Column: Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy.

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No, I'm not saying that at all. I simply showed the BS the right is still spewing about Obama. Despite how the right says the left accuses them of racism when criticizing Obama, the fact remains, a great deal of those Anti-Obama attacks are very racial. No, the left isn't perfect, but the right needs to own up to the ugly specter of racism when going after the first black President.

The back and forth here feels unproductive to me. Mr Reynholm told us how he FELT back then, and he inherently has a right to those feelings. All feelings are valid because they are personal and unique to the person holding them. If he was posting statements back then that were deemed veiled racism, my preference would have been for posters who wished to point it out to have tactfully tried to explain WHY to him. Either there was a failure in communication or there was a failure in sensitivity to Mr Reynholm's thinking process, in my personal opinion.

For the items that do have racist roots, I realize that many people believe the only way to end racism is to aggressively call it out. I don't buy that approach. I think it makes people dig into what was, when push comes to shove, quite often, bad information intentionally fed to them by sources they thought they could trust. I have seen friends genuinely and deeply hurt by such accusations because the last thing they want to be is racist. Knowing their hearts, I know the truth to where they want to be, despite where it looks to me they are at, which in many ways is more difficult to work with. We're all products of our backgrounds and the norms of our communities, and it doesn't shed that fast. I would rather plant a seed and hope it can grow, same as I prefer people do with me.

I can't tell if the listed claims are ones Mr Reynholm made, or it is intended to be a more general list of claims that someone whose vision wasn't clouded by race would not have made. How I understand the items on the list, with no specific comment to Mr Reynholm since I do not know his positions on these:

Obama was actually born in Kenya.
- This isn't a political position, it is a character attack that requires an assumption that Obama and his entire family, plus the state of Hawaii, has engaged in extended and protracted deception. This claim is viewed as racist because it is a claim that would not be made about a Caucasian candidate. If Obama father's had not been black, it is difficult to believe that such a charge would have ever taken root. Once it had taken root, I suppose it is possible for someone to believe it solely because of its steady promotion by right wing sources, so I wouldn't say that everyone who fell for it had to be racist. But there is no doubt to me that it was planted because of race. Given that Trump even eventually more or less admitted Obama was born in the US, I don't understand how anyone could still believe it, but moving someone from a solid belief can be nearly impossible to do, even if they aren't racist and we're talking about an attack originally born in racism. So my statement to anyone making the claim is not to assume they are racist, but to tell them the attack was born from racism.

Obama was a Muslim.
- Similar to the above, I don't think the charge would ever have been made if he were not black. It isn't spun as a political position (under the US constitution it should make no difference); it is spun because a large segment of America fears Muslims, which makes it problematic on more than one level. Can anyone find a Causation candidate who this has ever been said about? As above, I think it took root because of racism, but the racism charge gets more difficult to sustain against any single individual when one realizes how aggressively the Muslim attack was promoted by right wing sources. Similar to the above, my statement to anyone making the claim is not to assume they are racist, but to tell them the attack was born from racism.

Obama was a communist.
- Common charge against progressive candidates; I don't think one should assume racism was involved.

Obama was a socialist.
- Common charge against progressive candidates; I don't think one should assume racism was involved.

Obama was the son of a black communist leader.
- Interesting, never heard this one. If it is always presented as a BLACK communist leader, I think the veiled racism is evident.

Obama was the Antichrist.
- I think the same charge was leveled against one or both of the Clintons. I don't think its fair to assume it is racist.

Obama was going to have the UN take the country over.
- I think the same charge was leveled against one or both of the Clintons. I don't think its fair to assume it is racist.

Obama didn't graduate from law school
- So much of the discussion about Obama's academic credentials included assumptions that he benefited from a preferential admissions process that it is difficult to believe that the questions weren't originally rooted in racism. But, as with some earlier examples, once something takes root and is widely spread among a community, it gets more difficult to say why any one unique person believes it. So, once again, my statement to anyone making the claim is not to assume they are racist, but to tell them the attack was born from racism.

This is all my personal opinion, of course. I'm as imperfect as any of us, and am still in my own learning process.

NOOOO!
The hell you say.
I haven't met many of those recently.
I thought they were extinct.

Wouldn't the extreme right *boast* they were racist?
Isn't that a major part of their ideological platform?
I.E. Superiority of their genetic coding?
If not that, then what?

It is my belief that the vast majority of Republicans are *not* racist.
The left simply wants to overlook that and paint the entire right as fascists, for political gain, as in ousting Trump.

Weren't you awake, here at WP, when many of you progressives went nutzo and labelled all Republicans "Fascists"?
It was a very fascinating, and disturbing period.

^^^
I don't think we liberals ever said all Republicans were fascists, just the Trump cult.
Actually, no, the far racist right deny that they're racists, as they know society has changed too much for that to be popular now. But through use of innuendo and veiled code words, voter suppression based on race and class is justified, as is the roll back of civil rights protections.
Trump was a wannabe right wing strongman, like his buddy Putin. The fact that Trump played up on nationalism, with it's nativistic biases toward non-white immigrants (he wanted to know why we only had immigrants from "sh*t hole countries," and not from someplace like Norway... y'know, where they're all white), while demonizing the press, and so on, says Trump was at least comfortable with fascism.

it is no use when the other side refuses to come clean.

I know. I gotta still speak the truth.

and god bless you for fighting the good fight, i just don't have the quick smarts in me to do what you do.

Don't sell yourself short, man!

Terms like "Fascist" and "Racists" is used as virtual synonyms by the Left for anyone they disagree with politically. Especially conservatives. It is strait out of Saul Alinski's book Rules for Radicals.

I've never read that book, but I do see the pain racism causes in the eyes of associates of mine. If a racist action is never accepted as one, how is anyone supposed to end that pain? I don't know for sure if Trump was actually racist, but he had no trouble using racist dog whistles to make his points and rile up voters. In Kraichgauer's example, there was NO VALID POLICY REASON for Trump to draw the line as he did besides to signal that he considered our immigrants to be "less than," knowing full well that most of our immigrants are people of color. Even if he did not intend that "less than" to create images of racism, it most certainly was intended to create an image that all men are NOT created equal. The second you move into "all men are NOT created equal" territory, you open the doors on racism.

It isn't the fault of liberals that conservatives are more likely to dog whistle support of inequality; the idea that some people are better than others and, thus, should hold greater power in decision making, is historically baked into the ideas of movement conservatives. Note I am intentionally being specific to movement conservatives.

Liberals aren't immune from supporting concepts of inequality, although they don't use any dog whistles that directly appeal to self-identified racists.

In the area of racism, a lot of liberals aren't taking the time to actually understand the issues involved and will default to virtue signalling without doing the work to actually make any difference at all. Or, sometimes, to engage in racist actions while sticking a different banner on the activity. Hence we can end up with "Karen's" who act with obvious racism on video while no doubt believing they aren't racist, either. Those people are getting called out, too. It isn't just conservatives.

I have a simple question: do you want to be part of the solution of ending racism, or do you not? It is easy to say liberals like to hide behind the word instead of engaging in honest debate on policy differences, but do you actually think about if those policy differences could be racist? Do you think about how you use words and how those words might be felt by a person of color? Does it bother you that people of color feel the sting of racism every single day, and do you agree that we, as a nation, need to work on ending that in order to live up to our constitutional ideal of acting from the baseline that all men are created equal?

I've made a genuine effort to support you in this discussion because I operate from a place of never wanting to see anyone hurt, but what you wrote above is simply not true. Not every accusation of racism is a dishonest way to cover up a difference of opinion. Are you willing to examine differences of opinion to look for potential underlying racism, or are you not?

i hear crickets........................

That’s how I feel about most of my posts. What does it say about me?

perhaps that you express opinions that the right wingers either don't grok or don't agree with? i know the feeling, believe you me.

That you are right and being very logical here and pointing out facts so of course people are going to be speechless because how can they defend themselves against that?

This is where white fragility comes in, when racism is pointed out, instead of learning about it, they get defensive and act like they have been attacked and insulted and bullied. From what I have noticed people who are racist will be justifying it and explaining it to make it sound like why they are not racist.

And yeah there will be people out there that will play the race card but that never works.

What D_W_amom said.