Multicultural booster gets an ear full.
At least 2 million readers visit DrudgeReport.com daily, and, for thelast two weeks, it seemed like most of them were steamed at me.
Thousands of hostile messages flooded my e-mail after my Sept. 2 column that the Daily News“We Need Obama, Not 4 More Years of George Bush.” called
Drudge cleverly headlined it: “Philadelphia columnist warns if McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race war.”
I stand by the column – but after all of that backlash, I realize Iwas dead wrong. We don’t have to wait until after the election for arace war. We’re in one now.
I know that putting the words “race” and “war” together is likehurling an incendiary device. But I wasn’t issuing a call to arms, itwas a metaphorical prediction.
I hate violence, but I do see a growing wave of intolerance sweepingthe nation. And most of the responses were hostile, like one fromsomeone who identified himself as Dennis Van Pelt: “Obama runs like a porch monkey in Alabama during a KKK concert.” But, not all white Southerners feel like Dennis. Russ Nelson wrote: “I am a white male who was proud to cast my vote for Barack Obama in the Alabama state primary. He inspires me!”
Nelson sounds more like the liberal whites I grew up with in WestMount Airy, a community that pioneered integration in Philadelphia andkept me wearing rose-colored glasses. I didn’t personally experienceracism until I was 40, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The recent onslaught of hate mail I received is a cruel reminderthat racism is a like a simmering pot ready to boil over. But it’sdiametrically opposed to what democracy should represent.
I move in diverse circles and was raised in an upper-middle-classfamily with parents who exposed us to a wide range of experiences. Myfamily includes several races and religions and a range of politicalviews.
But from what I’ve been seeing lately, including the reaction to mycolumn, the racial, economic, cultural and religious divides aregetting wider. Most of the 2,000 negative responses used language sofoul my ears curled.
These excerpts are some of the milder ones: Jerry Caruso threatened: “Pleeeeease bring it, we’ll extinguish you.” Michael Babich from Wichita, Kan., accused me of “calling for rampant crime and a plague of locusts.”
Here is the story as presented by American Renaissance with readers comments.