racismreview.com

I have been reading a very interesting book by Benjamin Dennis and Anita Dennis called Slaves to Racism: An Unbroken Chain from America to Liberia. Professor Dennis was born in Africa, raised in Berlin as a diplomat’s son, and came to the U.S. in 1950, where he marched with Dr. King and was in a debate with Malcolm X. He got a Ph.D. in sociology/anthropology, then taught at several universities, including University of Michigan (Flint) and Michigan State. Anita Dennis, his wife, also has a degree in sociology and anthropology. They have recently summarized Benjamin Dennis’s research and eyewitness account of how white racist framing and action have spread globally, even among those who are not white, thus: (photo: jizagirre)

During the 1800s, the American Colonization Society enticed free Negroes to go to Africa. Slaves were freed on the condition they leave. These two groups that became the “Americo-Liberians” who ruled Liberia, carried with them the evils of racism and the limitations of slavery.

Racism inevitably reproduces itself in the minds of the oppressed in order to rise. In the “Imitation of Supremacy,” as victim becomes victimizer, the Americo-Liberians saw the natives the way whites saw them. Now that the Americo-Liberians were rulers, they mimicked white rule. They justified their exploitation of the natives on the basis of cultural inferiority just as whites used racism to justify slavery. In America, race trumped all other considerations. In Liberia, culture trumped race as the classification of inferiority.

In the “Imitation of Superiority,” [some? many?] Americo-Liberians mimicked and retained the culture of the antebellum South because they derived their cultural superiority from it. The vast majority of the Americo-Liberians were freed slaves, including slaves freed on the high seas. Because of the limitations of slavery, they were image rather than reality. What they evolved was a pseudo culture, a poor replication of what they didn’t really understand. As slaves they had had only a “taste” of Western culture.

Ironically, they replicated what they despised – oppression and discrimination based upon “inferiority.” Natives were disparaged and ridiculed as “country people.” The Americo-Liberians set up all the Jim Crow laws of the South in Liberia. There was social segregation in Monrovia, the capital city. Among other things, natives could not enter through the front door. They could not vote. They could not speak unless spoken to. There were sexual restrictions. No native man could marry or have a sexual relationship with an Americo-Liberian woman. Even when natives became educated, they were restricted from government positions. Only a token few were allowed to participate.

This research and eyewitness account of how U.S. racism affected, and infected, the minds of people of African descent is striking. Even as the racially oppressed, some number of them carried the structures and orientations of aspects of white racial oppression back to Africa. The idea of the white racial frame that we have used on this site, and I have developed in several books, clearly needs to be developed even more aggressively with regard to the international context and impact.

According to Dennis, these (it is unclear whether he means some or many?) Americo-Liberians carried this white racial framing–with its negative view of Africa and other non-Western peoples, and especially its view of white cultural superiority and white supremacy, back to the country of their ancestors. In several important ways, they became substitute or proxy whites in their actions and orientations. The global circulating impact of white racist framing–and of the thinking, ideology, and action that grows out of it—remains one of the world’s most fundamental structural problems.

Yesterday, two white teenagers were arrested and charged with a hate-crime after assaulting a black man as they all waited in line to register for classes at Westchester Community College, just north and west of New York City.  The persistence of this sort of racism within educational institutions is consistent with the research evidence on this topic, such as Feagin and colleagues’ The Agony of Education (Routledge, 1996)  and this newly released research by Sarah Stitzlein, Breaking Bad Habits of Race and Gender (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).  That this sort of thing happened in suburban New York, once again underscores that the northeast is not immune from racism because the states in this region of the country happen to be above the Mason-Dixon line or because these white teenagers’ ancestors never owned slaves.  I wonder how the story of the young black man’s educational experience might read if he were to write it down for us?  The legacy of Brown v. Board of Education must sound like a hollow promise to him as he is getting called racial slurs and then pummeled as he tries to register for classes at a community college.

In another suburban community, this one to the east on Long Island, in Suffolk County, is seeing some anti-racism organizing on the part of some residents.   This is a welcome change of tone from Suffolk County, as this is the same county where Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero was killed by a group of (mostly) white teenagers recently.    (The fact that both these recent attacks were the actions of white male teenagers also speaks to the gendred, and specifically masculine nature of this violent form of white supremacy.)   The Town of Southhampton’s Anti-Bias Task Force met on the steps of Town Hall (photo by Kelly Carroll, Hamptons.com) to voice concern over the issue of hate-crimes against immigrants and against native-born racial/ethnic minorities.   Referring to the murder of Lucero, Lucius Ware, president of the Eastern Long Island NAACP said, “That was a lynching, which is injury by mob violence.  There are still hoods and gowns in some of the closets around here,” a reference to Long Island’s history of KKK activity.

It seems to me that suburban New York in these two events serves as a sort of microcosm for some of the choices we have facing us with regard to racism.   We may engage in overt racist attacks, we may be victims of such attacks, and we all have the option to stand together, across differences, against the legacy of racism.  At the moment, there is no large, anti-racist social movement in the U.S., but there are small groups of concerned people, like these folks in Suffolk County.  Perhaps if more of these small groups can sustain the collective interest in seeing an end to racism, then we could for the first time see a viable anti-racist movement in this country, and really begin to change systemic and entrenched racial inequality.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still periodically crying in celebration and relief at the news of an Obama presidency.    I feel as if something that I can’t yet name has broken loose, and I think it’s important to continue to mark this celebratory moment and talk very specifically about what it means and why it’s important.   I have a video clip of an election night montage, including part of Obama’s acceptance speech, saved to my iPhone and it makes me cry every time I watch it, and I’ve watched it every day since Tuesday.  I watched it riding the 6 train to Union Square yesterday and cried all over again, sitting there among all those strangers (image from here).   I have no intention of deleting it.   At some point, I’m sure the impact of this important symbolism will fade a bit, but it certainly hasn’t yet.

Part of why the election of Obama as president is meaningful for me is that it marks some significant distance traveled in my lifetime.   I was born in the same year as Barack Obama, 1961, but to parents who existed on the other side of a vast racial chasm from his parents.   Indeed, my parents in South Texas would have seen the union of Ann Dunham and Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. as evidence of all that was wrong with the world at that time.   And, the birth of Barack would have illicited - at best - some “tsk,tsk,tsk’s” from my parents about the “tragedy of a mulatto child” who would have to bear the mark of his parents’ thoughtless act of bringing him into the world.   I could easily imagine any of my grandparents, all four of whom were still alive in 1961 (and one of whom had been a KKK member in the 1920s), talking casually about the murder of an African man who had married a white woman, or their interrracial child, as part of what would set the world right again.  I can easily imagine my parents agreeing with them, if not initiating that conversation.   I can imagine these things because I heard similar conversations growing up about black leaders of the day; vile racist messages were the stuff of easy dinner conversation where I grew up.   And, on Tuesday I, along with millions of others, voted for Obama and danced in the street in Harlem in celebration.

So, what accounts for this distance traveled?  As I said, this is a personal note, so for me the distance traveled is about a “life-long struggle with the notion of white superiority” as one reviewer wrote about my work (Van Ausdale, Social Forces, September, 1998).  Those early dinner conversations about race were part of what spurred me to study race and racism in graduate school.   One of the most powerful experiences I had in the process of unlearning racism was working on Joe’s book (with Melvin Sykes), Living with Racism.  As part of work as a research assistant, I transcribed all the interviews in that book.  When I sat down to begin that work, I had moved away from the views of my parents and shared the views of most of my white liberal friends that racism was a bad thing but that it was an anomaly, and that charges of racism by blacks were either “exaggeration” or looking for grievance based on historically distant acts.  As I began listening to the recordings of middle-class black Americans talk about their daily experiences of racism, I initially objected to what I was hearing and wanted to take exception with the respondents in that study.   But the reality of the transcribing task is that you listen, carefully, and write down every word.  And, so I listened.  Carefully.  Noting each word.   Eventually, I learned to stop objecting and just listen.   After transcribing more than 200 hour-long interviews, I was a different person.   What I heard were people who were not “exaggerating” about racism, but rather often tried to minimize it.  The people in these interviews had learned really effective, often elaborate, coping skills for how to deal with something that was just a reality in their lives.   And, all of the people in the study were far more accomplished (in terms of education, occupation and income) than anyone in my family despite all the barriers that they had faced.   That experience of deep listening radicalized me.

In the preface to my first book (here), I wrote some about what my particular standpoint at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality has meant for my own work on white supremacy.  What I couldn’t know then is that writing that preface would cost me.   After I wrote that, I sent it to my father (my mother had died by then).    When my father read the preface, he reacted badly which is to vastly undrestate the case.  He tried to stop the publication of that book, tried to have me locked up, and we never spoke to me again.   (He died two years later in an industrial accident.) The fact is speaking out about racism, and in particular the lineage of racism in my family and connecting that to the larger story of white supremacy in American culture, was seen as a deep betrayal by my father.  I was supposed to uphold white supremacy, not call it out for the lie that it is.   It was about this same time that I also changed my name - from the one my father, and his father the Klan-member gave me - to one that reflected the anti-racist tradition I wanted to claim instead.  As my new namesake, I chose Jessie Daniel Ames, the white woman anti-lynching activist who founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.   For me, an Obama presidency represents an important symbolic shift in the legacy of white supremacy that has shaped my own life and has been the inheritance of this nation.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the racial progress that is represented by one black man being elected president.  As if “one black man could make it as a president, Katrina didn’t *really* happen just years ago,” as BFP cogently observed.  Yet, it still makes me cry tears of joy and relief, in part because it’s taken so very long.

Today, I write critically about race here and in academic publications, I teach in an institution that serves predominantly non-white, first-generation college students, I’m a member of a multiracial congregation, and there are beautiful biracial kids in my family.   None of this happened by accident, by being “color blind,” or as the result of some inevitable march toward “progress.”   The distance that I’ve traveled from being the daughter of ardent segregationists to being an anti-racist activist is one that is marked by intentionality.  I set out to learn about race and unlearn my own racism, and in the process, engage others in that process as well.   There’s a lot more work to be done on my own individual racism and on institutional racism, such as the school-to-prison pipeline that continues to operate unabated.

While some delusional commentators will mark this moment by declaring that racism never existed, others are offering much more nuanced examinations of what this election means, and how we might expand and continue the work of examining racism in an Obama-era.  The hope I have for an Obama presidency is that this is the beginning of widening that circle to include more people in thinking critically about race and taking action against racism, both individual and institutionalized.   For now, I’ll continue to get deep joy from knowing that after four hundred years we finally have a black president.

Pennsylvania has rather infamously been described as “Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle.”  After Obama’s win, there’s a lot of armchair-quarterbacking going on, a good deal of it has to do with the “ground game,” which refers to those community-organizing strategies like knocking on doors, contacting people in person, by phone, and wherever they happen to be hanging out to engage them about the candidate.  As just one of dozens of examples, last night Jake Tapper of ABC was talking about Pennsylvania as “the big prize” for the Obama campaign.  In his on-air analysis, he suggested that the winning strategies of the campaign were focusing on economy and paying attention to the “ground game.”  Following Tapper’s analysis, ABC commentators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous agreed and went on to praise the Obama campaign for their “ground game.”   If you lift the hood and look at what this actually involved in those face-to-face and door-to-door conversations, it looks a lot like anti-racist organizing.

This American Life has an episode called, “The Ground Game” (from 10/24) that illustrates what I mean by this.  The segment called “Union Halls,” features the really admirable efforts of Richard Trumka (image from Wikipedia).   Here’s the description of the segment from the show’s website:

No one much likes to talk about it out loud, but everyone knows it’s true: There are a lot of people out there who say they won’t vote for Obama because he’s black. To fight this problem, Richard Trumka, secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, has been traveling around the country giving a speech to fellow union members. It ends with a plea: You must stand up, and deal with race directly. Talk about it. Producer Lisa Pollak spent a month hanging out with union members, eavesdropping on their conversations, to see if Trumka’s directive was working.

They way they’ve framed this story is interesting: “What no one much likes to talk about but everyone knows it’s true…” is that there’s racism.    True enough, “no one much likes to talk about it,” it’s part of why we maintain this blog.  And, less true, “everyone knows it’s true,” there seems to be a lot of protestations to the contrary (but that’s the subject for another post).   The seventeen-and-a-half-minute segment is worth listening to in full and you can listen to it here (link opens to the full length episode, this is “Act Three,” about 25 minutes in).   What you learn from listening to Trumka’s story, and the story of lost of union members who worked hard in the “ground game” confronting and cajoling people about their racism.  As a union leader, Trumka developed something of his own stump speech, that was an impassioned call to anti-racism for union members.    In that speech, Trumka is plainspoken about the racism he’s encountered:

“We can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there, a lot of them are good union people, who just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man.”

From my perspective, there has been - and continues to be - a great deal of “tap dancing” around the issue of racism, including discussion of the “ground game” that doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this kind of direct engagement with people’s racism (such as the ABC report above).  Another story that Trumka uses in his speech and that makes it into the radio segment linked above is this one:

“This woman walks up to me. I’d known her for a long time, and I ask her ‘Have you decided who you gonna vote for?’ ”

“There’s no way I’d ever vote for Barack Obama,” the woman responded.

Trumka said he pressed her as to why. First, she said it’s because Obama is “a Muslim.” Trumka responded that Obama is actually a Christian.

Then, she told him Obama never wears an American flag pin on his lapel. Trumka told her that, too, is false, then asked her why she wasn’t wearing one if that is such an important issue.

Trumka said he continued to push, until “her eyes dropped down and she said to me, ‘Well, he’s a black man.’ ”

Trumka said he told her to look around at their town, the mining community where they both had lived for so long. “And I said to her, ‘This town is dying — literally dying.’ ”

“Our kids are moving away because there’s no future here,” Trumka said in the United Steelworkers convention address. “And here’s a man, Barack Obama, who’s going to fight for people like us, and you won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin? Are you out of your ever-loving mind?”

It wasn’t only union leaders like Trumka that engaged in this anti-racism political organizing, it was rank-and-file union members.   This sort of one-on-one engagement with people about their racism is a good part of what’s euphemistically described as the “ground game.”  And, this is just the kind of thing we need in this new era.

Anita Hill has an op-ed piece in The Boston Globe in which she suggests that “racial amnesia may be the cure” for getting Obama elected (image source).  Her essay includes this paragraph:

Regardless of one’s political leaning, most would acknowledge that the country is aware of its racial and ethnic diversity, and that for most Americans the stark contrast between the “black experience” and the “white experience” no longer exists. Systemic, state-enforced discrimination has disappeared and the prominence of civil rights law enforcement is greatly diminished.

And then after acknowledging some lingering inequality, she closes with this:

Figuring out the significance of race will be a challenge, but relying on racial memories based on a divided reality is not a good option.

Hill locates racism in the past, as a phenomenon residing primarily in the “memories” of a divided reality.   No doubt this is a comforting notion to many.  Unfortunately, Hill’s call for willful amnesia contributes to the problem rather than helps alleviate it.   As I posted a couple of days ago, we live in a culture that discourages critical thinking, particularly around issues of race and racism, and this makes understanding the world more difficult rather than easier.

Racism does not exist exclusively in the realm of the past.  Just recently, a life-sized effigy of Obama was found hanging from a tree with a noose around its neck at the University of Kentucky, and this is just the latest in a series of overtly racist incidents, including a foiled assassination plot by neo-nazis. (Updated @10:44am to add: And now this racist email from a GOP party volunteer that even FoxNews is reporting.)   The persistence of this sort of overt racism alongside the trend toward support for Obama among many whites (including David Duke, as Joe noted) suggests that racism continues to be a complicated issue in the U.S.   Such a reality calls for engaging in more complex and nuanced thinking about race, not amnesia.    Hill is a smart woman and it’s disappointing to see her advocate such a naïve and facile position on race.    Charles Ogletree, law professor at Harvard, argues that “racial amnesia” and “racial fatigue” are the real problems.  We have forgotten how significant race is and we think we don’t have to talk about it anymore, Ogletree said at a recent gathering about racial disparties in the judicial system.  The school-to-prison pipeline is still about race and about gender.  At Rikers Island (where I’ve done some research), the population is 95% black and brown.  Blacks are 10 times more likely to be arrested than whites, and young men are 17 times more likely to be arrested than young women. In Connecticut, for example, the state has sent hundreds of adolescent girls (opens .pdf) — most of them black and brown –  to the state’s maximum security women’s prison (h/t Rick Green).

Given Hill’s background as a strong example, heroine even, for women who have endured sexual harassment in the work place, it’s doubly disappointing to read her recommendation advocating for racial amnesia rather than pointing it out as a problem.    It seems unlikely that she would recommend a similar strategy for dealing with gender.    Instead of “Speaking Truth to Power” (the name of her book about her testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings) about racism, Hill adopts the white racial frame by embracing intentional forgetfulness.  If Hill’s goal was to support the Obama campaign (crossing over from her life long allegiance to the GOP), she might have drawn on the example of Shirley Chisholm (image source).

Talk about amnesia.  Chisholm, a representative in Congress from Queens, NY ran for U.S. President in 1972.   Her name has rarely, if ever, been mentioned in the current election cycle.  Chisholm talked openly about facing racism and sexism, and courageously spoke truth to power at a time when it was incredibly unpopular to do so.   Chisholm’s bid for high office made possible both presidential campaigns of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.     Do yourself a favor, watch “Chisholm ‘72: Unbought & Unbossed,” this election season and rid yourself of a little amnesia.

Humor can be a subversive political act.   There are a couple of examples I’ve stumbled across about race and the election that I thought I’d share.   Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing at The Atlantic, has a very funny and scathing piece called “In Defense of White Racism,” that’s worth reading.   And, Keef who draws the KChronicles has a rather devastating political cartoon up (I’d reproduce it here, but I’m pretty sure it’s protected, so I’ll just link to it).  There’s a long tradition of using humor to skewer whites. And as I’ve written here before, Chris Rock is just the most recent in a long line of comedians to use their craft in subversive ways (image from here).   As just about every late night comedian has noted, and even the New York Times has picked up on, it’s going to be a difficult time for comedy writers if Obama gets elected.   Not that that’s a bad thing, as they would say on Seinfeld.   But it is worth noting, I think.

And, here’s both the challenge and strength of humor: it’s best when it’s skewering those in power. So, take the example I mentioned above. Chris Rock does some amazing political commentary on race and racism in his stand-up routines.    In his current routine, he does a great bit about the neighborhood he lives in in New Jersey where his neighbors include some of the black elite entertainers (Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z).  The punch line is something like, “and you know what the white guy does that lives there?  He’s a dentist.”   Much funnier when Chris Rock delivers it, of course, than with me re-typing it into text-only here, but it’s a very funny, and very pointed, routine that really lays bare one little corner (albeit a very privileged corner) of racial inequality.    Still, Rock’s current routine is also a little disappointing for his reliance on the old, decidedly unfunny tropes of sexism and homophobia.   Humor that sets out to hurt people or groups that are already pummeled by life or social position is not funny, in my opinion, so much as a form of bullying.

Yet, trying to find this particular brand of humor is vexing, to say the least.  For example, I do wish Google would quit suggesting “racist jokes” as a search term.   If I use Google in a browser, and type in “racis”  (yes - the beginning of a vanity search for my own blog), Google suggests several search terms for me: “racing games” “racing post” and third on the list, “racist jokes” (425,000 results).   The Google-app on my iPhone suggests “racist jokes” first, as a tab.  And, apparently this is a fairly popular search term.  As Macon D points out over here, lots of people end up at his blog who initially started out searching for racist jokes.    If, instead, you Google “anti-racist jokes” you get many fewer results (39,100) and no prompts from the search engine at any point that might lead you in that direction or suggest that as an option.   And, there’s really no tag or Google alert that I can set for “subversive humor, non-sexist, non-homophobic, please.”  Or, maybe there is but I’m just not tech-savvy enough.     It seems to me that the search engine is undermining even the possibility of finding subversive humor.

So how to find, create and support subversive humor?   I’m not sure, but I’d love to hear any ideas.  I could use a good laugh.

Over at zmag.org the historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street—who has recently published his book, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics– has some interesting commentary on issues of racism in both the McCain and Obama camps.

Street points out some of the racialized reasons that some whites support Senator Obama, reasons and issues that get very little attention in mainstream media discussions. He quotes an exchange reported in the New York TimesCaucus Blog:

between white voter Veronica Mendive and white Obama volunteer Cathy Vance: Ms. Mendive: “I’ve never been around a lot of black people before. I just worry that they’re nice to your face but then when they get around their own people you just have to worry about what they’re going to do to you.” Ms. Vance: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and he was raised by his white mother. So his views are really more white than black really.”

First, here is the old worry that African Americans are not saying to white faces what they are really thinking, which in a racist system is not too surprising. African Americans do have to spend a lot of time and energy in their backstage settings recounting whites’ racist actions and figuring out how to counter them. But that is not what whites are worrying about when they think about the Black backstage. Whites seem to worry most about what Blacks might “do” to whites. The volunteer assures the voter that Obama is OK because of his white ancestry and socialization. This reasoning may well be one common way of thinking about Senator Obama among whites, and it is interesting that (to my knowledge) no one in or out of the mass media has researched this important political and racial issue.

Street then recounts another Times interview with someone who is apparently working for Obama:

According to Times reporter Adam Nossiter, Oaks is “pleased by Mr. Obama’s lack of connection to African-American politics.” Oaks spoke to fellow whites at a local church and with approval of how Obama “doesn’t come the African-American perspective - he’s not of that tradition. . . . He’s not a product of any ghetto.”

One reason that Senator Obama is getting some (many?) white votes, thus, is because they see him as “an exception to his race,” a very old notion that has been part of the white racial frame since at least the 17th century. He is seen as not fully “Black” in the negative sense that idea has in the white racial frame, especially since he was raised mostly by whites. And he does not have the “African American perspective,” which I would guess means that unlike veteran Black civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al. Sharpton, Senator Obama has been very careful (with the exception of his one Philadelphia speech) not to talk openly about the racial hostility and discrimination, the systemic racism, perpetrated by a great many white Americans.

In working on our book on “race” and the Obama campaign, Adia and I have discussed why Senator Obama has carefully avoided discussing civil rights issues and the venerable Black civil rights agenda, which includes getting the government to vigorously enforce U.S. civil rights laws—which it has not done. Presumably, he must do this to be elected.

A society founded in and still grounded in white racism means, among other things, that a Black candidate running in a predominantly white district or area (the entire nation in this case) cannot talk candidly about the continuing and deep impacts of racial hostility and discrimination against African Americans and other Americans of color—that is, he or she must still act in ways that please whites, at least a significant enough group of whites to be elected. He or she cannot talk about what may be the nation’s most serious problem.

Even then, a majority of whites are still hard to persuade. A check of recent polls indicates that in this last week Research 2000 found that Senator Obama leads Senator McCain significantly among all registered voters, but is way behind among white voters (52-40 percent split in favor of McCain). Gallup shows less of a divide, but still a 48-44 percent white voter split in favor of McCain.

Given that the economy is in a meltdown mode, that we have the most negatively regarded president in recent memory, that the Republican brand is in poor repute, that Senator Obama is extraordinarily capable and has run what is probably the best organized and technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, why is it that white voters are still strongly tilted to McCain?

What do you think about this?

The Sun Journal on September 13, 2008 reported that

activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap. (Source: AP News)

The conference where the product was first introduced to the public was at the Values Vote Summit which was co-sponsored by the conservative American Values and Focus on the Family Action.

Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.”

The Summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon. On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?” The article goes on to note that the boxes were simply “political satire” and that the waffle reference was “poking fun at [Obama’s] public remarks and positions.” Even though the product was reportedly pulled, I noticed one could still purchase the boxes from a sponsored website.

On the site it is noted that

Obama Waffles are selling like, well, like hot cakes!

To me that simply signal that those running the machine of oppression are simply feeding the hunger that is the heart of many Americans. We as a nation should be mortified.

[Open Thread: What Do You Make of This Story and the Image?]

UPDATE: Courtesy of M. in comments, and of stuffwhitepeope do, here is a video of the white guys who did this.

It is interesting now that Senator Obama is not doing as well in numerous polls, with McCain leading in several and ahead now in the electoral vote estimates, some writers are talking about the “Bradley effect” and beginning to make arguments, albeit with less data, that I have made for many months now. They still seem afraid to call this the “white racism” effect, which it actually is, but at least a few are beginning to raise the issue. (Photo: Tashland) Yet, they still do not understand just how uphill Senator Obama’s struggle really is. And they are not discussing at all the impact and significance, especially for African Americans, of a loss.

In a recent (September 25, 2008) New York Review of Books, Andrew Hacker argues a modest version of my argument about racist barriers under the vague title, “Obama: The Price of Being Black.”

After some initial discussion of voting barriers and other matters, as part of reviewing a publication on voting, he finally gets to the central problem for Senator Obama:

I’ve been careful so far not to use the word “racism.” The term itself has become an obstacle to understanding. Once white people hear it, they tend to freeze, and start listing reasons why it doesn’t apply to them. After all, most Americans admire Oprah Winfrey, like Tiger Woods, and respect Colin Powell. Yet racism persists, albeit not publicly voiced, especially in the belief that one’s own is a superior strain.

Wow! Here is one of the important analysts of “race” in the U.S., in his past work, using rare examples (which whites see as “exceptions to their race”) and backing off from calling racism what it actually is and accenting it front and center. Of course, even the word “racism” offends a great many whites. They do not wish to face the underlying reality of racial oppression in this society.
Then Hacker buys into “whites are now less racist” argument:

… not many whites regard Barack Obama as their inferior; effete or arrogant perhaps, but they don’t fault him on intellect. To some, indeed, he may seem too much the intellectual. Resentment of perceived black privilege is also involved, as we have seen with respect to affirmative action, and even fear of some kind of racial payback. Over half of a largely white sample told a Rasmussen poll that they feel Obama continues to share at least some of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s positions on America.

Of course, many whites see Obama as their inferior, their racial inferior on numerous dimensions. And the poll cited makes that very clear. A white majority think Dr. Wright was a “dangerous black man” who “hates America,” and that is certainly inferiority for a great many whites. This hostile view of Black men, by the way, is nearly 400 years old now in this country, yet scholars and analysts seem reluctant to even call it out. Then Hacker cites polls:

… in an ABC News /Washington Post poll in June, 20 percent of the whites who responded said a candidate’s race would factor heavily in their vote, while 30 percent admitted to feelings of racial prejudice. If the Bradley Effect was at work, as many as one third of the voters may count race as important.

We see in the polls just how huge the barrier is for Obama, for presidential candidates usually win by less that 8 or so percentage points. A good point, but Hacker’s analysis seems very odd–that is, for a leading social scientist of racial issues like him not to pay attention in an important review for the general public to the substantial research data which show quite clearly that a majority of whites today, including a majority of young well-educated whites, still think and talk in very racist, blatantly racist terms, about African Americans.

Moreover, when I engaged in a long discussion with numerous otherwise savvy sociologists about the Obama presidential campaign over at the Contexts blog, I was the only one to discuss and consider these data on white racist thinking as likely blocking his election. Almost all there thought he would probably be elected. The other discussants seemed to think the data I cited about the extensiveness and impact of the white racial frame on white voters and voting can be more or less ignored–and generally moved on to discuss the significance of the black presidency.

Whites are not part of some “new racism,” for it is the same old racism of four hundred years. And why are the social science data on how deeply racist in their thinking a majority of white Americans still are, being so ignored even by social scientists discussing the Obama campaign? I predict that many social scientists will eventually have to face and analyze openly the deep US foundation of white racism between now and what seems like November’s increasingly likely loss for Senator Obama. (The Republican 527 attacks are just beginning again, and are trying to tie Obama again and again to the negative images of the old white racial frame. More are doubtless coming.)

Again, in my view the only way to stop that loss is for many people in his campaign and the media to take on and highlight the deep hidden racist thinking that lies behind many whites being so comfortable with McCain — and, most importantly, to accent aggressivly in every way possible, for white Americans in particular, the old liberty and justice frame this country claims to live by, but in fact does not. The only hope, as I see it, is to somehow get whites to listen “to their better angels.”

Jim Brunner, at the Seattle Times, has a story about a top Snohomish County, Washington, Republican Party official apologizing for their group selling at the Evergreen State Fair “$3 bills” that showed Senator Obama in the center in Arab dress and showing a camel. The official blamed a volunteer and said she had the bills removed when she heard about them.

Brunner reports that the $3 bills are sold nationally by an arch-conservative website (which has other racist and vicious attack paraphernalia). The website

feature signatures from “Teddy Kennedy” as chief socialism adviser and Al Sharpton as new spiritual adviser. Obama’s face, in the traditional Arab headgear, is pictured above the words “Da man.”

White racist thinkers and activists love to mock the speech of Americans of color, especially African Americans and Latinos. (Odd too that they clearly cannot hear their own accents since everyone speaks with an accent.) A Democratic Party supporter complained at the Republican booth, but was given a hard time:

The bills offended some passers-by at the fair, including Ronnie Thibault, a Monroe woman who said Republicans at the booth threatened to call security on her after she complained. . . . Susan Ronken, a volunteer at the nearby Democratic Party booth at the fair, also saw the bills, which were present at the booth for at least two days this week. “It was an absolute hate crime,” said Ronken.

Yes, these politicized hate crimes are already spreading like toxic mushrooms across the country. The Republican official was quoted as saying that

hopes the presidential campaign will avoid illegitimate personal attacks — such as insinuations about Obama’s religion or McCain’s age.

Yes, she balances the Muslim attack to an age critique of McCain, but without assessing the point about the former being the kind of hate crime that is often associated with racist violence against Americans of color. The explosion of politicized racist attacks in the next two months, I predict, will be extensive and huge. One can already find many racist political attack sites on the web targeting Obama, several with the N-word as part of their url.

In my view the only way to meet these attacks is openly and assertively, especially by people with influence and power. It is time for our media and our politicians to take these and the many other hate crimes in the US very seriously–as well as the deep white racial frame that makes them possible–and to discuss, counter, and act openly against these political hate crimes. They cannot be swept under the rug without making them much worse.