DREAM,
INTERRUPTED

While a good majority of Americans awoke on Wednesday, Nov. 5 glad that the Republican-led degeneracy was near over, another demographic clearly weren’t pleased that a black president was no longer just something they showed in movies to indicate the story was set in the future. The result of that displeasure has been a sudden spike in racially motivated crimes from cross-burnings and mock-lynchings to vandalism and assault. And the bigotry isn’t contained to the redneck states.

According to Mark Potok of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, police across the U.S. have been dealing with “hundreds” of similar race-based crimes in a surge that began the day after Obama’s victory.

Potok says the reaction comes from those who feel “that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.” And it wasn’t by the Jews after all. Sociologist BJ Gallagher equates post-election racism against African-Americans to the post-9/11 anti-Muslim violence in the U.S., suggesting it’s a flash reaction by McCain supporters against the race of the man who defeated them. And while Gallagher points out that it’s “stupid and ineffectual,” he also notes that it “happens a lot.”

by SCOTT SAXON