. But when Rush Limbaugh says, quote, “in Obama‘s America, the white kids now get to beat up the black kid with the black kids cheering.” -- or “white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering,” basing it on a school bus incident which police determined was not over race, but over an argument over who got to sit where.

That alteration is definitionally, unadulterated racism. More on Limbaugh in a moment.

But that same story about a fight on a bus was prominently played on Matt Drudge‘s website, surrounded by anti-Obama headlines. Context is key. But context is hardly necessary to reveal the obvious.

When the president‘s environmental adviser, Van Jones, resigned, it was in part because this man stirred up accusations of Mr. Jones‘ otherness. Of course, Glenn Beck had been, as he still is, losing advertisers because of the efforts by the organization Mr. Jones co-founded, Color of Change.

Advertisers objecting to Mr. Beck having said he thought Obama is, quote, “a guy who has a deep-seeded hatred for white people or the white culture. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

Mr. Limbaugh picked up where Beck left off, pointing out that Van Jones is Obama. just as Obama is William Ayers, which is a racist double dip. Black president is the same as other troublesome black men. Black president is dangerous just like a domestic terrorist.

So when Bill O‘Reilly tops his show just last night with yet another segment on Acorn, he continues in the tradition of right wing pundits and politicians who have taken isolated cases of abuse to portray Acorn as a collection of criminally minded African-Americans, with the president as Acorn‘s poster child.

Bringing us back to Mr. Limbaugh, whose consistent mission has been to denigrate Obama the candidate, Obama the president, in overtly racist terms. Calling him half-rican-American and playing a song, “Barack the Magic Negro” during the presidential campaign. Whatever its origins, the song is on its face racist.

Late in that same campaign, a local McCain campaign volunteer falsely claimed that she had been robbed and pinned to the ground by a black man, 6‘4, with a knife, who then scratched the letter B into her face. She did it to herself, backwards, in the mirror.

A campaign in which Obama as monkey, brandished by a McCain supporter, was a near footnote to the far more dangerous theme. Then candidate Sarah Palin taking up the William Ayers story and turning it into this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH PALIN, FMR. GOVERNOR OF ALASKA: Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: And while we literally do not have the time here to recount all the fear-driven nonsense stirred up during that campaign, it easily led to instances like this one.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I can‘t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he‘s not—he‘s not—he‘s an Arab. He‘s not?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN ®, ARIZONA: No, ma‘am. No, ma‘am.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: So when calls to kill him rang out at some GOP rally, who could legitimately claim that it had to be isolated from that context?

Meantime, rumors about the other side and its racism never proved true, but spread, like the false accusation that Michelle Obama had used the word whitey. Thus the pain this “New Yorker” cover stirred, because it was so accurately and painfully, if satirically, representational of much of what was going on back then.

And after the election, the White House watermelon picture e-mailed by the mayor of Los Alamitos, and the “New York Post” dead monkey cartoon, both of the piece.

Then there were the under-reported incidents. Immediately following the election of the first African American president, in Durham, North Carolina, police officers investigated for making racial slurs on their MySpace pages. Dozens of incidents of alleged hate crimes by ordinary citizens across the country.

And at a Maine convenience store, a betting pool on when Obama might be assassinated. At North Carolina State University, the spray painting of kill that racist expletive deleted.

It is sickening, but it is just a sampling. And it shares the same obvious under-current. Just as the brandishing of the Confederate Flag during the campaign is mirrored by the Confederate Flag at the recent 9/12 protests. Just as the South Shall Rise Again sentiment associated with states‘ rights finds its way to flirtations with succession, as in Texas, with Rick Perry as governor.

That ample and ugly context constantly supplemented by the most foul refreshers built for consumption, like Limbaugh wondering, quote, “if Obama‘s brother is still in the hut,” end quote.

Set against that, are we to believe that the birther movement can be separated from racism? That the wild fear mongering of the deathers does not play on racist fears of a black man‘s otherness, and his stereotype proclivity to violence?

Thus, the first time a president in history was heckled at a joint session of Congress by a man who had maligned Strom Thurmond‘s mixed-race daughter. And yet Mr. Wilson‘s defenders wonder why anyone might think his outburst was even slightly racially motivated.

And contemporaneously, they will still assert that Mr. Wilson‘s derision was an aberration, though they brought signs in its anticipation.

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