This is a disturbing report from The Star-Ledger:
Some neighborhoods in Roxbury were blanketed over the weekend with campaign literature from a white-supremacist, anti-immigration group that bluntly raised the issue of race regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama, offending some recipients and angering Democratic leaders.
A flier left on driveways in a neatly packaged plastic envelope questioned, “Do You Want A Black President?” and stated, “Black Ruled Nations most unstable and violent in the world.”
The material was distributed by a group called the League of American Patriots, which has a Butler mailing address.
The black-and-white flier featured “unflattering photos of Obama, including a doctored one portraying him with a long beard and turban.”
“Why should we seal our fate by allowing a black ruler to destroy us?” said the flier, which also detailed what it contended were facts on unemployment, poverty, HIV and crime rates among African Americans, while pointing out woes of a couple of predominantly black-populated countries.
I’ve seen this kind of thing before — in Princeton, where an area hate group distributed anti-Semetic literature in the same manner — and my hope is that this kind of nonsense is ignored.
But given the kind of ugliness that arrives in my e-mail Inbox almost daily and the comments I’ve heard from otherwise sane and humane people at parties, I can’t say I’m all that optimistic that this kind of assault on reason will fall on deaf ears.
Hank Kalet 