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Former President Jimmy Carter said recently on NBC News with Brian Williams what many of us in the South have known for months. The hatred and vitriol that has been spewed toward President Barack Obama for the past few weeks is inspired by the inchoate racism that is alive and well in American culture.
Forget all those platitudes about President Obama's election signaling the end of racism and the start of some sort of rosy scenario of a "post-racial America." As my Daddy used to say, "Don't buy that bullshit."
No culture on earth with the history we have could wave an electoral wand and eliminate hundreds of years of racial hatred and violence against anyone with a darker hued skin. The only time America faced the possible dissolution of the union forged by the patriots who created this form of government then unique on earth - and that so many of us thank God we were born to live under - was because of the forces of racial prejudice and hatred.
After that cataclysm - in which I had five great-great-grandfathers fighting for the Confederacy and two of them dying for the cause - who can forget the way the Southern whites used Jim Crow and segregation to keep blacks subjugated for another one hundred years?
I, the descendant of those Confederates, remember when segregation began to be dismantled. It wasn't that long ago. It caused an outburst of anger and violence, culminating in the assassination of Dr. King. It became the heart of the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy," which bore fruit - albeit bitter - for election after election. Why in the world would any thinking adult believe that all that history could be erased by one election where the other side won?
President Carter knows the truth.
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