Our only language is English

When President Obama filled out his census form last week, he had to decide how to answer the race question. Even though his selection was only half true, he settled on the “Black, African American, or Negro” option.
I noticed Facebook friends struggling with the same issue: If my father’s parents were born in Central America, but my mother’s parents are from two disparate European countries, what does that make me? This is what Americans are famous for: We welcome the tired, hungry, and poor into the ultimate melting pot.

For some Americans, however, the prospect of non-Hispanic whites becoming a minority in 2012 is an outrage and a focal point for their fear. Ethnic differences are simple and concrete: relatively easy to see and to count. The flaws of global capitalism, on the other hand — a major source of change, uncertainty, and discontent — are complex and abstract.
The angry and violent reactions to the passage of health care reform have more to do with this fear than with objections to particular items in the legislation. Before health care reform can truly succeed, the Obama White House must calm the fears of those who feel increasingly disenfranchised.

Obama supporters can’t even say the word “vote” in English

There was an example of the rhetoric of fear at February’s Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Tom Tancredo, a Republican presidential candidate in 2008 and a former congressman from Colorado, included the following remarks in his convention kickoff speech: “[P]eople who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
The Tea Party Convention was not as extremely right wing as some media outlets chose to portray it, however. Jonathan Raban, in The New York Review of Books, provided a nice counterpoint. In attending the convention, Raban remained somewhat undercover. He didn’t reveal that he was a reporter, and he had potentially sympathetic credentials: “I had my own quarrels with big government, especially on the matter of mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and the rest, and I counted on my libertarian streak to give me sufficient common ground with my fellow tea partiers.”
He describes the reaction he witnessed to Tancredo’s “can’t spell the word vote” remarks:

Though a ripple of cheers and applause spread through the ballroom, I was taking my cue from a middle-aged couple sitting immediately in front of me. When they clapped, I clapped. When they rose to their feet, I did too. Now they exchanged a hard-to-read glance and their hands stayed in their laps.
My guess was that few in the room were offended by the association of the “literacy test” with the Jim Crow laws, though some may have been. But everyone I’d met so far was in a position to know immigrants, legal and otherwise; they employed them in their houses and businesses, to look after their children and work on their yards. The idea that Maria and Luis, or Tatyana and Dmitri, had somehow subverted the political system to bring about Obama’s election struck them as insulting and absurd.

The birther issue

There were similar mixed reactions at the convention to conservative writer Joseph Farah, who appealed to “birthers.”

“I have a dream,” Farah said. “And my dream is that if Barack Obama even seeks reelection as president in 2012, he won’t be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate?'” Again, I saw as many glum and unresponsive faces in the crowd as people standing up to cheer.

Conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart — described recently in Time as “the Web’s most combative conservative impresario” — criticized Farah for bringing up the “birther issue.” Their argument in the lobby was captured on audiotape and transcribed. Farah speaks first, then Breitbart:

“It is a winning issue!”
“It’s not a winning issue.”
“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”
“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”

Hopeful signs from the Right

This gives me a small glimer of hope that sanity might one day prevail. Also hopeful is this observation from Raban:

At Opryland [the Nashville convention], devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand’s gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.

Plus, there’s this comment from one of Raban’s dining companions: “You know, I phoned my husband last night. I told him that being here has made me realize that I am a liberal conservative.”

I’m not bitter

Taking all this into consideration, and looking back with all we know today, Obama’s “bitter Midwesterners” gaffe during the campaign takes on new meaning.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Related posts:
Obama on race and the Tea Party
Reaction to health care: A step backwards