"Let me say this clearly so there are no misunderstandings: some of the protests against President Obama are howls of rage at the fact that we have an African-American head of state. I'm sick of all the code words used when this subject comes up, so be assured that I am saying exactly what I mean. Oh, and in response to the inevitable complaints that I am playing the race card--race isn't a political parlor game. It is a powerful fault line in a nation that bears the scars of slavery, a civil war, Jim Crow, a mind-numbing number of assassinations, and too many riots to count. It is naive and disingenuous to say otherwise.

"So when Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell jokes about hunting the president or South Carolina GOP activist Rusty DePass calls an escaped gorilla one of Michelle Obama's ancestors, it's racist. Which, in case of confusion, is the "ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group." (That's from the Oxford English Dictionary, but leave the Brits out of this.) When "Tea Party" leader Mark Williams appears on CNN and speaks of "working-class people" taking "their" country back from a lawfully elected president, he is not just protesting Obama's politics; he is griping over the fact that this country's most powerful positions are no longer just for white men. No, I do not believe that everyone who disagrees with Obama is racist. But racists do exist in this country, and they don't like having a black president."

When Raina Kelley wrote those words in Newsweek in her powerful essay, "Play the Race Card," her words were, in themselves, a howl of rage.  And they spoke to me, not just because I agreed with them, but because they'd been spoken, yet again, by an African-American writer.

Ms. Kelley's words joined those of many other of my favorite op-ed writers who happen to be black, like Bob Herbert and Charles M. Blow of the New York Times, and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, among others.

I wondered if maybe some of us who were white were wandering around, wondering WHAT to say, in a state of the way I felt just then, as if there were silent howls going off in my head.

And even as I was busy accumulating all kinds of links and passion and outrage so that I, too, could join the fray, it was an African American friend of mine who made me think about the issue in a whole other light.

My friend, who I'll call Anne, and I grew close during the Obama campaign and its aftermath, when we learned that we had so much more in common than not, and our frank and funny discussions about race have drawn us closer still.  The long miserable heated days of August upset us both deeply, with the "Obamacare" witch-doctor viral e-mails, the "monkey-see, monkey-do" signs, the "African lyin' in the zoo," and the other unmistakeable manifestations of racism rearing their ugly heads at meetings ostensibly set up to discuss health care, of all things. 

When men began to attend the presidential venues openly sporting loaded firearms, and a congressman thought it just fine and dandy to call a sitting president a liar on national television while he was speaking in front of a joint session of congress--and proceeded to raise nearly two million dollars off the naked insult from folks who thought that was a good thing--my friend and I talked about how we were "wandering around in our heads," filled with despair that, to her, it was 1968 all over again; but to me, it was the early 90's again, just before the Oklahoma City bombing, when I'd been researching right-wing rage and paranoia for a book and had known it was leading up to something terrible.

Either way, it was bad.

And either way, neither of us had dreamed we'd be seeing the likes again.  Not like that.

I told her that I had written about this subject before and that I had this sense of hopelessness that it seemed to make no difference, that here we were, all over again, that nothing ever changed, that the hatred, if anything, was worse--and in a measurable sense. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 900 active hate groups in the U.S. today--up from about 600 just a couple of years ago, and militia groups themselves, of the kind I was researching for my book, ORDEAL, have come raging back, with a vengeance, including one which is made up exclusively of former military and law enforcement officers.

The subsequent threats against the first African American president are very real.  According to Ron Kessler's new book, IN THE PRESIDENT'S SECRET SERVICE: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, threats against Obama's life have gone up 400% just since he took office in January of this year.

Now, in all fairness to right-wing nutcases, they hated Clinton too.  Oh, Lord how they hated that man and his wife.  They accused him and her of murdering Vince Foster and covering up the crime--didn't just accuse them in some rant or other, but kept up the heat so convincingly that Ken Starr actually dedicated TAX-PAYER DOLLARS AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FEDERAL AGENTS INVESTIGATING THE CLAIM before FINALLY DEBUNKING IT--which, of course, did not convince them.

(Years later, I actually saw a guy on TV say that he didn't think the matter had been investigated thoroughly enough.  Well, mister, if Ken Starr ain't thorough enough for you, then I can't help you, man.)

They accused Clinton of running drugs in Arkansas, of using state troopers to procure women for himself, of killing off all his rivals, and God knows, they kept one poor innocent woman in federal prison for, what was it--sixteen months?--because she refused to lie and claim that he had some sort of nefarious thing to do with the whole Whitewater mess?  They spent $65,000,000 taxpayer dollars trying to bring down Clinton and then wound up impeaching him for a blow-job, but I digress.

Obviously that had nothing to do with the color of his skin, so right-wing hatred for anything Not Right-Wing clearly knows no bounds.

But in the Clinton years, FOX news did not exist yet.

Now, Obama has to deal with an entire "news" network that spends, literally, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, attacking him, mocking him, denigrating him, delegitimizing him, smearing him, making up conspiracies about him, and whipping up public frenzy about him.

Toss THAT into the racist pot and see what you get.

It's one thing to refuse to air any of his news conferences.  It's quite another to refuse to air a speech to the joint session of congress.

What they do is, they refuse to air the speech in its entirety, but starting first thing the next morning, they cut-and-past, edit-and-clip little splices that they can put together in the worst possible light, so that they can attack and mock and be outraged at those looping clips for the next week or two.

Then whine like crybabies when he refuses to be interviewd by Chris Wallace.

With Glenn Beck insisting that Obama is racist, that he has a deep-seated hatred of white people--as if his own mother was not white, as if he was not raised by his white grandparents, as if his closet advisors were not white--and with every FOX anchor on their daily line-up encouraging their audience to keep their kids home from school rather than let the president of the United States even speak to them on the first day of school (something which seemed to disturb even Laura Bush)--this is not just racist, it is CORPORATE-SPONSORED RACISM.

And then comes the claim that Obama did not even write DREAMS FROM MY FATHER.

It seems this has been going on since the campaign, a myth begun by both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, that not only did Obama not write this incredible, soul-searching work, but that Bill Ayers, a casual neighbor in Chicago he sat with on a couple of education boards, did.

If I was not already deeply offended from a purely racial standpoint, this...THIS...literally made me recoil, as if I had been physically struck.

As an author, I find this so repugnant, so offensive as to be almost beyond my capacity for comment.

How.  Dare.  They.

What?  The black boy's not capable of writing his own book?  Is that it?

Or is it something deeper?  Is it more along the lines of pure JEALOUSY?

Sometimes, someone will streak across the cosmos like a comet, someone who seems to have everything; looks, athletic prowess, intelligence, Ivy League education, charm, wit, success, even, as in Obama's case, a happy marriage and great kids. 

And when that happens, well, the nasty lit-tle people of the world just have to find something somewhere they can make up or dig up that will make them feel bigger.

In this case, these two boneheads were so certain that Obama's and Ayers's two books were soooo similar that they sent carefully selected segments of them to Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, who has designed a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases.

They offered him $10,000, money which was raised by the brother-in-law to Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah.

First of all, he told them that it was "very implausable" that the two works were by the same author, and that if he were to compare the two books in their entirety as requested, he would have to go public with the results, even if the results were not, er, what they wanted.

So they dropped their little gambit, since it was pretty obvious they were wrong.

Which has not kept Rush Limbaugh OR Sean Hannity from repeating the lie that they now know is not even true.

Okay, so now, I'm wandering around the house in a bloodlust; a red-eyed author's rage.  I mean, Obama's mother was still alive, but had been diagnosed with cancer, when he wrote that book; he got the contract just out of law school because he'd been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.  He was barely 30 or something when he wrote it.  He wasn't even in politics yet.

Reading that book, I could see that this was a journey of the spirit that is what had given such a young man his beyond-his-years wisdom; it was exactly the kind of soul-searching that George W. Bush NEVER had.

For the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh to slap the authorship onto not just a white man, but THAT white man, so they could couple it with some sort of "radical education" meme of the day or whatever the hell they were after on their hate-rant, made me ill.

Like I told my friend Anne, "I'm already sick of this and it's only been six months.  You guys have been dealing with it for CENTURIES, and far worse, to say the least."

And then she said something that caught me up short.  Something full of grace and light and wisdom; something I think we should all heed, and something I think President Obama would appreciate.

She said:

He is letting us see that he "ain't scared" and we shouldn't be either.  The silent majority is on the side of truth and fairness this time, just like during the campaign.  That's why he was not about to call Joe Ass-hole Wilson a racist.  It would have only made the bigots even more zealous and it would not have done anything at all to convince anyone who didn't see that for themselves.   

He is scheduled to be on all five Sunday morning talk shows and David Letterman on Monday.  No one can rally the troops the way he can and he is signalling the troops to spread the word and to keep the faith.  We can't let him down.     

I thought about what my friend had said, and that is why I posted my blog, MY GRANDMOTHER'S CORSET and ALL THOSE EMPTY LIBRARIES, on how we needed to concentrate on getting health care reform passed and not get sidetracked on what Limbaugh or Hannity or any of those Morons of the Day were saying, because Anne was right. 

By letting them set the agenda, we WERE getting sidetracked, whether by racism or whatever other issue, but what Obama needs us to do is get this passed.  

But.   That racism thing.  It's still there. 

And it shouldn't be just the African Americans who have to keep speaking out about it.  We of other colorful or not-so-colorful persuasions should not just be silently howling in our heads.  

As Raina Kelley writes in Newsweek:  

I get it. Race issues are scary. There are few souls brave enough to say what they think about race relations outside the privacy of their homes or the anonymity of the Internet. But rather than deal with the discomfort of talking about race, we've continued to follow outdated rules about what words can be said by whom or, even worse, to stay silent. As if not speaking of racism will somehow make it go away. Silence, even the well-meaning kind, rarely wins an argument. It just allows the lunatic fringe to fill the vacuum in the public debate. And this reluctance doesn't help the effort to achieve racial equality, it hurts it.

But maybe silence isn't, after all, so silent.

For example, I raised my kids in the bastion of red-state conservatism, as did my good friend Linda, who hails from South Carolina, State of the Embarrassing Statesmen (I'm from Texas; I can relate.) 

And we both taught our kids to respect everybody based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin or the culture of their background.  Kids of all colors were welcome in our homes--even if it cost us friendships with adult whites in our respective areas.

And it wasn't just us.  Obama has pointed out--rightly so--that this issue is, in many ways, a generational one.  It does not mean that there are not young bigots running around, but it is just as true that the children of racists do not necessarily grow up agreeing with their parents, as was so movingly pointed out by African American blogger, Keli Goff in her Huffington Post blog, "Why I'm Grateful for Joe Wilson and the Fury of Racists":

Because the reason some people's racism has been brought to the fore is because the America they thought they knew and loved is becoming a different one before their very eyes; an America in which a Black man can get elected president and a Latina can become a Supreme Court Justice. But most of all an America in which their very own children applaud both. This is what really has racists in a tizzy. Every study shows that most of their children do not share and will not pass on, their legacy of intolerance and hate, but instead may end up dating or marrying an Obama or Sotomayor of their own one day.

You know what else gives me hope? The fact that even in a state like South Carolina where the Confederate battle flag still flies near the entrance to the capitol, citizens have seen fit to punish Congressman Wilson in the polls for the lack of respect he showed our president, who as we all know, is Black. If that's not proof of progress then I don't know what is. So let the racists wail. Let freedom ring and let progress come.

My friend Anne said something very similar in an e-mail to me:

Maybe the history that needs to be stressed right now is not the part that went wrong, but the part that went right. Maybe we should talk more about the white heroes of the abolition movement and the civil rights struggle.  Maybe we should be talking about how everyday there are white Americans out there reaching out to people of color through all kinds of  charitable organizations. 

White America was just as outraged about what happened in New Orleans as black America and many opened up there homes to displaced New Orleaners of all races.  Brad Pitt is building houses down there even as I write this.  Maybe we should fight back with the truth about the harmony that exists among the races, even while acknowledging that there are still problems.  It's kind of like when you were a little kid.  You didn't mind getting yelled at if you did something bad, if you got a "way to go kid" when you did good. 

Now, please don't get me wrong, Dear Reader.  

Especially to my friends of color who are reading this--please PLEASE don't think I'm using this as some kind of excuse to pat all us white folks on the back for Job Well Done!!!  

Because clearly we're not doing such a great job.  

What I'm trying to say is that, there are things that we can all do, things that may not be so readily apparent on the outside, things we can say to our kids at home, for example, that can combat these horrific racist attacks that we see on TV, things that we make clear we will not tolerate in our home.  

There are boundaries we can make clear that we will not cross, say, in the workplace, when e-mails make the rounds.  

We can send them back.  Say, This is not funny.  It is offensive.  Do not send these to me.  

We can, for the thousandth time, NOT LAUGH AT RACIST JOKES.  

I mean, I know this all sounds so elementary and maybe patronizing but goddammit, the stupid stuff keeps coming up, doesn't it?  

The thing is, there really are people out there who do not realize that a viral e-mail may not be true, or that a joke may not be funny.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but many of you reading this live in predominently liberal areas and this may seem self-evident, but when you live in predominently conservative areas, honestly, there are innocents out there who pass a thing along without thinking.   

They don't mean to offend anyone; they're just not thinking about it.  You can make them think without lecturing or hurting their feelings.   Sometimes they are glad to know the truth; I've been told that many times, as long as I use a respectful, and not angry, tone.

We don't have to howl, silently or otherwise.  

But we can speak up.

I'm putting it in a lame kinda way maybe, but Chip Berlet, in an amazing piece that was posted in AlterNet on October 9, 2009, "Why Right-Wing Demagogues Are Trying to Peddle Ludicrous Conspiracy Theories," put it far better:

These are the three R's of civil society: Rebut, Rebuke, Re-Affirm: Rebut false and misleading statements and beliefs without name-calling; rebuke those national figures spreading misinformation; and re-affirm strong and clear arguments to defend goals and proposed programs.

That's exactly what President Obama did on in his nationally televised address Sept. 9.

While keeping our eyes on the prize of universal, quality healthcare, we must also prevent right-wing populism as a social movement from spinning out of control. Since Obama's inauguration, there have been nine murders tied to white supremacist ideology laced with conspiracy theories. It is already happening here.

I like those three "R's" because those are things that we can do just to respond to those viral e-mails that cross our desk from co-workers, friends, family members, and office workers.

And we can remember that even though it may sometimes seem so grim, that progress IS being made. 

As President Obama joked on Letterman, "I was black before I was elected."  

Millions of white people voted for Obama, as did millions of Hispanics and millions of Asians. 

And yes, I know personally, African Americans who DID NOT vote for him because they disagreed with his politics.  

I think young Ms. Goff, writing in HuffPo, was actually on to something, in that, when titanic change is underway, then those most vehemently opposed to it are going to put up the biggest fight.  

They are going to make the loudest noise.  

BUT that does not mean that they make up the largest number.  

When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his glorious dream that one day his children really would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, just think about this:  

Had he not been assassinated, and had he been allotted a truly long life by the Good Lord, it is conceivable that he could have lived to see a black man take the oath of office as the president of the United States of America, as did a number of the men and women who marched with him back in the day.  

Imagine what he would have thought about that.  

There were haters then, sadly, and they took away his chance to do so, but they did not take away his dream, did they?  

That day has come.  

Let's not let the howls distract us now.  

We overcame before, and we shall do so again.