“2012 Don’t Re-Nig”
Posted September 26th, 2012 by James DeWolf PerryCategory: 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.”
