There has been considerable angst in recent weeks about relations between police officers and young black men, and more than a little finger-pointing. While I certainly think this nation needs ongoing discussions about how race relations affect police activity and vice versa, that is not the immediate subject of this blog. Instead, I want to turn to a different aspect of race relations in the United States that I think is undeniable, and yet will be denied by certain segments of the population. It is the ongoing inability of some people to accept the legitimacy of African American leadership even when a majority of Americans have supported it.

I spent the first week of December in Washington, D.C., at a series of meetings big and small, mostly with two federal agencies but also with others. It was only as the week was coming to a close, and I was killing time eating a dinner of shrimp, clam chowder, and beer in the Legal Sea Foods restaurant at Reagan National Airport that I got an interesting revelation by initiating a conversation with the man seated next to me at the bar, where people often get their dinner when they want faster seating than waiting for a table might provide. Besides, being a naturally gregarious sort, I find it relatively easy to strike up such conversations, which might be more difficult if I chose to sit by myself.

In this case, my conversation partner turned out to be a retired U.S. Navy officer who, among other things, talked about the challenges posed to some naval facilities by global warming and sea level rise. He manifested a trend in defense thinking that runs directly counter to Tea Party ideologues who see talk of climate change as some sort of left-wing conspiracy. This man noted the rise in sea levels in places like Diego Garcia, a remote island naval base in the Indian Ocean, and what it might mean over time. But the conversation started when he ordered a New Zealand wine, and I casually remarked on my experience with the subject after receiving some bottles of New Zealand red as gifts for speaking during my visiting fellowship there in 2008. That led to discussion of disaster work, and his comparing military response to disasters to my work on long-term community recovery through urban planning.

Somehow that led to a discussion of visits to Hawaii. I noted that, on our visit there in 2011, my wife and I had taken a rainforest tour in Oahu. It turned out that the tour guide had been a classmate of Barack Obama at the Punahoe School in Honolulu, and he joked, “I must be one of the underachievers.” But I added that he also noted that, on a previous tour, a Marine “birther” had challenged him on the idea that Obama was born in Hawaii and was thus a U.S. citizen. The tour guide laughed and said he told the Marine, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, but I went to school with him and I knew his mother and grandparents.”

The now retired naval officer noted his disgust with those who questioned Obama’s citizenship, stating that the advocates of such nonsense had turned “a lifelong Republican into a Democrat in the last ten years.” He then expressed a desire to see the right-wing Republicans who raise such questions focus on more substantive issues and quit pursuing issues that, in his view, were a waste of everyone’s time.  He was a very practical man who preferred to solve real problems rather than chase phantoms.

It struck me that a good deal of the far-right criticism of President Obama has been of this nature, but that there is a reason. After all, even before he was elected, Obama was the target of accusations and insinuations that he was a Muslim, that he secretly hated white people, and so forth. American politics has always been to some degree a fountain of character assassination, but over the years most of it has stayed in bounds. With the Obama presidency, however, there seem to be no limits. Most of the issues I have mentioned—the birth controversy, his alleged devotion to Islam, and so forth—are issues absolutely without factual foundation, yet they have circulated and maintain a hard core of believers that polls have often shown to be in the low double digits. To me, anything above the very low single digits in support for such blatant lies is somewhat frightening. I find it troubling that so many fellow Americans readily accept and even advocate such outrageous nonsense. And, frankly, I strongly suspect that a great deal of it emanates from the inability of a certain segment of the population to accept the legitimacy of a black man, even a biracial man, in the White House. Some people seemingly cannot reconcile themselves to the reality of black political leadership at the highest level of government. Never mind the obvious fact that a sizeable minority of whites had to vote for the man, or he would never have become president in the first place.

That brings to mind a small item in Business Week’s recent special issue celebrating its 85^th anniversary. The magazine lists, in reverse order, the 85 most significant disruptive innovations during its years in business. Far down the list is the Republican Party’s southern strategy, first enunciated under President Richard Nixon. The aim was to use coded racial appeals to woo the Deep South away from the Democratic Party, taking advantage of resentment among white voters over civil rights. It has worked like a charm, cementing what is now a Republican “Solid South,” but, the magazine notes, the presidency has become a “poisoned chalice” for the GOP because the party’s tactics and ideology have alienated many former adherents of the Party of Lincoln in places like California and the Northeast, which now form a solid block of Democratic support. As a long-time Chicagoan, I would add to that Illinois, which after all generated Obama in the first place. What is interesting in Illinois is that Republicans can win here—but only if they are socially moderate while fiscally conservative. State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who died recently only a month after winning re-election to statewide office, was a testament to that proposition, and someone who routinely criticized the more extreme factions of the Republican Party. Bruce Rauner, the governor-elect who defeated Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn, made obvious appeals to and inroads into the African American community. The state fiscal mess created by Illinois’s Democratic legislative leaders added to Quinn’s vulnerability because of his perceived inability to gain control of the situation.

But try to elect a Tea Party or far-right Republican statewide, and you are headed for electoral disaster. Obama handily defeated such a candidate, Alan Keyes (also African American), in 2004 to become U.S. Senator. Illinois voters tolerate many things, but extremism is not one of them.

Now, mind you, I do not mean to imply that any disagreement with President Obama is suspect on these grounds. There is plenty of room to disagree with any U.S. president, and I cannot think of any in my lifetime with whom I would not have some differences on some issues. That includes Obama; there are decisions he has made with which I can at least quibble, and some to which I have serious objections. In most cases, however, there is a good deal of room for compromise. Instead, in Obama’s case, from the very beginning there have been indications that some people had no intention of reaching accommodation with him on any issues whatsoever. The degree of vituperation and name calling has been at times absurd, shameful, and ridiculous.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to see this vituperation as a backdrop to the whole discussion that is now taking place on the streets about police relations with minorities. It is a testament to the fact that there are more than a few among us who lack any capacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, especially the shoes of anyone of a different ethnic or racial group. It goes without saying that those lacking capacity for empathy are usually the last to recognize that fact.

Jim Schwab