Barack and the Supremacists

The Ku Klux Klan wants Barack Obama for President!

Sounds crazy, I know, but get a load of this. In The Oklahoman, a Conservative-leaning daily newspaper, I read on August 9 an article about the supremacists prospect of a white revolution if Barack is elected.

The supremacists are a group of enlightened wackos who believe in the superiority of the white people. Oh, did I mention they continue living in the 21st century?

Paradoxically, these heralds of tolerance and democracy would not be too unhappy if Barack were elected because it "would jar whites into action [...] rather than sitting around complaining" (I quote the paper).
Some people even fear the supremacists want Obama to be elected so they can assassinate him...

Sadly, ethnicity is very much at the core of the current campaign. John McCain has accused Barack Obama of playing "the race card." Barack retorted that John did it first.
The truth is both candidates, in their tour across the country, meet the different ethnic communities in turn and address the issues that are relevant to their specific audiences.

Ethnicity pervades everything. In an opinion paper, editorialist Kathleen Parker even suggested that McCain's ad conveying that Barack was just another celebrity by juxtaposing his image to Britney's and Paris's went even further than just doing that. It was stirring up in the American psyche the old nightmare of miscegenation. Arguing that apart from celebrity, sex is the natural connection that the viewer associates with an image of either of the two brainless, resume-less young ladies, Parker suggests that "the black man/female woman sexual taboo [which] still burbles just beneath the surface of America's inconscious mind" is awakened in "the pockets where racism is still easily tapped."

Because I am naive, I want to believe that Parker is wrong and way out there. But the ethnic factor is so overwhelmingly present that she might have a point.

Here's a thought. If ethnicity is pervading the narrative so much, it might be because the American English language has not yet done what the French language has done with the word race. Race has been nonsensical since it was discovered and established that there are no human races. Yet, race is the term still used by the Americans to identify their ethnic origin.
Is it possible to contend that the word itself is perpetuating boundaries between people, boundaries which are ingrained in the word itself and automatically conveyed each time the word is used?
Because races do not exist, when the word race is used in French, it is used consciously contrary to established fact that races do not exist and so it is used clearly out of racism. In American English, it is not. But it should be. Maybe people will stop thinking of themselves in terms of different races (an aberration, I repeat) if they stop using this term in the erroneous meaning it has taken.

I might be completely mistaken here, but I think racism is a much more shameful matter in France than here in the US. It seems to me that the French racist is less outspoken than the American one because he knows it is shameful to be racist. Two days ago, I read in the same newspaper a reader's letter entitled Love Us or Leave Us! The woman is incensed by an organization of Hispanic-American citizens called Nuestra America which organizes a national Hispanic voter registration campaign. This is what she writes: "Nuestra America means Our America. This gives me serious thought since I see the Mexican flag displayed in parades and protest rallies. [...] They are working to correct our American laws to favor both legal and illegal immigration. La Raza [another Hispanic-American organization, which by the way should change names] is tax exempt, so we're obligated to finance their efforts. If they would work as hard in Mexico as they do here to change laws, perhaps their back yard would be a great place to play. We are fine without their intrusive help. [...] Love us or leave us! I've never enjoyed company who come to visit and try to take over the house."

Not only this person does not seem to find any problem with what she writes, but a daily newspaper publishes it.
In all fairness, I have to say that the same page shows an opinion paper, by George Will, remembering some 80 black people lynched by a mob exactly 100 years ago in Springfield, Illinois, where Barack announced his candidacy last year. George Will concludes "Things have not always been as they are."

Well, they have not changed much either.