Sarah Palin (with the complicity of John McCain) is doing her best to stir the pots of racism and xenophobia in the waning days of their failing campaign. Her increasingly inflammatory remarks to crowds of agitated, undereducated, uninformed, and presumably economically on edge admirers are beginning to elicit the kinds of responses that reveal her and her followers for just what they are. Invoking Obama's middle name Hussein, then tying him to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, and finishing with a loud flourish that Obama and his "fellow" terrorist buddies don't represent the America that Palin and her supporters know and love, she has recently incited at least one person in the crowd to roar, "Kill him," while another shouted racial epithets at a black sound engineer (and momentary Obama racial surrogate/scapegoat) who was there with a local TV crew.  One has only to think back to recent American history in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and in Boston in the 1970s (to choose just two of numerous racially inflamed American moments) to recall what this virulent racism looked like and was acted out, as blacks (and sympathetic whites) became the victims of white mob violence and at worst murder.

That Palin and McCain (and their various conservative surrogates) seem to be comfortable inciting this same historical sense of frustrated and ignorant racism at a moment of profound national economic dysfunction speaks both to the desperation of their campaign and the lingering wellspring of racism that rests uncomfortably near the surface in this country. The profound moment of change that Barack Obama's candidacy (and soon presidency) heralds in this postcolonial era is causing extreme anxiety for those who still believe certain people ("that one" as McCain derisively referred to Obama in last night's debate) should know and keep "their place." 

                                                                                   

I grew up in New York as part of the first generation of black kids to be bussed out of their neighborhoods to schools in predominantly white communities. Considering that a lot of these folks whose kids we were now going to school with had moved to where they were in order to escape our family's move into what used to be "their" neighborhoods should give you a sense of the combustible situation we were being sent into in pursuit of a better education. I can't say that anything in my comfortable past up to that point could have prepared me for some of the encounters and situations I found myself in. Of course, these situations were lurking potentially anywhere outside of the safety of our homes, as I found out one day when my brother and I sat in the car while our mother made a quick visit to our family doctor, most likely to pay a bill or pick up some papers, since she was only gone but a few minutes. We lived in St. Albans, a by then largely black neighborhood  whose most famous inhabitant when I was growing up was the singer James Brown. We were only about a fifteen minute drive at best from our family doctor, Dr. Mardner, whose office was in Laurelton, then a largely white section of Queens. A few minutes after my mother went inside two girls, slightly older than my brother and I, approached our car. I innocently thought they were going to wave, say hello, and start a conversation, and looked anxiously out at them. Instead, after looking at us for a few seconds, they each picked up two large pieces of  ice from the snow covered ground and started pounding and scraping on the window with them, their faces twisted in rage as they shouted over and over, "Niggers, niggers, niggers!" Terrified, I thought the glass was going to shatter, but eventually--their anger spent--they threw the ice down and continued on. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what had prompted such rage in these two young girls, who moments before had looked to me like ordinary kids. 

This kind of hatred can only be taught. I found this out one day when a white sixth grade classmate of mine invited me to visit his home one Saturday afternoon. My parents (knowing better than I) made a big fuss about it, making sure I had fresh clothes after a morning at the local YMCA. My dad picked me up at the Y, and we proceeded the few miles to Lenny's home. Arriving at the block of row houses off of the Horace Harding Expressway, we located the address, rang the bell, and waited. When Lenny's mother answered the door, I can only imagine the look on her face. Since the adults were eye to eye and I was at my father's waist, I didn't quite get what transpired between the two adults. But the next thing I knew the door closed, my father and I were off of the front steps, and we began walking the length of the block to the corner, and then around the corner to the alley in the back of the houses, and then found the back door of my friend's house. He was waiting there with a terribly uncomfortable look on his face; his mother had clearly lectured him on inviting black people (of all things) into their home. I never saw her the whole time I was there. No milk and cookies were proffered, and my friend looked ill at ease the whole time, and we never went upstairs to his room, staying downstairs in the living room the whole time.  I can only imagine what was going through my father's mind as he attempted to salvage my visit and swallow his pride as he walked the long distance around to the rear entrance, the entrance that was reserved for those not worthy of passing through the front door. My friendship with Lenny cooled after that, of course,  though I continued to see him in class everyday, and occasionally saw him in the local library. Even on those occasions he didn't stop to speak, weakly acknowledging me from a distance. Lenny's mom had straightened him out.

Hearing of the xenophobic race baiting and the crowd's lusty response at the recent Palin rallies made me think again about the messy and unfinished business of race in America, and how after election day we will have finally begun to turn the page on a long and painful chapter. In the meantime, we have another few weeks in which to witness crowds of incited Americans, railing against a Harvard educated black man who would dare to run for the presidency, incited ironically by someone with the spottiest of academic histories and intellectual abilities. No one ever said that change was a pleasant thing to watch, but as the late tennis great and humanitarian Arthur Ashe once said, "Most people resist change, even when it promises to be for the better. But change will come, and if you acknowledge this simple but indisputable fact of life and understand that you must adjust to all change, then you will have a head start." Go to: (http://www.vimeo.com/1891955)