What Do They Call a President Who Happens to be Black? If You Are Fox News You Call Him a "Ghetto Crackhead"

Malcolm X famously asked, "what do you call an educated negro with a B.A. or an M.A., with a B.S., or a PhD?" The answer? "You call him a nigger, because that is what the white man calls him, a nigger."

Decades later, his wisdom endures.

Malcolm's observation captures the pain experienced by many African Americans, when during their coming of age moment (either before or after the talk about how not to get shot by the police during a routine traffic stop), they realize that being "young, gifted, and black" is not, all things being equal, sufficient for success in America. Malcolm's words also capture the sentiments felt by any black person whose confidence has been described by their managers or peers as "threatening" or "arrogant."

His wisdom also explains the moment when black professors walk into a room for the first time and their students look at each other in shock, wondering if this teacher is "qualified" to teach them; Malcolm's wit also captures the frustration and insult felt by any black or brown person who has been presumptively assumed to be a janitor, maintenance worker, or mail clerk at their job, when in fact, their titles are actually "manager," "director," or "vice president."

Malcolm's comment on the arrogance of white racism also speaks to collective memory: it conjures up family stories of men and women trained as doctors, engineers, and lawyers, but who had to work as Pullman Car porters, maids, and home health attendants because Jim and Jane Crow America was by definition, a system designed to choke out the social and economic mobility of the African American community. Both then and now, white racism does the work of class inequality.

African-American veterans of World War 2, "the Greatest Generation," were denied the fruits of citizenship given by the United States government to their white peers. Black Americans fought fascism abroad. But, at home they were denied access to the GI Bill, and the FHA and VA home loan programs that helped to create the American middle class. In practice, these programs were what Ira Katznelson famously described as "affirmative action" for white people.

The "Double V" campaign would continue against American Apartheid. The Black Freedom Struggle in the face of such stern and deep opposition would eventually triumph. This is an American success story, one which the popular imagination conveniently overlooks.

On the public stage in the present, the lack of faith in black expertise, ability, genius, and competence is on full display whenever the ugly phrase "qualified minority" is uttered by one of the faux populist Right in order to demagogue, and mine the waters of white racial resentment, for cheap political gains.

As the folkism suggests, African Americans have had to do ten times as well, to get half as far as whites. In the post-Civil Rights moment, that margin has diminished quite a bit. Yet, there is more than ample evidence that whiteness still pays great dividends to its owners and beneficiaries in such areas as the housing market, jobs, wealth and income inequality, inter-generational mobility, access to health care, and life chances (more generally).

It is a given that Fox News has no love for President Obama. To point, on the Hannity show last week (and without retraction or apology after the fact), Brent Bozell, of the conservative media "watchdog" group, Media Research Center, described President Barack Obama, "as a skinny, ghetto, crackhead."

This moment was an object lesson on the white racial frame in action, and the truth of Brother Malcolm's deep understanding of the pathologies of white racism, where any black person, however accomplished, intelligent, and gifted, is de facto seen as "less than," a "nigger," as a person who is not equal to even the most mediocre and lowest of white people.

Black people and black humanity are forever suspect, under watch, and viewed as less than by many in White America. To the white gaze channeled by Brent Bozzel, we are perpetual criminals, deviants, over-sexed, libidinous, dangerous, and pathological. These sentiments are a function of the "wages of whiteness," the psychological investment in white supremacy, and white superiority, spoken to perhaps most famously by W.E.B. DuBois more than a century ago.

I am not surprised by Bozzel's mouth utterances. Because they are propagandists, Fox News displays a double concentration and distillation of the impulses and anxieties which drive contemporary conservatism and the Tea Party GOP. In all, if conservatism and racism are one and the same in America, the election of a black man as President has created such cognitive upset that naked racism is the inevitable excreta, an expected outcome.

The suggestion that President Barack Obama is somehow evocative of a "ghetto crackhead," is part of a larger constellation of racial slurs, appeals to white racial anxiety, dog whistles, and open bigotry. To this point in his term, it has been suggested that Obama is not a citizen of this country. He faked his undergraduate grades at Columbia, and his success at Harvard Law was the result of "affirmative action." President Obama entertains black thugs at "hip hop barbecues." He is unqualified to be President, is "lazy," "incompetent," and "in over his head." Michelle Obama is a mirror of President Obama's shortcomings, a black radical in drag, who has never been proud of this country.

Furthermore, as offered by Palin, McCain, Fox News, and most recently by presumed presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Obama is outside of the American political tradition, a man who does not understand the country's greatness and is actively working to destroy it. Race is the connective tissue between all of these paranoid and ridiculous claims. Barack Obama is a black American. We are the perpetual outsider and the Other. Where other groups' "Americanness" is presumed, Black Americans, despite our contributions to all that makes this country unique and great--and as a people who forced her to live up to the promise of the democratic creed and the Constitution-- are marked as perpetual anti-citizens.

This pandering to the worst parts of the White racial id, contemporary populist conservatism, and the Fox News public, are textbook examples of symbolic racism.

The personal is political. The rage machine that presumes the worst of Barack Obama, precisely because he is not white, is old hat. Black folks have known that game for centuries. We did not need to read Thomas Jefferson's racist tract, Notes on the State of Virginia, in order to grasp the deep wells of anti-black sentiment which are the beating heart of America's political culture.

My surprise at the claim that President Obama shares anything in common with a "skinny, ghetto, crackhead" is rooted in its absurdity. Obama is human. He is imperfect. I often disagree with his politics. Obama is a man. He is nothing more, nothing less. But a crackhead? Impulsive drug user? A hype? Nope. Not ever. Obama's personhood and habitus, his relaxed and effortless black cool pose (even if some do not possess the cultural framework and lens necessary to perceive it) is obvious--and unapologetic.

The inability by some on the Right to see Obama's full and dignified black humanity, as opposed to a default of black drug use, criminality, and omnipresent, irrepressible "niggerdom," is the source of my hurt. I must ask: If the white conservative imagination can frame a man of Obama's abilities, poise, intelligence, genius, life accomplishments, and talent as a skinny, ghetto, crackhead, how do they see the rest of us?

And we wonder why the colorline persists.

Ultimately, as Obama derangement syndrome has continued to demonstrate, white folks need to get their own house in order; the problem of white supremacy, especially on the Right, is a sickness that only they can cure through intense dialogue and therapy with one another.

If the best and brightest of Black America are just felons and drug users in the eyes of populist conservatives, what of the legions of working class, hard working, regular folks? How do Tea Party GOPers see black bus drivers? Black teachers? Black janitors? Black attorneys and investment bankers? Black parents? Black people who are either no more, or no less, mediocre than the vast majority of White Americans?

I am not sure if I want to know the answer.

We are everyday people. All of us. Sadly, white conservatives such as Brent Bozzel, see all black people as drug addicts and crackheads. Nothing more. That is black humanity in their eyes. White pathology is real. Last week, Fox News proved that fact (again).

They are who we have always known them to be. Ugly. White. Racists. Do keep it classy Mr. Bozzel, for every time you sell your wares, you do the rest of us a favor.