racismreview.com

As election day approaches, the campaign-related racism is getting amped up to new levels, both from the McCain campaign and from individuals not officially associated with the campaign.  Let’s start with the individual-level racism.

Greg Howard, a Florida middle school teacher and football coach, has been reassigned (but not fired) for his lesson in acronyms.   He spelled out the word “CHANGE” (part of the Obama campaign’s tagline) on the board in his classroom, and asked the class if they knew what it stood for.   The answer: “Come Help a (N-word) Get Elected.” Apart from the weak pedagogical strategy, Mr. Howard’s lesson was clearly and overtly racist.   The fact that he has been reassigned (to adult education) rather than fired speaks to the continued level of tolerance we have as a culture for this sort of racism.

Along with this individual-level racism that’s erupting like an infectious disease, the the McCain campaign is also engaging in a slightly more subtle, though no less racist, strategy.   The campaign’s strategy is to let Palin do much of the heavy lifting of peddling their racist message, and she seems eager for the task.      In a cogent analysis for AP about Palin’s character attack on Obama in which she questions Obama’s association with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, Douglass K. Daniel writes:

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

Daniel, and lots of other writers, have noted again and again that Obama’s association with Ayers is “exaggerated at best if not outright false.”   There is simply “no evidence shows they were ‘pals’ or even close,” yet the innuendo along with the racially tinged subtext - repeated over and over - is apparently what passes for “straight talk” in the McCain campaign these days.

Have you found a DVD in your mailbox recently entitled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” released by the Clarion Fund? In its jacket they ask “How can you help fight radical Islam?” and directs you to a website (www.radicalislam.org) to “take action” and for “activism ideas.” The cover (and title) of the DVD should be telling enough, but after watching for a few minutes, you get the idea: that the production is pure fear mongering and anti-Islam (see this ), not to mention the Clarion Fund is a pro-McCain group. As One at Huff-Post reported, just four days after the DVD’s release, an attack at a Dayton mosque took place in which two white men sprayed some kind of chemical into a window, with children praying inside. Zero attention has been paid to this attack, while the local press has bought the line from the police that it was not a hate crime . Unfortunately we haven’t heard either candidates speak out against this attack, though McCain should feel more inclined to do so, since the group supports his candidacy.

Is this “Obsession” video the “October surprise” we should expect from the Republicans this election cycle? Or rather, is this just the beginning? Just yesterday Governor Palin tried to accuse Obama of “palling around with terrorists” something the AP has recently said is racially tinged, though now she is denying it is.

Following Jessie’s recent entry, Palin is now pivoting from her own image of whiteness and attacking Obama for his perceived Otherness. But what about McCain? Many in the media seem to think he won’t go there, but I’m not so sure. McCain recently said he would “take off the gloves” this Tuesday night at the debate.

Obama supporters, brace yourselves. This final month before election day is going to get very rough.

Sarah Palin, Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska, represents archetypal whiteness (image from here). Her place on the ticket as been described as an effort to appeal to “women” voters but this characterization misses the very real way that she represents and appeals to white women and men. The “hockey moms” and “Joe six-packs” she relentlessly invokes in her speeches are cultural references to white people.  While there are a few black players in the NHL (e.g., Donald Brashear, Manny Malhotra, Jamal Mayers, George Laraque, Ray Emery, Jarome Iginla, Anson Carter , Kevin Weeks), hockey is an overwhelmingly white sport.  “Hockey moms” is meant to conjure an image of women like Palin herself, white and socially conservative.

Palin also asserts her representation of the group known as “Joe six-pack.” In a radio interview she said:

“It’s time that normal Joe Six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.”

She’s repeated this reference multiple times, including in the Vice Presidential debate last week.  It’s a reference that’s meant to evoke “Everyman,” as William Safire noted in this 1998 piece (and, it’s not restricted to conservatives or Republicans).    Yet, the expression carries with it a particular - rather than a generic - referent.   The referent is to a white, working-class man, and, more specifically, to a white working-class man with an over-developed appreciation for televised sports and canned domestic beer.  It’s been interesting to watch and listen to Palin do the acts of translation necessary to transform this quintessentially masculine image into one that’s supposedly gender-inclusive of women.  Of course, little in the mainstream press has noted the gender-disconnect here, but has tried to take issue with Palin’s claim to be working-class since she and her husband Todd (the first dude) earned $249,000 last year.  But there’s no analogous clamor of critique of the whiteness of this term and the racial exclusion it implies.

Sarah Palin’s “cringeworthy” performance in a number of interviews, most notably the series of interviews with Katie Couric, suggest another element of her archetypal whiteness:  advancement despite a lack of verbal acuity.   We’ve seen this again and again with white people who don’t have the basic verbal skills you’d expect of a 5th grader, and yet they get promoted to higher and higher levels in government.   The most notable example in recent history is George W. Bush.  Any black man with his verbal ability would be relegated to cleaning office floors or driving a truck.   But not W., he rose to the highest office in the land.   And now, Sarah Palin is following in these well-worn white footsteps of promotion without ability.   In case you missed it, here’s some of what transpired in the interviews with Couric:

Questioned about her boast that being governor of a state that borders the frozen wastes of eastern Russia added to her understanding of foreign policy, she said: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.”

Asked if the US financial crisis was leading the country towards another Great Depression, her reply was: “Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re going to find ourselves in another Great Depression. But, there has got to be action - bipartisan effort - Congress not pointing fingers at one another but finding the solution to this, taking action…”

It is virtually impossible to imagine a black person - man or woman - with that lack of verbal ability or basic grasp of knowledge who would be considered for the vice presidency.     Black people have long recognized that to get ahead in a white world they have to work twice as hard as white people.  The flip side of this is the kind of half-assed performance we’ve come to expect from white people in high office in this country, people who are so arrogant that they believe that they don’t need preparation, education, and hard work to succeed.  Instead, they seem to cling to the comforting fiction that they are inherently blessed with some sort of “gift” of leadership that obsolves them from the need to read, speak and think in coherent sentences.     The winking, smiling hubris of the unprepared yet supremely confident Palin, combined with the images she conjures of  “hockey moms” and “Joe six-pack” makes her an archetype of whiteness.

The current financial crisis turns out to be quite an opportunity for exposing the modus operandi of white privilege and white racism. In this short clip (3:05), Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota), you can see and hear this white woman blame “blacks and other minorities” for the current financial crisis. Specifically, she refers to something known as “CRA,” the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The clip begins with a shot of the (rather empty) chamber, then the camera turns to her:

In fact, Rep. Bachmann is wrong and is simply re-iterating conservative talking points, as Think Progress notes. Bachmann’s assertion is based on a series of racist lies, nicely dissected here by Sara Robinson. Bachmann’s strategy of blaming black folks “and other minorities” is an old, racist trope that even mainstream news media types are beginning to recognize. (This speech earned Bachmann the dubious distinction of Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” award on last night’s broadcast.) So, this is how white racism and white privilege are working together here. Economically privileged white men built, implemented and profited from this elaborate financial scheme, a good deal of it on the backs of people of color and their mortgages. Then, other privileged whites - like Michelle Bachmann - come along and do the ideological work of blaming the people at the bottom of several, interlocking social hierarchies (race, class, gender) for the economic collapse. Meanwhile, the 400 richest Americans continue to get even richer and can easily claim that “they’re not racist” and convince themselves that they are not implicated in this deeply unequal and unjust system.

Make no mistake, all the available evidence suggests that the American political economy is headed for a major crash.  Some are even speculating that this is the end of American economic dominance in the world’s financial market.  But don’t be deceived by the blame-the-victim rationalizing that’s being floated now.   Let’s be clear about what policies and which people are behind the current financial crisis: neoliberal policies and the overwhelmingly majority of economically privileged white men (photo from same link) who created, implemented and benefited from those policies.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of policies that encourage “less government” and unfettered (and unregulated) capitalism.   The key elements of neoliberalism include: 1) the rule of the market, 2) reducing government expenditures on social services, 3) deregulation, 4) privatization, and 5) gutting the notion of “the public good.”    While this may strike some readers as sounding astonishingly similar to any recent Republican stump speech, neoliberalism has infected Democratic politics as well, and either Clinton’s policies (and way too many of Obama’s, for my tastes), fit neatly within the framework of neoliberalism.  Remember, “welfare reform” was a large part of what got Bill Clinton elected, and that’s a quintessential neoliberal policy.   Now, it seems self-evident to me what the connection is between neoliberalism and the current financial crisis, but allow me to connect a few of the dots here.   As those in the White House and Congress, including John McCain, touted the benefits of deregulation (link opens video of interview with McCain) of the financial markets and passed legislation “freeing” up those industries from any sort of government oversight, whole new markets developed and a few people got very, very rich.   Many of those who got very, very rich did so in financial services that are obtuse at best and an elaborate shell game at worse.   Others got very, very rich by targeting minority communities for subprime mortgages, the new version of “redlining.”  Now, those who conceived of, established and profited from these businesses have either cashed out or, if they’re still in the game, are looking to the U.S. tax-payers (some of the same people who’ve been fleeced by these schemes) for a $700 billion bailout, making the U.S. government the insurer-of-last-resort for these highly risky capitalist ventures.    The end result of neoliberal policies is that while a handful of people get very, very rich, these policies simultaneously exacerbate the suffering of just about everyone else and increase domestic and international instability.    So, what we’re seeing now is just the logical, perhaps inevitable, result of these policies.

Economically privileged white men have had a disproportionate level of involvement in the development, administration and profit from neoliberalism.  If you look at the roster of those in power on Wall Street and in the financial services sector more broadly in the U.S., what you will see is overwhelmingly white men who have gone to elite schools and, for the most part, come from upper-middle class and upper-class backgrounds.   Granted, there are token women (usually white) and people of color (some African American men), but these exceptions highlight the prevailing demographic fact about the industry.   While the “secret societies” of the wealthy occasionally make the news, the fact is, the power elite has been a feature of American life since before C. Wright Mills wrote about it in the 1950s, yet it rarely gets discussed in any meaningful way in the mainstream news. Instead, we get a lot of reporting about how the bailout failure was the result of partisanship - certainly part of the story, but doesn’t explain why conservative republicans and democrats rejected the plan.  Instead, what we need is more reporting, more information about how the state is working to protect the interests of the power elite.

Fortunately, critics on the left have pointed out the elite interests behind this crisis and the proposed bailout.   The reality is that bailout or not, the worsening economic landscape is not going to affect everyone in the U.S. - and the world - evenly.   Instead, people of color, women, and particularly women of color, are going to get laid off, not have health care, lose their homes and be forced into bankruptcy, while privileged white men may have to sell one of their vacation homes.  It’s time to shift this burden back onto the shoulders of the people who created it.

A few days ago a rather clueless John McCain told a standard joke about Irish Americans and drunkenness. In response, Seamus Boyle, the National President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America, sent him this September 23, 2008 letter:

Dear Senator McCain, Thank you for meeting with us on Monday September 22 in Scranton Pennsylvania to discuss our issues concerning the Irish American community. You did address the seven issues which we had given to you on a previous occasion and we were generally satisfied with your answers and your ideas to implement action on our behalf should you be elected in November. It was a great meeting but when you began your speech with a joke about the Irish, I and many of our fellow Irish Americans in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were shocked. It was really an insult to a whole nationality to be stereotyped as drunks. The Irish are a jovial people who enjoy life, work hard, help the needy, support our community and our country yet get depicted as drunkards and partiers. As you stated in your speech yesterday the Irish have a great education and work ethic. Senator, I was not the only one offended and I received numerous complaints from a variety of people throughout Pennsylvania and other parts of the country. On behalf of these people, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and myself and my family, I wish you would refrain from demeaning the Irish or any other ethnic group by telling such jokes in the future. I think an apology is in order to those millions of Irish in the United States who were offended by your joke.

As an Irish American, I have had this response for years now to all such Irish stereotyping and joking, and I think it is well beyond time to take all such widespread ethnic and racist stereotyped joking out of the U.S. communication system in public frontstage settings and in the private backstage.

It would be particularly good too, in my view, if powerful national organizations like this would take on all racist and ethnic joking as hurtful, inappropriate, degrading of this society, and stimulative of discrimination, as they hint at in the next to last sentence, and make it a major organizational cause to press for national education about such racist and ethnic joking and stereotyping.

Indeed, we need to start teaching Stereotyping 101 at all levels of U.S. education. It is odd that almost no US school system anywhere that I know of has even 6 weeks of Stereotyping 101 required of all children at any grade level. Why is that? I welcome your thoughts and comments on that, and how to change this reality.

Despite the fact that 99% of those in charge of the financial and political institutions that are responsible for the current political crisis are rich, white men, it seems that black and brown folks are being set up to the take the blame for this.  Apparently, the bank Washington Mutual (WaMu) failed because it “hired minorities,” if you are to believe National Review’s Mark Krikorian.   This is not a new stance for the National Review, and their elite, articulate version of racism is a good reminder that white supremacy doesn’t always wear Klan robes.   Daniel De Groot, writing at Open Left, has an excellent piece about racism and the current financial crisis (h/t Paul at BS).    To highlight the NR’s current racism and connect to a legacy of this kind of thinking at the magazine, De Groot posts a quote from them in 1957:

The Central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal is whether the White community in the South is entitle [sic] to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?  The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race…  [emphasis from De Groot].

De Groot goes on to comment that:

none of this has changed.  NR still believes the enlightened minority should prevail over the “atavistic” majority, and violence is an acceptable solution to make that happen.

The violence is economic violence rather than cracking the heads of lunch-counter-protestors, and it seems clear that the mechanisms for a bailout being put into motion now are intended to benefit the wealthy - and the overwhelmingly white - elite.

In a recent column called “White Privilege and Barack Obama,” John Stossel, the co-anchor of ABC’s show 20/20, deploys the white racial frame - and hides behind the writing of African American neo-con Shelby Steele to disguise his own ignorance about racial matters in the U.S.

Stossel begins his piece by sharing his “assumption” about the significance of Obama’s success, then picking up on the widely circulated Tim Wise piece on Obama and white privilege, (which Adia Harvey wrote about here first), and then attacks Wise for his message. Here’s Stossel:

I assumed that the success of Barack Obama, as well as thousands of other black Americans and dark-skinned immigrants — many of whom thrive despite language problems — demonstrates that America today is largely a colorblind meritocracy. But a white campus lecturer, Tim Wise, gets tremendous applause from students by saying things like, “[W]hite supremacy and privilege continue to skew opportunities hundreds of years after they were set in place” and in America, “meritocracy is as close to a lie as you can come.” His message is in demand — he is invited to more than 80 speaking engagements a year.”

Stossel never refutes the charges that Wise and Harvey (and lots of others) make about white privilege and the way it operates in U.S. society and particularly in this campaign. Instead, he engages in a rhetorical strategy that’s best described as “nuh-uh, Shelby Steele says…” The line that immediately follows the paragraph quoted above starts like this:

But black writer Shelby Steele argues that whites do blacks no favors wringing their hands about white privilege.”

The rest of Stossel’s column consists mainly of lots of re-tread quotes from Steele’s book White Guilt. The bottom line: “nuh-uh, Shelby Steele says all that stuff is minor and he should know, ‘cuz he’s black.” So there. The only ground that Stossel ever concedes to racism is this bit:

Of course, there is still racism in America. At ABC News we’ve aired hidden-camera video showing sales clerks spying on black customers, cab drivers passing blacks to pick up whites and employers favoring white-sounding names.

Steele says those are minor problems.

Here, Stossel is referring to one 19-minute segment called “True Colors” that 20/20 did back in the early 1990s when Diane Sawyer was still on the show. It’s an excellent piece. I’ve used in classes and I include here on our list of recommended videos to use in teaching about racism. That’s one segment - in the twenty-plus years the show has been on. What Stossel fails to grasp here, and what Steele minimizes in his analysis, is that this discrimination is daily, ongoing, and life-threatening. In fact, in the very segment that Stossel references here African American economist and social commentator Julianne Malveaux points out how damaging and pervasive this sort of discrimination, when she says “it grinds exceedingly small.” Yet, this is not the African American Stossel chooses as his spokesperson to address racial inequality; instead, it’s Shelby Steele because his message is much more consistent with the white racial frame that Stossel deploys here. Once again, he quotes Steele to make his point:

“The fact is,” he adds, “we got a raw deal in America. We got a much better deal now. But we can’t access it unless we take … responsibility for getting there ourselves.”

He makes good points. White privilege does still exist, but Barack Obama’s success is more evidence that it’s not the whole story. There are plenty of people in America who want to vote for someone because he is black. Or female.

Next, Stossel trots out that tired old trope in discussions of racism: “political correctness.” And, he slips easily between race and gender here, deftly protecting white, male privilege as he goes:

It’s not politically correct to say that. Hillary Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro said she wouldn’t have been nominated for vice president in 1984 were she not a woman and that Obama would not have been doing so well were he not black. “Could I have said … his experience is what puts him there? No. Could I say because his stand on issues have distinguished him? No … If Obama were a white man, he would not be in this position. … He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

For saying that, she was repeatedly called racist.

Yes, yes she did. (Including this excellent piece, again by Adia Harvey.)

In the closing line, Stossel makes the non-sensical claim that there is “black privilege” that is somehow the equivalent of white privilege. And, predictably, calls for a stop to “complaining” and for race-blindness:

There is black privilege — and white privilege. It’s time to stop complaining about past discrimination and to treat people as individuals, not as members of a certain race.”

Yesterday, I wrote about Kristof’s call to fellow journalists for more critical analysis of racism in the presidential campaign. And, as the election grows closer and the polling data continues to show that racism is costing Obama the votes of whites, such an analysis is sorely needed. Unfortunately, most journalists - like Stossel - are blind to the reality of racism and ill-equipped for such an analysis due to the white racial frame.

Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column in the New York Times is about the deplorable effort to “otherize” Obama.   One of the key points that Kristof highlights in the piece is that:

Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.  … A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.   …In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

It’s shocking and Kristof links to some of these outrageous sites at his blog.   Take a look, too, at the comments on Kristof’s blog.  Several of the people who believe these lies weigh in to reinforce their own delusion.   (And yet, this is not that shocking if you believe this argument, or if you subscribe to the old H.L. Mencken adage.)  To his credit, Kristof nails the analysis with this (and confirms much of what Joe’s been saying here for months):

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Kristof ends his column by calling on fellow journalists to “do more than call the play-by-play,” and do more to expose the egregious “fouls” that magnify the ugliest prejudices.    I’m glad to see Kristof finally acknowledging what we’ve been writing about here for months now.   If ever there were a time when those reporting on this campaign, not to mention the American citizenry, needs to get more sophisticated in its analysis of racism, that time is now.

A 527 outfit called by the Orwellian and oxymoronic term, Freedoms Defense Fund, has been running this racist smear ad on Senator Obama, reportedly in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, and other states. (H./T. John Foster) It tries to tie Senator Obama to the disgraced mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, with a harsh looking mug shot of the latter much like the old much like the racist Willie Horton ad of the 1988 Republican (first Bush) presidential campaign:

And Jonathan Martin at politico.com calls out the Tennessee Republican Party for a similar attack web-video ad trying to tie Senator Obama to Mayor Kilpatrick:

In the web video, the state party features a clip of the two praising one another and embracing while listing Kilpatrick’s legal and political woes on the screen. Kilpatrick’s problems could damage Obama in Michigan, especially in the white areas outside Detroit, but why is the Tennessee party the one airing this video? Asked if they’re really just trying to connect an allegedly corrupt big-city black politician to Obama, Tennessee GOP spokesman Bill Hobbs denied that was the case, saying: “We categorically reject the suggestion — the Web ad focuses on yet another example of Obama’s lousy character judgment, a growing list of examples that includes folks like the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the other race-baiting preacher, Father Phleger; and the corrupt real-estate wheeler-dealer, Tony Rezko.”

Martin is critical but did not call it racist, yet this ad like the first one is straight out of the white racist frame and appeals aggressively to the negative framing of Black men in most white minds. Senator Obama has done fairly well with segments of the white population, such as young political activists and better educated whites, but has drawn some support from other segments of the white population. I suspect that much of this white support is there because these whites, implicitly or explicitly, view Senator Obama as “an exception to his race,” at least to some degree. That is the old racist notion that certain African Americans are acceptable to whites if they do not press against the racist system openly and fit in well with certain white expectations and assumptions.

These Republican ads seem to be designed, and aggressively so, to link Senator Obama ever more clearly to what that white racial frame considers the “dangerous black man.” We see that expressly in Bill Hobbs comment, which mentions Dr. Wright and even two “corrupt” and “dangerous” white men.

And just now the McCain campaign has put out this ad linking Senator Obama to Frank Raines who was head of Fannie Mae when it got into trouble. This ad has two Black men and one white woman looking hurt. Not-so-subtle racist attempts to make Senator Obama into the typical black man in the white racist framing: