White Southerners Still Don’t Trust Obama

Obama’s candidacy mobilized many young and black voters, above all in America’s southern states. At the same time, however, the unhinged side, the reactionary face of the South also became more visible. We visited with a Republican voter for whom even John McCain was too liberal.

Ed Buren is afraid of blacks. He’s afraid of the black man that will enter the White House on January 20th, and he’s afraid of blacks in general. “I don’t want anybody like that making decisions about me or my life,” he says. Almost threateningly he adds, “That’s the way it is.” He won’t speak the president-elect’s name aloud, but he takes pleasure in repeating his middle name: Hussein, like Saddam.

Ed Buren lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a small town east of Atlanta. He comes off as a cartoon character in a book of clichés, a redneck as the reactionary backwoods folks here are called. A ragged confederate flag flies from the aerial of his pickup truck, the flag of the secessionist states during the war they lost in 1865. A white plastic cross dangles from his rearview mirror. He’s about 50 years old, possibly younger, with bad teeth and thinning hair. He looks so nondescript he’s quickly forgotten. He himself may be easily forgotten, but his words stick in the memory. They may sound dull, bizarre and outdated, but voices like Ed Buren’s are heard with increasing frequency since the November 4th election, the mouth usually hidden behind the hand.

It’s that way mainly in the American South, that region that never tires of reminding people how deep the Civil War wounds still are. Words that remind everyone that the days of segregation are less than 50 years in the past and the soil for its return is still fertile.

Ed Buren has a small appliance repair shop in Stone Mountain where he fixes refrigerators, television sets, machines, “anything that needs fixing.” He picked out a bar with a German motif for our meeting, the Village Corner, with a dim back room that smelled of leftover cabbage. Faint brass band music drifted from the speakers. Despite his pithy words, Ed Buren lost his courage the first time we asked him his real name. He’d rather not divulge that – “or I’ll have a mob down on my neck,” he says.

He said he voted for John McCain, reluctantly and with a heavy heart because McCain was too liberal for him, by which he meant McCain was too moderate. He finds it hard to believe that his countrymen actually voted Obama into office – and with a solid majority of nearly 53 percent and 365 electoral college votes.

There must have been something rotten going on, some sort of a conspiracy. “The blacks rigged the outcome, along with the gays and the Spics,” Ed says. (“Spics” is the jargon Ed Buren and his friends use to describe Latinos). Then he turns his attention to the steaming sausage dinner he ordered – knackwust, bratwurst, white wurst, scalded wurst. He bites into everything as savagely as if the sausages were his worst enemy.

Obama’s candidacy mobilized many young and black voters, above all in America’s southern states. At the same time, however, the unhinged side, the reactionary face of the South also became more visible. In some states and counties Obama’s candidacy led to a backlash among white voters, Democrats as well as Republicans. In Arkansas and Louisiana, more people voted Republican in 2008 than in 2004. In Lamar County, Arkansas, John McCain won 76 percent of the vote, five percent more than George Bush got four years earlier. Many white Democrats in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana who had voted for John Kerry in 2004 declined to support Obama in 2008.

That goes beyond Democratic versus Republican worldviews and values, say many election observers. Race is the only logical reason for the phenomenon. “In many, but not all areas of the South, race may have played an important role,” says Merle Black, Emory University Professor of Political Science and an expert in the southern states. “In Arkansas and Tennessee, for example, are where fewer blacks live and where Democrats wound down their activities after Hillary Clinton’s departure from the race.” Republicans are still strong in the South, Black emphasizes – eight of the eleven traditionally southern states still went for McCain. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are playing defense all over the country, including the South.”

Barack Obama achieved what Bill Clinton was also successful in doing, namely, breaking the Republican stronghold in the South. Virginia and North Carolina, solidly Republican for many years, voted Democratic. The swing state Florida, with its large Hispanic population, also went to the Democrats. Georgia, for years a dependable red state, stayed Republican but by a slimmer margin: McCain got 52 percent of the vote there, whereas Bush got 58 percent in 2004. “Georgia turns purple,” said the headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meaning a mixture of Republican red and Democratic blue. Simple patterns no longer really apply in describing the South since November 4th.

As in the example of Ed Buren’s town of Stone Mountain, home to many blacks. A town Martin Luther King referred to in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain, Georgia!” It’s the town where itinerant Methodist preacher William J. Simmons resurrected the racist Ku Klux Klan organization in 1915. It’s the town where the police reported the last racist lynching carried out by the Klan in 1981. It’s the town where the Confederate flag is paraded annually through the downtown area. None of this, however, is ever highlighted in the brochures advertising Stone Mountain as a friendly vacation destination with its eponymous park and gigantic granite cliffs.

But Stone Mountain is also the town where 80 percent of voters cast their ballots for Obama and where city fathers for years have been distancing themselves from the town’s racist past. It’s a town where Ed Buren fights a losing battle.

The New York Times figures that less than one-third of white southern voters cast ballots for Obama, contrasted with 43 percent nationwide. This trend may be more noticeable because of Obama’s race, but it’s not really something new. What is actually new is the fact that in future elections, Democrats will be less dependent on the southern white vote than in past elections. “African-Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups now comprise 30 percent of the electorate in the South,” says political scientist Black. Twenty years ago, it was 10 percent less. “The biggest change in the South is growing ethnic, racial and social diversity.” That makes things difficult for Republicans to control the South as a monolithic block.

Ethnic, political and social diversity is also the hallmark of Obama’s future Cabinet. It’s a development that Ed Buren also views with deep disgust – all the blacks, Latinos, Asians and women that Obama is “pulling into his circle.” Buren laments, “Who is going to look out for us decent white Americans?” Then he wipes his mouth; the sausage dinner has been vanquished. As he gets up from the table, he says quietly, “Well, let’s hope this magic spell won’t last long.” He refuses to explain exactly what he means by that, he just makes an angry gesture as he turns toward the door. But then he pauses and takes one last look around him before he leaves. Better safe than sorry. The bottom line is, Ed Buren is still afraid of the black man.*

Ed and his friends dream of the South as an independent republic and categorically reject a black President. They support the “Southern League,” an organization of nationalists who like to display the Confederate Stars and Bars flag. They paraded it publicly in Columbia, South Carolina last January in a protest march on Martin Luther King’s birthday.

* Translator’s Note: the German children’s game “Wer hat Angst vor dem schwarzen Mann,” or, “Who’s afraid of the black man” is similar to the American kid’s game “tag” where the object is to avoid being touched by the “monster.” Misunderstood political correctness has also reached this facet of German culture and the adjective “black” is now increasingly being replaced by “wild,” or “evil” although the original game had nothing to do with race.