By Tim Wise

Throughout the first six months of his administration, President Obama
-- perhaps one of the most politically cautious leaders in contemporary
history -- has been routinely portrayed as a radical by his opponents
on the far-right. In particular, persons who have apparently never
actually studied Marxism (or if they did, managed to somehow find
therein support for such things as bailing out banks and elite
corporations) contend that Obama is indeed a socialist. Reducing all
government action other than warmaking to part of a larger socialist
conspiracy, the right contends that health care reform is socialist,
capping greenhouse gas emissions is socialist, even providing
incentives for driving fuel efficient cars is socialist. That the right
insists upon Obama's radical-left credentials, even as they push an Obama=Hitler meme (something they apparently think is fair, since, after all the Nazis were National Socialists,
albeit the kind who routinely murdered the genuine article) only speaks
to the special brand of crazy currently in vogue among the nation's
reactionary forces.

As real socialists laugh at these clumsily made broadsides, and as
scholars of actual socialist theory try and explain the absurdity of
the analogies being drawn by conservative commentators, a key point
seems to have been missed, and it is this point that best explains what
the red-baiting is actually about.

It is not, and please make note of it, about socialism. Or capitalism.
Or economics at all, per se. After all, President Bush was among the
most profligate government spenders in recent memory, yet few ever
referred to him in terms as derisive as those being hurled at Obama.
Even when President Clinton proposed health care reform, those who
opposed his efforts, though vociferous in their critique, rarely
trotted out the dreaded s-word as part of their arsenal. They prattled
on about "big government," yes, but not socialism as such. Likewise,
when Ronald Reagan helped craft the huge FICA tax hike in 1983, in a
bipartisan attempt to save Social Security, few stalwart conservatives
thought to call America's cowboy-in-chief a closet communist. And many
of the loudest voices at the recent town hall meetings -- so many of
which have been commandeered by angry minions ginned up by talk radio
-- are elderly folk whose own health care is government-provided, and
whose first homes were purchased several decades ago with FHA and VA
loans, underwritten by the government, for that matter. Many of them no
doubt reaped the benefits of the GI Bill, either directly or indirectly
through their own parents.

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or
lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right
about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably
hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm
Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big
spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally
one thing -- his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying
about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a
linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment,
socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white
fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they
have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not
just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear
nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't
wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to
balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in
our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on
implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial
resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and
especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya!
Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic
will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling
Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if
the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal
sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the
white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its
foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism
has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the
generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or
communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such
places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea,
Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the
Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union
and its immediate Eastern European satellites -- which are understood
as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it
freely chosen through their own revolutions from below -- Marxism in
practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of
America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General
Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms
negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s,
and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied
that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were
impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the
Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed
the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its
adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do
with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The
real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the
planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China
(though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market
in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea.
These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions,
who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given
the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of
governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his
administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists
in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them
politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of
color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no
intellectual or factual truth.

Secondly, and even more to the point, we must remember what "socialism"
is, especially in the eyes of its critics: it is, to them, a code for
redistribution. Of course, some forms of socialism are more
redistributive than others, and even late-stage capitalism tends to
engage in some forms of very mild redistribution (as with the income
tax code). But if you were to ask most who grow apoplectic at the mere
mention of the word "socialism" for the first synonym that came to
their mind, redistribution is likely the one they would choose. Surely
it would be among their top two or three.

Now, given the almost instinctual connection made between socialism and
redistribution, imagine what many white folks would naturally assume
when told that this man, this black man, this black man with an African
daddy, was a socialist. Even if those using the term didn't intend it
to push racial buttons (and that is a decidedly large "if"), the fact
remains that for many, it would almost certainly prompt any number of
racial fears and insecurities: as in, the black guy is going to take
from those who work and give to those who don't. And naturally, we all
know (or at least our ill-informed prejudices tell us) who's in the
first group and who's in the second one. Thus, the joke making the rounds
on the internet, and likely in your workplace, about Obama planning on
taxing aspirin "because it's white and it works." Or the guy with the sign
at the April teabagger rally, which read, Obama's Plan: White Slavery.
Or others who have carried overtly racist signs to frame their message:
signs suggesting that
Obama hopes to provide care for all brown-skinned illegal immigrants,
while simultaneously murdering the white elderly, or that cast the
President in decidely simian imagery, and refer to him, crudely but clearly as a monkey. Or Glenn Beck's paranoid screed
from late July, which sought to link health care reform, and virtually
every single piece of Obama's political agenda to some kind of backdoor
reparations scheme. This, coupled with Beck's even more unhinged claim
to have discovered a communist/black nationalist conspiracy
in the administration's Green Jobs Initiative. All because the
initiative is headed up by author and activist Van Jones: a guy whose
recent book explains how to save capitalism through eco-friendly
efforts at development and job creation. So even there, it isn't about
socialism, so much as the fact that Jones is black, and was once (for a
couple of months) a nationalist, and has a goatee, and looks determined
(read:mean) in some of his more contemplative press photos.

Fact is, the longstanding association in white minds between social
program spending and racial redistribution has been well-established,
by scholars such as Martin Gilens, Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, and Jill Quadagno,
among others. Indeed, it was only the willingness of past presidents
like FDR to all but cut blacks out of income support programs that
convinced white lawmakers and the public to sign on to any form of
American welfare system in the first place: a willingness that waned as
soon as people of color finally gained access to these programs
beginning in the 50s and 60s. But even as strong as the social
program/black folks association has been in the past, it has, until
now, never had a black face to put with the effort. With a man of color
in the position of president, it becomes far more convincing to those
given to fear black predation already. It isn't just that the
government will tax you, white people. It's that the black guy will.
And for people like him. At your expense.

Much as the white right blew a gasket at the thought of bailing out
homeowners with sub-prime and exploding mortgages a few months back
(and if you listened to the rhetoric on the radio it was hard to miss
the racial animosity that undergirded much of the conservative
hostility to the idea, since they seemed to think only persons of color
would be helped by such a plan), they now too often view Obama's moves
to more comprehensive health care as simply another way to take from
those whites who have "played by the rules" and give to those folks of
color who haven't. Even as millions of whites would stand to benefit
from health care reform -- and all whites, as with people of color would
enjoy greater choices with the very public option that has drawn the
most fire -- the imagery of the recipients has remained black and brown,
as with all social programs; and the imagery of the persons who would
be taxed for the effort has remained hard-working white folks.

By allowing the right to throw around terms like socialist to describe
the President and socialism to describe his incredibly watered-down,
generally big business friendly approach to health care, while not
recognizing the memetic purpose of such arguments is to ensure that the
right will succeed in their demonization campaign. To respond by
pointing out how the plan really isn't socialist, or how Obama really
isn't a socialist misses the point, which was never, in the end, about
economic systems or philosophies: none of which the folks on the right
raising the most hell show any signs of understanding anyway. This
noise is about race. It is about "othering" a President who is seen as
a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white
entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and
unchallenged from the darker skinned other. This is what animates the
every move of the angry masses, individual exceptions notwithstanding.
Unless the left begins pushing back, and insisting that yes, the old
days are gone, white hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and
that we will all be better off for it, the chorus of white backlash
will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing
and conquering the working people who would benefit -- all of them --
from a new direction.

Tim Wise is the author of four books on race and racism. His latest is Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. (City Lights: 2009).  You can learn more about his work at www.timwise.org and www.redroom.com/author/tim-wise.

(The image depicting President Obama as the Joker from "The Dark Knight" Batman movie
is from an anonymous poster that has appeared
recently in cities across the United States.)