Annie, Get Your Gun

Earlier today, my best friend was relating a story about a doctor friend of her sister’s who was having trouble finding ammo for hunting season.  Turns out, ammo is hard to come by in some parts of Oregon, ’cause folks have taken to stockin’ up to defend their homes and property from the takeover that President Obama is planning for white folks.

Seriously.

It  got me to thinking about white folks (white men in particular) and their fears about black folks, (black men specifically), and what that may have to do with all this talk about Obama hating white folks and starting up his own version of Hitler’s SS.

For decades, the media has portrayed black men in a less than favorable light.  As far back as the early 1900′s, the media portrayed black men as something to fear.  Joel Shock writes in his essay,  Desperate Deeds, Desperate Men: Gender, Race, and Rape in Silent Feature Films, 1915-1927:

Many of the top-grossing feature films spanning from 1915-1927 utilized rape as a device for defining manhood and thereby establishing power relationships. The images of rape in these silent films idealized the power of respectable white men over the men and women of other classes and races and subordinated the women from their own social station. These movies constructed white men as heroes and guardians of morality and civilization, white women as frail but morally superior figures, and African-American and immigrant men and women as uncontrollable sexual deviants who threatened civilization. These films reflected the fears of the white middle class that massive immigration, waves of black migration to the North, and the increasingly public role of women were irrevocably changing American society and threatening the power of the traditional dominant group in the United States: white middle- and upper-class men.

He sums up what I believe we’ve been seeing during his campaign and young presidency.  The real problem with a black man in the white house is that many feel that “the power of the traditional dominant group in the United States: white middle- and upper-class men” is at stake.

Hmmm…

I guess I would be angry if I thought centuries of being the oppressor was coming to an end.

(As shocked as my elderly black relatives were to see the election of the 1st black president, I guess the shock was even greater for a white middle or upper class man. )

With the “impossible” upon us, a black man in the white house, what can any self-respecting, card-carrying NRA’er with strong family values do?  Why, arm themselves.

DUH.

People are scared, I get that.  9/11 created a different reality and the previous administration along with the media did everything they could to keep Americans in fear.  After 7 years of that, the economy collapses (Lehman went bankrupt?  IMPOSSIBLE!) and THEN the improble election of a bi-racial president?  I’ll be damned. No wonder folks are acting like idiots.

And President Obama makes a great target for all that fear.  After all, blacks are something to be feared.  But a black person in power?  We are in trouble for sure.

While I recognize that not everything is about race,   I wish people would really just admit to what their real fear is:  If black people (or women, or any other oppressed group) gain significant power, they will do to us, what we have done to them.

But to get there, people would have to examine how their own issues about race are affecting their judgment.  But that would take some thinking and hell, they can just listen to Glenn Bleck or Rush Limbaugh to be told what to think.

Besides, haven’t you heard?  We live in a post-racial society.  Slavery (and all that other stuff) was a long time ago.  Just get over it..

In the meantime,  I think I’ll go cash in on this craziness and go sell my ammo on eBay.