Can We All Get Along?

Can We All Get Along?

On November 4, 2008 American voters elected their first African-American president, Barack Obama.  A day after Obama's historic victory, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow hailed his win as the start of a new post-racial period in American history.  Soon others in the liberal media championed this notion that America had gotten past its history of racial injustice and bigotry.  During President Obama’s first term this ideal notion of post-racialism would be challenged by incidents such as the possibility of racial profiling in the Trayvon Martin killing and anti-Obama rhetoric which at times appeared to be racially motivated. Nevertheless, American voters proved again that they were willing to believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society by reelecting President Obama to a second term on November 6, 2012.

            Does the reelection of Barack Obama mean that post-racialism has finally begun?  The president won the majority of votes from blacks, Asians, Latinos, women, gays, and youth under the age of thirty-five.  His challenger, Mitt Romney, won the majority of votes casts by white males and voters over the age of forty.  The president was aided by the growing diversity in the American electorate.  Liberal critics and political pundits said that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party lost because there were not enough white voters.  Such a statement challenges the notion of a post-racial society.

            Post-racialism was further tested the day after Obama’s reelection.  The campus of Ole Miss (The University of Mississippi) was occupied by four hundred student protestors angered by the president’s victory.  Some of the protestors chanted racial slurs and burned Obama campaign posters.  Others chanted “the South will rise again.”  The incident was especially troubling because of Ole Miss’s history of race relations.  During the Civil War the majority of the school’s student body served in the Confederate army.  The Confederacy was a collection of slave owning Southern states fighting to maintain their way of life.  All of these students died at the Battle of Gettysburg, leading to the school’s adoption of the rebel mascot to honor their fallen dead.  The school proudly flew the Confederate flag and maintained a strict policy of segregation.

            In 1961 a twenty-nine year old black man named James Meredith attempted to enroll at Ole Miss.  Under the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. the Board of Education case, enforcing school integration, Ole Miss was required to admit Meredith.  The university with the support the state’s governor, Ross Barnett, defied the court order.  In September 1962 President John F. Kennedy was forced to send several hundred federal marshals to Mississippi to ensure Meredith’s enrollment.  The presence of the marshals and James Meredith on campus led to a major riot which resulted in two deaths and several arrests.  Meredith was eventually registered and graduated a year later. (He had attended Jackson State University for two years before transferring to Ole Miss.)

            Today Ole Miss has a substantial number of black students and, remarkably, a statue of James Meredith stands on the grounds of the campus.  The students recently elected the school’s first black student body president, Kimberly Dandridge.  The majority of the student body and the administration did not condone the protest.  Unfortunately, this ugly incident, occurring during the fiftieth anniversary of the Meredith riots, reminds the public of the nation’s history of racism.  Such hints of racism were not confined to the Oxford, Mississippi campus the day after the election.  Forty students at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the birth state of the Confederacy, chanted racial slurs, threw bottles and set off fireworks to show their disgust with another four years of Obama.  And then there was Rush Limbaugh.

            Limbaugh, the ultra-conservative radio talk show host, has been one of the president’s harshest critics since he declared his candidacy in 2007.  He famously told an audience that his goal was to see the president fail.  In an on air rant he told Mr. Obama to stop ‘pretending’ to be president.  Limbaugh was so distraught over his reelection that he told his devoted listeners the following:  "I went to bed last night thinking, 'we're outnumbered.  I went to bed last night thinking we'd lost the country. I don't know how else you look at this… 'this is utter BS, and if it isn't, then we've lost the country.”

            No, we do not live in a post-racial society.  We have come a mighty long way since Dr. King made his famous I Have a Dream speech in 1963.  The reelection of Barack Obama is definitely a sign that we are moving in the right direction.  We must move forward and not dwell on our great nation’s ugly past.  But unfortunate incidents like the negative reaction to the election and the tragic Trayvon Martin murder just nine months ago remind us that we must continue to embrace change and strive for equality and diversity.  In the words of the late Rodney King: “Can we all get along?”

Written by Dr. Joshua Wright, Ph.D. 

Assistant Professor

UMES Department of Social Sciences

The accuracy of references in this essay, (including all opinions, quotes, references,  proper names, dates, references to documents, literature, film etc.) are the responsibility of Dr. Wright and have not been fact checked by the Real Life @ UMES Blog Team.

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