Homer said in a comment on my last post, about why the tea-partiers don’t like Barack Obama:

You forgot to mention Obama is black. That is really the problem. All the rest of the crap is just sorta random whining and sound bites. The tea partiers “Want our Country Back” because they never, ever imagined one of the black guys would be running it.

Actually, I think it’s more complicated. They don’t dislike him because he’s black, or at least not just because he’s black. They dislike him because he defies categorization. He has a white mother but a black father. And his father wasn’t an American but a Kenyan. And he lived in Indonesia for much of his childhood. And his first name has origins in Swahili and (OMG) Arabic. And his middle name is Arabic and is the same as the last name of that guy who Bush said had WMDs. And his last name doesn’t sound ‘merican.

Kenyan father, Indonesian childhood, a name with multiple foreign origins. What do they do with all of that? At least “Jesse Jackson” is pronounceable, and his ancestors were American slaves. They know what box to put him in. They know all about black people — they have generations of stereotypes about black people to fall back on. But what about that Obama guy? What box do we put him in? How are we gonna stereotype him if we don’t know what box to put him in? Obviously he must be hiding something. Kinda shifty and suspicious! At least black people are American. This guy doesn’t even seem American!

That’s the mentality, as far as I see it.