“2012 Don’t Re-Nig”

Posted September 26th, 2012 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: Living consequences Tags: Barack Obama, Leonard Pitts

Leonard Pitts has another inspiring column this week on our nation’s persistent racial intolerance, based, of all things, on an anti-Obama bumper sticker reading, “2012 Don’t Re-Nig.”

This story isn’t new, with variations of this bumper sticker having been reported in the spring. As usual, however, Pitts manages to take a depressing topic and infuse it with hope for the future, exposing profound bigotry while showing that this bigotry is, in fact, a reaction to powerful and irreversible change for the good.

(Click here to see an image of the bumper sticker.)

Pitts doesn’t pull his punches in discussing the raw bigotry represented by this political slogan. He notes with sensitivity that some white people are experiencing a sense of “racial and cultural dislocation” in the age of a black president. But he quickly adds that for some of “us” the issue isn’t the rapidly changing racial landscape, but “just the same old hate as always.”

Pitts goes one step further, however, in noting that the haters are now often forced to delude themselves, and others, by suppressing their views in subtle code or, in the case of “Don’t Re-Nig,” in what they insist are merely”jokes.” (Billy and Paula Smith, who make some of these bumper stickers, both insist that the slogan, and the N-word, are in no way racial.) In this way, he says, overt racists “do not lie for our benefit. They lie to conscience — and to self.”

As a result, we have the impossible situation of a president “hemmed in by race, defined in crude, stereotypical imagery,” but forced to pretend otherwise, to avoid being seen as an “angry black man.”

The column doesn’t end there, however: ultimately, Pitts isn’t interested in condemning the haters, or in analyzing their dilemma, or even the president’s. He wants to suggest that this dreadful situation is the inevitable result of positive change in the country’s relationship to race.

To show this, Pitts retells the story of Jacob Philadelphia.

Jacob is the five-year-old who, when posing for a picture in the Oval Office, quietly told the president, “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.” In response, the president of the United States bent down and replied, “Why don’t you touch it and see for yourself?” (As if that weren’t enough, when Jacob hesitated, the leader of the free world added “Touch it, dude!”)

Jacob, as many Americans know, touched the president’s hair and proclaimed “Yes, it does feel the same.” This leads Pitts to conclude that if there are still some Americans “dreaming of a white president, well … it’s likely Jacob has some new dreams of his own.” In the same way, perhaps, all of this country’s children are slowing, inevitably, starting to see race in new ways, despite how mired in racial animus we remain.