| Tellingly, a more recent Daily Kos/Reseach 2000 poll found that the false belief that death panels and mandatory end-of-life counseling were part of Obama's plan followed the same sort of partisan and regional pattern as belief in Birtherism.
"Not everyone who opposes the president's plan or him as an individual obviously is acting on the basis of racism," activist Tim Wise, author of White Like Me told CNN's Don Lemon on August 16. "My argument is that there is a background noise of the hostility, that is, I think, about what I guess I would call white racial resentment."
Wise went on to cite the example of an altercation at Missouri Senator Clair McCaskill's Hillsboro town hall on August 11.
"A white man goes, assaults a black woman, rips up her poster of Rosa Parks and then receives a huge ovation from literally hundreds of white folks in attendance for doing that. And then as they haul her away, the police in the room, the security, haul her away, these white folks are applauding. She was assaulted, a picture of Rosa Parks ripped up. Meanwhile, there are white folks in the room with posters that refer to the president by the 'N' word. No one seemed to care about that," Wise explained.
A classic historical example of white paranoia similar to today's "death panels" was the spread of rape fantasies used to justify widespread lynchings beginning in the post-Civil War era-even though many lynchings having nothing to do with rape. This fantasy narrative about events that were extremely rare stood in stark contrast to the pervasive practice of white slaveowners raping black slaves, which was rarely even noticed at the time. This pot-calling-the-kettle-black dynamic, formally known by psychologists as "projection" or "projective identification," has been identified as a central mechanism of racism
'The price of admission into a culture is the acquiring of its projective identifications," Young wrote in a 1992 essay, "Racism: Projective Identification And Cultural Processes" Almost two generations after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, conscious attitudes about race have changed dramatically, and Obama's election is clear proof of that. But projective identification is a deep-seated subconscious process, and its shared contents within any culture do not change so quickly or entirely, regardless of what we might wish.
When figures like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck-with long histories of racially stereotyping others-accuse President Obama of being a racist, of harboring "a deep-seated hatred of white people" as Beck claimed, they are projecting their own unacknowledged racism onto him... and encouraging their listeners and viewers to do the same. Insisting-against all evidence-that Obama was not born in America, is a primal subconscious refusal to accept the dramatic conscious changes that America has made since 1964.
"I want my country back!" is a cry that's been heard at "tea-parties" and at disruptions of health care town hall meetings. "What country is that?" some wonder.
Wise told Lemon, "When you stand up and you wax nostalgic and say things like I want the country that the founders envisioned, when the country the founders envisioned was a formal system of white supremacy, excuse me if I found it a little hard to think that race is not perhaps playing a pretty big role."
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is the author of Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Colorblind racism is a subtle blend that allows for substantial progress in individual relations, even as it resists confronting the persistence of inequalities. It helps explain how conscious progress and subconscious resistance co-exist in a state of considerable confusion that nonetheless has a structure to it.
"I make a distinction between old fashioned racism--the Birthers are as close as you can get to that," Bonilla-Silva told Random Lengths. "They use a somewhat more sophisticated version, but still only slightly so."
"I'm more concerned with the more sophisticated folks," he said, referring to colorblind racism, which comes into focus "if you move to how white America reacted to the controversy about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and who's story was believed from the get-go, and how people responded."
He went on to say, "Plenty of my colleagues [he teaches at Duke University] asked me 'Why did Obama jump on this when he doesn't know the facts?' And I responded, 'Are you assuming that the police officer is giving you the facts?'
"Anyone with an ounce of brains who reads the documents knows that this cop is doing what's called testilying."
Indeed, the 9/11 call, from Lucia Whalen, identified two men, neither of them Black: "One looked kind of Hispanic, but I'm not really sure," Whalen said, also stating that they had two suitcases. "I don't know if they live there and they just had a hard time with their key," she said.
But Sergeant James Crowley's police report claims she told him a different story just minutes later, "She went on to tell me that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch."
"He turns 'luggage' into 'backpacks'," Bonilla-Silva pointed out, much more compatible with the image of criminal suspects.
The very fact that Crowley's subtly, but significantly falsified report never became a major part of the story is a typical example of how colorblind racism works. A content-free photo-op of personal reconciliation became the centerpiece of the story. Whited out from the script was clear evidence linking the incident to the pervasive, systemic problem of racial profiling, and routine police lying to cover it up.
Harvard's James Sidanius is co-author of Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Social dominance theory explains gender as well as racial, ethnic and religious hierarchies within a comprehensive framework. Social dominance orientation is a structure of attitudes supporting the dominance of one group over another, which in turn supports a variety of hierarchy-enhancing "legitimating myths" or ideologies, which vary from one society to another, as well as varying over time. These in turn serve to justify unequal treatment, be it individual, institutional, or a combination of the two.
Bonilla-Silva's colorblind racism can be seen in part as describing the workings of such legitimating myths in America today-quite different from the legitimating myths when America was still a segregated society, with legal discrimination, but still preserving a good deal of inequality that minorities tend to be far more conscious of than white people.
"Generally speaking legitimating ideologies are believable stories for explaining behavior towards minorities, for example, in this case, the President," Sidanius explained, when questioned about the Birthers and Tea-baggers. "What's unusual in this situation is that the explanation seems to be so unbelievable--he's a fascist or communist or an alien. That I find interesting," he told Random Lengths.
"They seem to have really made themselves look ridiculous in the minds of moderate Republicans. I was really surprised to see that, because it violated the norm of plausible deniability." | 
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