Fear of a black planet?

Quick post from Japan, here. Still out til the 18th...

Via Yglesias, this comes as little surprise: nearly everyone who subscribes to the idea is a Southern white:

The breakdowns of the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll that asked 2,400 people about where they believe the president was born are revealing. As Steve Benen and Markos Moulitsas both pointed out, only in the South is there a sizable number of Americans with questions about the president’s citizenship. While around 90 percent of people in the Northeast, Midwest and West know that Obama was born in in United States, only 47 percent of people in the South believe this...

But how many Southern whites aren’t sure whether the president has lied about his citizenship?...

While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president’s citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama’s citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South’s “don’t know” number to 30 percent and it’s “born outside the United States” number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn’t know where Obama was born.

So basically, the birther movement is code for people's fear that Obama isn't part of their tribe. It's a politically correct outlet for people who worry about having a black president, and people who worry about their region losing its traditional political clout. Naturally, Southern whites are much more afraid of this than others. (Yglesias makes a good side point, by the way, when he says: "I think Republicans have basically given up on the battle of trying to win more Hispanics over to their side. Which leaves them with the medium-term objective of trying to get non-southern whites to act more like southern whites.")

But this raises the question: why are whites, especially Southern whites, more afraid of blacks now than in years past? The black fertility rate has fallen to equal the white rate; blacks as a percentage of the population have been stable for decades and will be stable for the forseeable future. Obama isn't exactly chomping at the bit to redistribute wealth en masse from blacks to whites. Why the race panic? Why now?

Frank Rich has an answer: fear of blacks is itself code for fear of Hispanics:

[T]he inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments...

[A]n entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian. Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College...

The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.

I think this has the ring of truth. The South, dominated utterly by Southern whites, held political hegemony during much of the late 20th century; the massive long economic boom there (sparked, ironically, by FDR's Southern infrastructure outlays) made the South rule the electoral college...until the West went liberal in the 90s and the Southwest went liberal in the 00s. Both of those changes were sparked in large part by Hispanic immigration. So Southern whites have good reason to fear the Hispanic influx. Black people are just a convenient, traditional scapegoat.