EXCERPT:
Barack Obama behaves as if he has no historical or cultural knowledge of “the nation over which he presides.” The president’s labeling of African Americans as “mongrels” reveals an astounding and fundamental disrespect for Black Americans as a distinct people. As an epithet, “mongrel” is an even “more powerfully shaped political charge than the ubiquitous ‘nigger!’”
“The term packs as much concentrated bile and murderous intent as any in the English language.”
I did not learn of President Obama’s reference to Black people as “mongrels” on ABC’s “The View” until two days after the fact, and could not initially believe it had happened. Surely, such an occurrence should have provoked a scream heard in every corner of Black America. Yet, it did happen, last Thursday, and there was no general outcry.
The crime unfolded casually. Asked about his racial background, the president replied, "We,” meaning African Americans, “are sort of a mongrel people."
Could it be that the First Black President does not know the country over which he presides, its history and peculiar vocabulary? Even as the Tea Party’s white nationalists strive to resurrect a White Man’s Country, this president bandies about a term that not long ago packed as much concentrated bile and murderous intent as any in the English language – a racial epithet with a more powerfully shaped political charge than the ubiquitous “nigger!”
“Mongrelization” was the bane of American Manifest Destiny, an ever-present threat to white notions of “civilization.” The extermination of Native Americans and the fire and whips of daily white terror during slavery and Jim Crow kept “mongrelizing” influences at bay, but protecting the gene pools of “Anglo-Saxons” and other Europeans later allowed into the “white” fold required constant vigilance. In the post-Civil War era, as the muscular settler state prepared to push its empire beyond ocean barriers, expansionism ran into the brick wall of race purity. The United States could conquer the lands of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba, but how could these territories be absorbed into the national structure without hopelessly tainting “America” – politically, culturally and biologically
“As the muscular settler state prepared to push its empire beyond ocean barriers, expansionism ran into the brick wall of race purity.”For many southern segregationists, the price of empire was too high. Their racist fulminations on the House and Senate floors are what passed for statesmanship at the turn of the 20th century.
Sen. James Vardaman, of Mississippi, was implacable in his resistance to granting self-rule to Filipinos, much less treating them as equal to white Americans. “Preparing the Filipino or any other Mongrel race for the duties of citizenship or self-government can not be done,” he railed.
South Carolina’s Sen. John McLaurin could not agree more. Were the Philippines to be annexed, it would bring a “mongrel and barbarous race” into the body politic of the United States.
Not to be outdone, fellow South Carolinian Sen. Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman warned that denizens of Puerto Rico, also recently seized from Spain along with Cuba, be kept at a healthy distance. “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object,” said Tillman. But even if kept confined to their islands, these “mongrels” required rule by a firm, white hand, Tillman explained, because “No combination of Spaniards and half-negroes capable of self-government exists on the face of the earth.”
The American Republic feared itself in danger of terminal racial pollution. In 1900 the Overland Monthly, a journal published in San Francisco, wrote, “The Philippines are under the process of absorption. Cuba is occupied, and a proposition to annex the island with all its mongrel population may be made any day.”
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