Ooh Eeh Ooh Ah-Ah, Ching, Chang, Walla-Walla Bing-Bang...

MMkayy, what's not racist about this? Where is the statement on policy, in the image to my left? Is it the hammer-and-sickle cuteness?

I am no longer as sickened by this as I was in the months following inauguration. I'm getting used to it. And, in the words of Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." I find the statement particularly useful in this instance, for the wonderful irony - this...image...was propagated about the Internet by a doctor and representative of the American Medical Association.

I want to degenerate, here, into a curse-fest that would put a blush on Dice Clay's face. But I won't. Let me, instead, let Dr. David McKalip speak for himself:

"I am not a racist. I am simply a person speaking up to make sure patients don't get hurt by the government and by insurance companies.''

"Because I've been so effective in pointing out how the government plans are going to hurt patients in very serious ways ... the only way they can neutralize my message is to discredit me personally."

Read on: he's not a racist, he's helped Black kids! Of course, they were Boy Scouts, so they'd been previously vetted on the most important subject (whether or not they were future Sodomites), but let's not steal the good doctor's thunder. His point is well taken: he isn't racist because he did one good thing for some Black people.

Observe: Birth of a Nation warned Southern Blacks about the Klan and gave the fledgling NAACP something to raise a platform against. Bull Connor gave out free showers at summer protest marches. Gerrymandering and de facto segregation were responsible for the Harlem Renaissance. That is how you take "racist" and turn it into "beneficial to Blacks."

I have said to many of my friends that we need a close, careful definition of racism. This is exactly why: this man is defending himself against an allegation of character by calling upon a single action, taken years in the past. Racism is a doctrine, a system of values and beliefs that fits into the mental schema according to which one lives one's life. It doesn't require conscious thought to be formed. Nobody's accusing this guy - well, I'm not accusing him - of proselytizing young Floridian youth, or advocating the assassination of the President and the re-subjugation of Black America. But I do believe that to find it appropriate to circulate these images of the President of the United States, the office so often said to belong to "The Most Powerful Man in the World," requires a certain defect of character that I can only describe as racism. Do you really see this picture going around with a picture of a White American president? I don't. The joke, as with the previous Watermelons-in-the-Rose-Garden image, is predicated upon a stereotype of Black People. "So what? Comedians use stereotypes as jokes all the time," you might contend, and you'd be right; but I have never seen stereotyping used to campaign against a public official.

It was recently suggested to me that I not give Orly Taitz any airtime on my Facebook profile. As far as the political discourse in America is concerned - if we're talking about the President's agenda, the current problematic health care reform process - I completely agree. But I'm not the one giving these people airtime on (ahem) cable news networks. I don't intend to legitimize the challenge to Barack Obama's United States citizenship by engaging in debate over these people's claims. What I want is for everyone to see the kind of ugliness that is still paraded about in the public eye without a thought. Orly Taitz, in other words, is not newsworthy because her claims have any purchase in reality; she is newsworthy because she is a racist woman who, along with many others in the conservative media establishment, has been given a podium and is using it to spread her unique brand of venom.

The dialogue on race in America is never going to get any further than it's come, unless we root out each individual case - each David McKalip, each Orly Taitz - and hold them up to the light and say, "This is an example of racism today." There is no racial slur in evidence. There is no specific expression of racist doctrine, no advocating the discrimination against or subjugation of Blacks in America; there are none of the hallmarks of what constituted racism in the public eye for the last hundred years. What there is, is a very clear notion that by his very nature, Obama has opened the door to this sort of attack; that it's okay to spread these images and videos, and these ludicrous challenges, specifically because the President is Black.

Racism has become insidious. The evil has become Arendtian in nature, the danger more covert. While I absolutely believe that other kind of racism exists, and remains problematic, I find this the much more dangerous incarnation. This idea that being Black is a point in the "minus" column of the character debate, an appropriate target for critics of the President, is a symptom of a viral ideology that can and will spread throughout the general population without their awareness or permission - and that is how the other kind of racism can thrive.