(New millennium black face)
You're not the only who believes that the "policy differences" Republicans, conservatives and Teabaggers claim to have with the Obama administration is really a clever and modern way for them to express their racism aganst the first non-white leader of the free world.
Expatriate Carl Dews, author and professor at John Cabot University in Rome, says that all this talk of political differences with Obama is simply a mask for deeply racist thoughts and feelings. How does he know? He has been a member of racist communities all of his life and can recognize them even when they try to hide:
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth. I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Read the rest of Prof. Dews's story at the Philadelphia Inquirer website.