Published: March 15, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Republican Obstructionism is Based Not on Ideas, But Racism
By Djelloul Marbrook 
Republicans are partying heartily on the reluctance of most of us to call them racist.
But their unprecedented obstruction of President Barack Obama's every initiative and their intransigence towards our most conciliatory president in recent memory makes it hard not to think that the color of his skin has something to do with it.
The Republicans tapped the roots of American racism in the 1960s with their so-called Southern Strategy and have ridden the racist bandwagon ever since.
They know perfectly well a republic doesn't work without compromise and government can't govern from its extreme wings, whether right or left. But they see an opportunity to ruin our first black presidency and they're seizing it come hell or high water. To them, victory at the polls counts more than effective government.
Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and all our other neglected ethnic populations that have yet to fully participate in our republic should take note. They're next. Racism is not the exclusive bane of African-Americans.
The Republicans know that while lowly bloggers like me may dare to call them racist, the mainstream media-and most of us-are loathe to engage such an odious and slippery idea, and they're depending on this to get away with stacking the deck at the polls by appealing to racism.
The President can't cry foul, nor can his party, because it would come across as indecent and perhaps paranoid. But if it's not racism, what is it? The Republicans have given it every name under the sun-patriotism, fiscal responsibility, prudence, national security-but only the racists among us subscribe to those phony excuses because they're in on the game.
We confront a wicked conundrum here. The business of the people isn't being done, and the duly elected government is hamstrung, because the Republicans keep playing the race card while calling it the moral high ground. Those of us who don't look like old white clubsters-the majority of us-should ask ourselves what we're really voting for the next time we look at that elephant on the ballot, because racism is the elephant in the back room.
Djelloul (jeh-lool) Marbrook was born in 1934 in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American painter. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, New York, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. He then served in the U.S. Navy.
Djelloul Marbrook
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The pioneering Online Originals (U.K.), the only online publisher to receive a Booker nomination, published his novella, Alice Miller's Room, in 1999. Recent fiction appeared in Prima Materia (Woodstock, NY), vols. I and IV, and Breakfast All Day (London, U.K.).In his younger days his poetry was published in literary journals including Solstice (England) and Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California). Recent poems appear in Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (www.arabesquespress.org), Perpetua Mobile (Baltimore), and Attic (Baltimore). He is the English language editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal (www.arabesquespress.org).
He worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and as an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. Later he worked as executive editor of four small dailies in northeast Ohio and two medium-size dailies in northern New Jersey.
For More Information: www.djelloulmarbrook.com
www.myspace.com/delmarbrook
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