Hang a noose from the flag pole. The darkies are acting like white folks.

Some people thought that the election of a black person as president signaled that the United States was conveying to the rest of the world that it was finally putting its racist past to rest. Having a black man in the White House has merely inflamed it. Racism is like anthrax. Its spores can lie dormant in the earth for decades, only to be revived and virulent when stirred up.

Racism is raging again with the help of a new vector: the Internet.

The issue of healthcare has stirred the racist spores into the atmosphere with a vengeance. Some people think that every person should have access to health care, because such thinkers are part of that conspiracy started by a Jew from Nazareth who instructed his followers to feed the poor and heal the sick. Others think that the problems of poverty and illness can be solved if those so afflicted just damned well die. Government instigated health care reform, they say, violates patient's rights by intruding on their right to be sick and die. One doctor found the racial angle in the opposition to healthcare reform and circulated an e-mail picturing Obama as a witch doctor.


Then a professor at Harvard , Henry Louis Gates, Jr., got himself arrested by trying to get into his own house. Obama said the police acted stupidly in the case, and later said he should have calibrated his words more carefully. Ain't no black man in American, even if he is the president, dumb enough to call the police stupid. Gates was clearly guilty of H.W.B. As Michael Eric Dyson explains, that is still a crime in America. It is Housed While Black. Where do these uppity niggahs get the idea that they can act like white folks and live in something other than slave shanties. It could lead to the crime cited by Stanley Fish: P.W.B. President While Black.

Then we have a president who is not even an American citizen, as some of the more honest and astute citizens have pointed out.

You were warned about this in 1861, You give an inch in justice and equality and opportunity, and they'll take a mile.

But don't worry. The white sheets are out in force. On the Internet.