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"Many whites feel that the country their forefathers built has been...stolen from them," Potok said. (Google Photo) |
CAIRO — With some whites seeing Barack Obama's White House victory as a theft of their country, hate crimes are on the rise and some voice have even started talking about the secession of the southern states.
"What we are seeing now is undeniably a fairly major backlash by some subset of the white population," Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) told the Christian Science Monitor on Monday, November 17.
"Many whites feel that the country their forefathers built has been…stolen from them.
"So there's in some places a real boiling rage, and that can only become worse as more people lose jobs."
The SPLC reports more than 200 hate-related incidents in the southern states since Obama defeated Republican rival John McCain in the November 4 vote.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, the Secret Service has interrogated four college students sprayed race-tinged graffiti in a pedestrian tunnel after Obama's victory.
Two days after the Vote Day, a cross was burned on the lawn of a biracial couple in Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania.
In Georgia, a group of high-school students posted inappropriate comments about the country's first black president on the web.
In Oklahoma, anti-Obama propaganda has been distributed through newspapers and taped to home mail boxes.
"The vitriol is flailing out shotgun-style," said Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.
"They recognize Obama as a tipping point, the perfect storm in the narrative of the hate world – the apocalypse that they've been moaning about has come true."
A week before the election, two Tennessee white supremacists were arrested for plotting to shoot and decapitate 102 Afro-Americans, including Obama.
Secession
Obama's election has also sparked calls for the secession of the southern states.
"To a lot of people, the idea of secession doesn't seem so crazy anymore," claims Michael Tuggle, a blogger at the League of the South, a white racist and secessionist group.
The League says hits on its website jumped from 50,000 a month to 300,000 after the election and its phones are ringing off the hook.
"People are talking about how left out they feel,…and they feel that something strange and radical has taken over our country," said Tuggle.
In the 1860 presidential election, the Republican Party led by Abraham Lincoln campaigned against the expansion of slavery beyond the states in which it already existed.
Their election victory resulted in seven southern states declaring their secession from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
Led by Jefferson Davis, they fought against the US federal government, which was supported by all the free states and the five border slave states, from 1861 to 1865.
"In states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, there was extraordinary racial polarization in the vote," notes Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.
Only 20 percent of native whites in the Deep South states voted for Obama.
"Black Americans really do believe that Obama is going to represent their interests and views in ways that they haven't been before, and, in the Deep South, whites feel exactly the opposite."
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