Obamaphobia?

In “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia” our old target, Penn anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr., argues that much antagonism to Obama is, well, phobic. Not all of it, you understand, but the criticism offered by (like that offered by?) Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, et. al. As an example,

there has even been talk (media-covered talk) about an Obama-led Democratic conspiracy to create “death panels” charged with determining which sick Americans will be given the privilege of government-dispensed health care.

Another example:

Americans’ current “run on guns” isn’t just about a potential change in national policy around gun control and the right to bear arms. Some of it also seems to be predicated on an uptick in right-wing militias and their renewed calls for a “race war.” Part of it is about a kind of “racial paranoia” linked to economic insecurities, a racial paranoia that pivots on a growing social movement around reactionary racial politicking. (The way “race” functioned in the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was one example of what this reactionary racial rhetoric sounds like today. The fallout from the Gates-Crowley Affair was another.)

You get the idea.

Actually, according to Prof. Jackson, you don’t get the idea. So many people read his column as arguing that criticism of Obama is at best phobic and at worst racist (or is that reversed?) that he has now written a second column to respond to those readers, “The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia, Part 2.”

“Some readers,” he begins,

want to interpret my previous “Obamaphobia” post as yet another “far Left” attempt to dismiss any and all criticism of Obama as racist. These are readers primed for an ideological fight. And it is a fight on their own terms, not the ones I offered up.

Part of the problem, I think, is that some self-deputized “culture warriors” want to drag everyone else into their fight club. There should be no place beyond the fray, above the partisan muck.

Read the two columns yourself, if you can (they may require subscription; I’m never quite sure), and decide for yourself whether Prof. Jackson’s analysis of “Obamaphobia,” parts coming and going, is “beyond the fray, above the partisan muck.”