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Young people’s use of social networking sites, like Facebook, have quickly become an established feature of youth culture, according to a new report.  Facebook in particular, is proving incredibly popular; and, current estimates are that there are 120 million active users of the social networking site, as this bar graph illustrates (as of 2007, image from here). Yet there’s scant little attention paid to the emergence of new forms of racism that accompany these new forms of media.  Recently, there have been some notable examples of Facebook racism that I want to explore  (H/T Mordy for sending this my way).   As Joe’s been writing here, there’s been a real surge in overt racist actions in the wake of the election, and this incident, as reported by the Houston Chronicle, illustrates how the white racial frame can be used to completely distract from racism (from the top):

A template on facebook.com asks, “What are you doing right now?” An ill-advised response led to Buck Burnette’s expulsion from the University of Texas football team.

What began as a private text-message exchange on Election Night between Burnette and a friend soon became available for anybody with a computer to see.

Burnette, a sophomore offensive lineman from Wimberley, was dismissed from the team Nov. 5 for posting a racially insensitive remark about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page.

“I told (our players) to be careful with Facebook and MySpace,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “Those things are really dangerous.”

A survey taken during Monday’s Big 12 coaches conference call found most of the league’s coaches are concerned about how much information is available on popular social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The major concern: Users can voluntarily provide personal information, and the more popular the athletes, the more contact “with hundreds of people they don’t know,” Iowa State coach Gene Chizik.

“It’s a challenge for coaches, because ultimately we’re responsible,” Chizik said.

In the status update section of his Facebook page, Burnette posted, “All the hunters gather up, we have a (slur) in the White House,” in reference to Obama’s becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency. Burnette said the comment was a text message he received from a friend and that he exercised bad judgment posting it on his page. He later apologized in a written note that was read by Brown during a team meeting.

Apologies for the long quote, but it’s relevant to my point.  The article begins with a discussion about how “dangerous” social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are, but let’s be clear - the danger here as it is being described by this football couch, and reported on without comment by the Chronicle, is to the football player.   The “danger” is that he will post something on his page that’s “Ill-advised” and he will be expelled from the team, which is what happened to Burnette.   This is a rather profound shift away from what’s actually going on here.    What has happened here is that a young, white college student at a top school has threatened the president-elect and referred to him by using a racist slur.   And yet the newspaper article is framed as though there is an inherent “danger” in Facebook.   It seems to me that the danger is in the way that Facebook (and other forms of new media) give rise to heretofore unseen versions of racism that combine new technology with old hatred.  This combination of old and new forms of racism expressed through Internet technology is what I refer to as “cyber racism” (I explore it more depth in my forthcoming book of the same name).

Interestingly, this is not the first time college football players in the U.S. have gotten in trouble for Facebook racism. In 2007, members of the USC football team created a Facebook group called “White Nation,” which featured a graphic with the caption, “arrest black babies before they become criminals.”  The description of the group reads like this:

“This group is not for the faint of heart,” read the group’s description. “All members are athletes of Caucasion (sic) descent. DISCLAIMER: In no way are the following memebers (sic) intolerant of others, we are just doing our duty of protecting the Arian (sic) brotherhood.”

According to the USC college paper, an unnamed source from the athletic department said that the group was “a joke and had no serious purpose.”   While the athletic department may find humor in such antics, the joke is lost on the rest of us.    This sort of Facebook racism is not the sole purview of college athletes.

In 2005, University of Virginia first year student Maryann Li was horrified when she stumbled across a Facebook group that some of her college classmates had created.  The group, called “Asian Fetish,” for those who think “Asian women are truly the most scrumptrillescent delicacy abroad,” and the description of the group’s purpose:  “to bang out Asians. Bang hard or go home. Yes, even the ugly bitches.” The racist and deeply misogynistic group description goes on: “I can’t help it if my dick likes the taste of Teriyaki sauce. Or soy. Or duck for that matter. And when I’m feeling a little risky, wasabi…” it proclaimed. The creator of the Facebook group, white U.Va. sophomore Patrick Gieseke defended his creation of the group, saying that he intended it as satire.   This article quotes Gieseke saying,

“I couldn’t see anyone reading that and being like, ‘Wow, someone really wants to do this to Asian girls.’ I thought it was pretty blatant that it was just a joke,” he said.

So once again, Facebook racism gets dismissed by whites as “just joking” and therefore not something harmful or worth addressing.  Not surprisingly, Asian American students at U.Va. were not amused by Gieseke’s “joke.”   Two students, Elizabeth Chen and Julie Chu, attempted to organize a “Speak Out” to invite students who have faced discrimination to share their stories with the community at U.Va’.s amphitheater but found little interest.   When it comes to race, Chu said, “the majority of white people at U.Va. don’t care.” The emergence of this sort of gendered racism on Facebook is characteristic of the racialized pornography in print-media that Pat Collins talks about in Black Feminist Thought.   The fact that this has now moved to the new media environment of Facebook means that these old versions of racism are being translated into the digital era and some of the centuries old racism remains as it is mashed-up against new forms of social interaction.     

For its part, Facebook has removed the most extreme and offensive racist groups for violation of their terms-of-service (TOS) agreement. This is the right stand for Facebook to take in my view, and it’s one that other sites should follow through on.  But, Facebook did not take this without significant pressure.

The European Parliament lodged the most significant complaint with the California-based Facebook. Martin Schulz, Socialist leader within the EP, said, “The existence of these groups is repulsive.” And, indeed it is. According to this report, the pressure on Facebook came mainly from European sources about Italian neo-Nazi groups.   Still, the “White Nation” group in the USC controversy is still hosted on Facebook (or, it’s a group by the same name with an identical description), and there are over 60 groups that come up if you search using the terms “Asian Fetish.”    So, while Facebook may be responding to pressure from Europeans to remove the most repulsive and extreme groups from the site, apparently there is little or no pressure from people in the U.S.   In my view, it’s time for some of those 120 million active users to step up and put some pressure on Facebook to enforce its terms-of-service agreement by not allowing such groups on the site.

Meanwhile, extremist white supremacist websites have proven so popular in the days since the election that the flood of traffic by white people has crashed the servers at one site.   More about that form of cyber racism in a subsequent post.

While going over the exit polling from Mississippi for the Election, something jumped out at me when observing the cross-tabs for race and gender: the fact that the gender gap in voter turnout for blacks was double that of whites. The gender gap regardless of race exists likely for several reasons, including women’s longer life expectancies. With the 2000 Election debacle in mind (along with Gov. Crist’s rather surprising push to reform the law), I looked here to see which states have the most stringent (i.e., repressive and racist; see here) anti-felon voting laws, and the bulk of them are ex-slave states.

Anti-felon voting laws are part of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in this country because they disproportionately affect black men’s ability to vote. The following is a chart examining the gender gap for blacks and whites in selected states with the toughest voting laws regarding felons (note: each number listed represents the percentage of the total voter turnout for the state; women are listed first for each category):

ST/WHITES/BLACKS

AL— 33-32% 18-11%

AR— 45-37 7-6

GA— 32-33 19-11

KY— 44-41 7-4

LA— 36-30 19-10

MS— 33-29 21-13

MO— 44-38 7-5

NC— 37-35 14-9

SC— 37-34 14-11

TN— 42-42 9-3

VA— 38-32 10-10

So in Mississippi, for example, where “many” felons can never vote again in the state, black men made-up 13 percent of the total vote, eight points below that of black women. Although white women also made-up a higher percentage of the total vote than white men, the difference was only four percent. Meanwhile, the gender gaps in states like Louisiana and Tennessee were even higher. There are some disparities in the data, perhaps based on other factors (e.g., Obama’s time and money spent in the state, such as Virginia) or the variations in the anti-felon laws (e.g., the laws are less restrictive in the Carolinas than in Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama).

Still, the important analysis put forth by Charles Franklin (see here) may shed light on the issue of white fear and its relationship to the percentage of blacks in the population. It appears that the higher the proportion of the black population, the more severe the anti-felon voting laws are in that state. Imagine if the gender gap for blacks had not existed in this election…in a state like Mississippi (where Obama won the black vote 98-2), perhaps that increased black turnout could have made the difference in the outcome. What do you think?

I was looking for news clips to show to my Race and Ethnicity class today and I remembered that a friend of mine had told me about some of Karl Rove’s comments during Tuesday’s election results on Fox News. Listening to them today, he does have a few positives to share about what these results mean…that is before he compares the Obama family to the Cosby show by saying “Well look, we’ve had an African American first family for many years in different forms. You know, when the Cosby show was on, it wasn’t a black family, it was an American family.” While that alone is worthy of a blog post, what was also concerning to me was a comment Rove made before that. He was asked, as a “realistic political analyst,” to talk about the degree of color-blindness in our country:

I think particularly among younger people, they are color-blind. Uh, you know, older people, people who grew up and remember the 60s and remember the 50s and the 40s and the 70s, they to varying degrees remain observant of the color of, of the color break in America. But you go on a college campus or you go be around younger people, and they are “post-racial.” You know, and just, the idea of race very rarely enters into their thinking.

While I think many of us will agree that things have changed in some positive ways since the 60s and that this election has been historic in a number of ways, I’m not sure anyone is ready to say that first of all, we live in a society where race isn’t a factor anymore and second that young people don’t think about race anymore. Rove’s comments seem to imply that once older generations pass on, everything will be fine in terms of race, because young people just aren’t thinking about it. In my research talking with Latino undergraduate students, I found instead that for many of them, race continues to be a salient issue on their campuses.

A student at Southern University talked about how some major racial incident seemed to come up on his campus a few times a month when I spoke with him in the Fall of 2006.

This is my 7th semester here. In all my semesters, I’ve never seen like racial tensions like I have right now. (Oh really? What’s going now?)…Like students in the law school had like a ghetto party. They dressed up as stereotypically hip-hop clothing, and they wore like nameplates of stereotypically black and Latino last names. Um, there was a black face incident during Halloween where a couple of students took some pictures and they posted them online on facebook.com. It was a couple of members from a historically white fraternity… Even I mean yesterday the Young Conservatives had an Affirmative Action bake sale…like their own way of protesting the affirmative action policies in this country…I mean…usually like every semester like one or two big things happen, like at the most, but this semester its literally been like one or two big things every month. (“Southern University” Latino Male, 22)

His statement, as well as the comments of others on this campus indicate that race in the thinking of young, white students on college campuses. And it’s not only in their thinking, but it is evident in their racist actions on this campus. Incidents like this one demonstrate that racism is still alive and well on college campuses.

Another student at Southern University talks about an encounter she had with some white students before a football game. Again, we see that the whites racialized the situation in a way that would indicate that they are not free from prejudice:

I just have heard and I got the taste of a kid, of boys came in for the “Southern Tech”- “Southern University” game and uh, we were listening to Shakira, some friends of mine. There was another Hispanic girl in the front seat with me and then a Bosnian girl in the backseat…But we were having so much fun and we needed to sell our tickets and so these guys had their windows open. And we asked “Hey, do you guys want a ticket?… And they said “Oh, we don’t speak Spanish.” And at first I was I like, “What did he mean by that? I wasn’t, did I speak Spanish?” Because I don’t normally speak Spanish. And then I was like “Oh, oh…that still happens? Like, people still are like that?” And so it was just kind of, I was taken aback. And my friend started crying actually. But I was just like, I didn’t realize that still happened nowadays. ( “Southern University” Latina Female 23)

When this woman asked in English if the men in the car next to her needed tickets, they immediately racialized the interaction by informing her that they don’t speak Spanish. The Latina students were shocked and hurt by this reaction. Perhaps initially they thought things were more positive between the races, as Rove seems to think, and then were disappointed and discouraged to find out that, in fact, these incidents still happen.
These incidents were not isolated to just Southern University, so we can’t make the claim that somehow racism only exists in the South. In fact, on each of the campuses (one in the South, one in the Southwest, and one in the Midwest), students faced discrimination when they spoke Spanish on campus. They faced assumptions that the only reason they were attending their university was because of Affirmative Action policies and not because of their own academic talents. One student talked about an experience he had a football game at Southwest University.

I was at a football game last week. . .And somebody said, one of the fraternity guys that were yelling “Immigration bus is here. It’s waiting for you. Get on it.” Even though [At the other players?] Yes, at [the other] players. “Juarez is not here. This isn’t Juarez.” They were calling them all sorts of bad things. . .And they were just being, real, real bad about it. Even though the make-up of [this] football team is hardly any Hispanics. . .And so it was kind of surprising to me that, why would you say such things? (“Southwest University” Latino Male 26)

Notably, Southwest University is almost 35% Latino and still this was the response of white students in the crowd. They heckled the other team by implying that because they were coming from a predominately Latino school. And ironically, whites were racializing a football team that was mostly white!
Even light-skinned Latinos who reveal their racial background faced discrimination:

You see the tone of their voice, how they look at you, what you’re gonna say. After they know that I’m Mexican and stuff, some are like “Oh that’s so cool,”. . .They’re like ‘Wow, you look Italian’ and I’m like ‘I’m 100 percent [Mexican]’. . .So they’re like ‘Wow’, a little bit shocked. They would not talk to me after that. And you feel it, but it’s their problem if they’re not accepting. ( “Midwest University” Latino Male 18 )

This student went on to say that sometimes whites respond that they feel like he lied to them by not revealing this information when they first met him. Somehow, he was under some obligation to reveal his racial background and by not doing so, he was being deceitful. So contrary to what Rove claims, college students are concerned about race in a variety of ways that are both overt and quite subtle. By proclaiming such things, Rove is distorting the reality of the pain that students of color face on a daily basis because of discrimination and mistreatment based on race. As these examples, and many more like them that I could have shared, demonstrate is that racism is not absent from our universities and college campuses or in the mind of white students. Our society has made history this week, but this does not mean we’re living in a “post-racial” utopia.

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 ABC News website has an interesting article, “Two Nations Under God: Segregated Churches the Norm,” by Imaeyen Ibanga. The article cites a new study by the Pew Center that shows the huge racial divide in churches in the United States. The journalist summarizes thus:

Every Sunday parishioners head to their respective churches, the vast majority of which are filled with worshippers predominately of one race. Only 7 percent of American churches are racially integrated, according to the Pew Center.

These data show just how racially segregated the United States is now well into the third millennium–and also accent how unusual it is to have an African American with a serious chance to become president right now. One white churchgoer is quoted as explaining the church segregation this way:

You go into a society that’s all white, you’re gonna typically have an all-white church, and vice-versa with other ethnicities as well.

One Ohio minister, Cliff Biggers, is trying to break down the racial segregation by (photo: Obama site) taking his

black congregation out of its comfort zone to a white church every fifth Sunday. Often times Biggers and his congregants are given a warm welcome, inviting visitors to meals and fellowship. But sometimes the response can be less than enthusiastic. “I think people are a little put back, sure. You have people walking in that, number one, you don’t know them; number two, they look different than you.”

A little put back, indeed. As I was reading this article, I have also been thinking about a revealing new book by social scientist Korie Edwards that I have started reading. Called The Elusive Dream, it examines the impact of institutional racism (and thus white racial framing) in churches that are consciously interracial. The book description puts her findings this way, starting with one interracial church service:

A black pastor and white head elder stand before the sanctuary as lay leaders pass out the host. An African-American woman sings a gospel song as a woman of Asian descent plays the piano. Then a black woman in the congregation throws her hands up and yells, over and over, “Thank you [Lord]!” A few other African-Americans in the pews say “Amen,” while white parishioners sit stone-faced…..Even in this proudly interracial church, America’s racial divide is a constant presence. . . . . [I]nterracial churches … help perpetuate the very racial inequality they aim to abolish. . . . [M]ixed-race churches adhere strongly to white norms. African Americans in multiracial settings adapt their behavior to make white congregants comfortable.

The black members are thus forced to conform to white norms and racial framing of the church situations. The very long history of white-imposed segregation and white norms and framing helps to explain these disturbing findings. The ABC news article notes the centuries-old historical reality in regard to racial segregation in religion for African Americans:

The first black churches were built by freed slaves and many of them where open to whites on principle, but Jim Crow laws brought fresh division and wounds. “They had to sit in that last pew and if a white would come and families would come, even though they were in that pew they had to get up and give them their pew,” said Sister Eva Regina Martin, mother superior at Holy Family Sisters in New Orleans. . . . “It’ll take many years but I think as the years go by people will allow people just to be…,” said Martin, who is the head of just one of three black orders of nuns.

Many years, indeed.

Last night, Michelle Obama took the stage at the Democratic National Convention. She was the keynote speaker of the night, charged with personalizing Barack Obama and, more implicitly, with showing a different side of herself. Michelle Obama has been very negatively reviewed by the press and by Republicans, often described as unpatriotic for her statements about her perceived lack of pride in her country (photo by Jackson Solway, from the DNC via Flickr). Hence, at the convention, her speech had two goals: to make Barack Obama relatable and to define his history as a typical American story, and to “soften” her image and to showcase herself as someone who most Americans could envision as First Lady.

Michelle’s speech touched on all the requisite themes. She explained why she loves America, discussed Barack Obama’s commitment to everyday Americans, his middle-American roots and upbringing, and love for his family. For me, however, what she said in her speech was much less important than having the opportunity to watch her say it.

For many African Americans, there has been a long sense of being shut out from most levels of the U.S.’s social, economic, and especially political systems. Many of us are all too aware of the ways African Americans are taken for granted and/or ignored in national elections, and the ways that Black Americans are often invisible at the uppermost levels of the political spectrum. We see how infrequently loving, caring, happy relationships between Black men and women are depicted, and we notice the scant coverage that polished, smart, passionate Black women receive in the mainstream media. So to see Michelle Obama speaking about her husband with love and pride, to hear him tell her after her speech that she looked “very cute,” and to see their adorable children conclude with “we love you, Daddy!” was an incredible moment for me and many other African Americans who are acutely aware of how infrequently these types of images are shown.

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the challenges facing Barack Obama, the covert and overt racism inhibiting his historic campaign, and the ways intersections of race and gender have shaped the ways Michelle Obama is depicted as an “angry black woman.” It’s pretty clear that Barack Obama still has an enormous task ahead of him in overcoming white racism. It is unfortunate that Michelle Obama must work so hard to combat gendered racist stereotypes that demean and belittle her. But as an African American woman, it was such a profoundly moving moment to see someone who looked like me included, rather than excluded. Whatever else happens in this election, Barack Obama’s candidacy has been a welcome departure from the implicit “whites-only” norms of presidential politics, and has given a glimpse of America’s opportunity to finally start cashing that check that keeps coming back marked “insufficient funds.”

I have admired and appreciated Barack and Michelle Obama as a couple since he completed his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, went backstage, and grabbed his wife in a huge bear hug. In the Obamas, I see my husband and I, our friends, and our family members. In many ways, we’re similar to the Obamas– typical, everyday, working professionals, but we are painfully aware that Black Americans like us are rarely the subject of media attention, much less present in a central, defining role in American politics. Watching Michelle Obama speak eloquently and candidly about her love for her husband, her family, and the familiar particulars of her life story, I (and many other Black Americans) experienced a welcome departure from the typical feelings of exclusion and marginalization induced by national politics. Like her, for the first time in my life, I felt not only proud, but represented and included in a way I’ve never felt before.

ABC News’ Ron Claiborne reports a likely slip of the tongue on National Public Radio last week by the Democratic National Committee chair, Howard Dean, who said: (photo: Stroup)

“If you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in, uh, Republican party.”

The McCain folks of course pounced on this, and called it “insulting,” while a DNC spokesperson just said that Dean “misspoke and corrected himself immediately.”

Claiborne, however, accents how important this issue really is. It is literally, the Elephant in the Room. This issue is

rarely discussed in public and almost never by politicians: the marked racial division by party in American politics. Members of the country’s largest minority groups — blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans — are predominantly Democratic.

He is right, but of course there is a lot more to it than that: The Republican Party has been the white party since African Americans left it in large numbers for the New Deal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. It was then no longer the “party of Lincoln” civil rights issues, and economic issues were hitting African Americans very hard.

Last December I made these additional points about the Republican Party being, in effect, the “white party” of the United States (for research see here):

With the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the Republican Party intentionally abandoned black voters for a strategy openly targeting what are seen as the primary interests of a majority of white voters. This explicitly pro white political strategy has put emphasis on the interests of whites in suburbia and the southern states. Codewords such as “quotas,” “states’ rights,” “busing,” and “crime in the streets” have been substituted for the more explicitly racist terms of the days of legal segregation. The southern strategy was effectively used by Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 to win the first two Republican elections with that racialized strategy.

The neo-segregationist strategy targeting southern and suburban whites was also used effectively in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s. Reagan began his presidential campaign asserting strongly a states’ rights doctrine, and he intentionally picked Philadelphia, Mississippi–where civil rights workers had been lynched in the 1960s—to make this symbolic appeal to southern white voters. Reagan and his associates sought to dismantle further federal civil rights enforcement efforts, including weakening the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and attacking affirmative action programs, to please white constituents.

When George H. W. Bush undertook a run for president, he ran a racist campaign. In 1988 Bush and his advisors conducted an infamous advertising campaign that used visual images of a disheveled black rapist, from his opponent’s home state, to intentionally scare and recruit white voters to the Republican Party. Most recently, after losing elections in the 1990s to moderate Democrat William Clinton, the Republican Party succeeded in electing George W. Bush. Bush gained the presidency in two consecutive elections, 2000 and 2004. In both, the Republican Party focused heavily on securing white voters in the South and suburbs, and some Republican officials sought to restrict black voting in key states.

At one time centered in the states of the East and upper Midwest, today the Republican Party is, as a result of its recent political remaking, now centered in the South, parts of the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain states. In recent political campaigns, the Republican Party has continued to be the “white party,” the one aggressively representing white interests, albeit often in disguised language. Thus, in elections between 1992 and 2004 the Republican Party got a remarkably small percentage (8-12 percent) of black voters, and a minority of most other voters of color as well.

Not only has there been only a handful of black delegates at recent Republican party conventions, but the Republican National Committee has had few black members. Service at the highest decision-making levels of the Republican Party has in the last few decades been almost exclusively white. Thus, in late 2004 there was only one African American from the fifty U.S. states (plus a black member from U.S. Virgin Islands) among the 165 members of the Republican National Committee. This compared to the 97 black members on the Democratic National Committee, more than one fifth of the total membership about the same time. This pattern still pretty much holds today. Today, all black members of the U.S. Congress, and something like 98 percent of the 9,000 black officeholders at all government levels across the United States are members of the Democratic Party.

This highly segregated pattern of political party interests and participation has characterized U.S. politics now since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the southern and border states, the Rocky Mountain states, and numerous states of the lower Midwest, white voters now tend to vote overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in presidential elections, and for that reason some people now explicitly refer to the Party as “white party.” The Republican party has brought about its political resurgence since the major losses in presidential elections of the early and mid-1960s by explicitly using a politics of “race” that works mainly because of the racist legacies of slavery and legal segregation have persisted aggressively into contemporary U.S. society. It continues to do this today, and will even more in coming months.

How can we claim to have a democratic country and have a democratic media when these strong data on the racial differences in the two major parties are almost never seriously discussed? It seems to me, that this is the real issue in this election: democracy.

In her “The Last Word” column at Newsweek this week Anna Quindlen gave us a new and useful concept to describe what many whites do—the “Caucasian card” (H/T Jose Cobas). When African Americans object to racist framing, antiblack commentary, or antiblack practices, whites accuse them of “playing the race card.” This is a white-framed, whitewashed phrase designed to deflect objections to everyday racism. It was doubtless invented by whites for that purpose. (Can anyone tell me its first use?) (photo: kevinthoule)

Quindlen cites the way that African Americans carry a heavy load of racial hostility and discrimination on their shoulders:

When one of the white guys blows an account, the office line is that he’s a loser. But when a black guy does it, it means that they—that’s the all-purpose “they,” sometimes used interchangeably with “those people”—don’t seem to be able to close the deal.

This burden of everyday racism makes a black person’s life quite different from that of a white person. Somehow most whites assume their lives are the same. They assert that blacks have equal opportunities compared to whites–in education, employment, housing or health care.

She later notes that Senator McCain justifiably likes to cite his long trials in a Viet Cong prison with it torture of a physical and psychological kind for five years. That, he and his supporters plausibly assert, “builds character.” But they forget or intentionally ignore the huge burden of contending with white hostility and discrimination that black men and women face (as well as other Americans of color). They face it for lifetimes, for far more than five years. This heavy burden often involves physical and psychological torture of its own kind. This should be fully recognized by the white media and voters, but is not.

Quindlen then comments on the McCain campaign’s reaction to Senator Obama’s recent and reasonable commentary on being viewed by many (whites) as not looking like other presidents on U.S. money and as being portrayed by McCain supporters and others as somehow foreign and “other.”

The man is black. His candidacy is indivisible from that fact, given the history and pathology of this country.… The suggestion of [his doing] something untoward was pandering to stereotypes and fear. Senator McCain was playing the Caucasian card.

She nails it this time. Whites invented the racist system of this country and have maintained that system, with great white privileges, since the 1600s. They have “played the white card” in every era. They played it in the abolitionist era of the 1850s-1860s, and they played it in the civil rights era of the 1950s-1960s. With no sense of irony, privileged whites (coming from what one blogger bobbosphere calls the “deal”) still play that white card today when they regularly accuse African Americans who critique the racist system and try to bring it down as “playing the race card” and being unfair to our “really democratic” system.

The US Census Bureau just released population projections that by 2050, minorities will be the numeric majority of the population. For Latinos especially gains in the percentage of the population are expected to increase dramatically. In an article on cnn.com, Dave Waddington, chief of the Census Bureau’s population projection branch, stated that “Who’s going to do the jobs that are characteristically held right now by certain types of people…All those things are subject to change.” As the white population decreases and the number of people of color increase, it is critical that we take a look at how systemic racism plays out in some of our major institutions, especially education. Change is coming and in so many cases needs to happen in order to prepare for a future that is more diverse (photo: Brewer).

Education is important to Latinos, and universities often claim to value diversity by actively recruiting students of color. This effort by universities can be interpreted either as a cynical effort to enhance the image of their school, or more benignly as a true reflection of a deeply held value of cultural difference on campus. Nevertheless, there is often concern at universities about recruiting and retaining students of color. However, through my interviews with Latino undergraduate students at three universities (”Southern University,” “Southwest University,” and “Midwest University”) across the country, I found that institutional discrimination continues to be a major impediment to student success. Universities are historically white arenas and they continue to be so today, regardless of their rhetoric about diversity.

My research showed that many aspects of the university are still white dominated. Almost universally, students reported an underrepresentation of Latino faculty on their campuses. It was difficult for students to find faculty members that looked like them or that they could relate to. When students did have Latino instructors, they were often non-tenured and/or teaching only in Latino areas (like Mexican American studies or Spanish.)

“I think that that does happen. There probably aren’t that many Latina professors or working as the dean or something like that. And there are more cooks and janitors that are Hispanics or—[Have you had any Latino professors?] No, I haven’t. [How do you feel about that?] I hadn’t really thought about it, but I would like to have a professor who has similar, I guess, cultural background as me. That could connect more I guess, but I haven’t really noticed.” - Southwest University Female 19

Increasing Latino faculty membership and tenure, as well as diversifying departments are important issues that institutions of higher education must face if they truly want to retain Latino students. Most of the adult Latino faces that students saw were those working in lower (and underappreciated) positions at the university. This included food service, landscaping, maintenance, and custodial work. Latino students saw this pattern of work as lowering their status at the university, as well as reinforcing what they see as low expectations from whites about their potential.

Latinos are also underrepresented in the curriculum and symbolically on some campuses. Though Southwest University has done a better job with symbolic representation in terms of artwork, statues, and celebrations that represent Latinos, all three campuses lacked diversity in their curriculum. Latino culture and history are not often discussed in general education classes (like American history) and instead are relegated to specialized courses. Though students are not denying the importance of those courses and departments, the result is that diversity becomes optional. If they do not take those courses, they will not learn about their people, and neither will whites. At Midwest and Southern University, symbolic representation was also a big issue. Latinos were rarely represented around campus in things like artwork and statues, though Southern University students were looking forward to the arrival of a statue of Cesar Chavez. Midwest University did a poor job of representing any students of color symbolically, but students noticed that when they did see art, it was often in the form of photographs from the university’s past—a past that did not include people of color. At Southern University, symbols of white racism are present in the statues of Confederate soldiers and buildings named after racists. These symbols (or lack of symbols) create an atmosphere that is not welcoming to Latinos. Often there are very few places on campuses that they feel they can call their own because of racialized space.

On all three campuses students could point to examples of institutional racism. Institutions of higher education, whether they are in the South, in predominantly Latino areas, or in located big cities, still organize themselves around white ideals and values. Students of color are admitted in greater numbers, but by and large the institutions remain a white place. Because of the changes that are being predicted about our population composition, the institution will have to change and adapt to a more diverse student body.

In a useful July 23, 2008 commentary on his blog, “The Brain Who Mistook a Joke for a Fact,” Princeton biology professor Sam Wang has a very interesting take on the infamous New Yorker cover. First he notes just how dumb the various New Yorker editors are about how information is dealt with by the human brain:

. . . the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has pointed out that the magazine’s liberal leanings are well-known. He wonders: can’t people take a joke? The short answer is that we would, but our brains won’t let us. After our brains store a fact, the information does not rest. Instead, as a piece of information is recalled, it may be “written” down again as part of the process of strengthening it. Along the way, the fact is gradually separated from the context in which it was originally learned.

Of course, the New Yorker folks likely did not check with researchers or with the Black community before running the so-called satire. Wang then adds:

Most of the time this trick is useful. . . . But the same trick can lead people to forget whether a statement is even true. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term to longer-term storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. So any intended satire in the magazine cover may eventually be forgotten, leaving people to recall vaguely that Barack Obama is somehow un-American.

False memories develop especially easily in situations like the New Yorker cover:

Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have shown that if people aren’t given enough time to think, they tend to automatically accept a statement as being true. Visual information is processed particularly rapidly. And what’s more immediate than a caricature?

The emotional dimension of a presentation is also very important:

. . . ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods. Indeed, unscrupulous campaign strategists know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked.

Lesson one about framing is that by repeating a false framing a lot, even in countering it, one only reinforces it:

In covering the controversy . . . virtually every major TV journalist repeated the stereotyped charges against the candidate . . . before noting that the beliefs were false. . . . In television, which above all else is a visual medium, image can easily trump verbal content.

The old cliche works here: A picture is worth a thousand words. How then do we handle this type of negative presentation? Wang suggests this:

If journalists are to avoid adding to the public’s misinformation, they need to find other strategies, such as offering an equally competing, true storyline. . . . rather than repeating the false belief then denying that Obama is a Muslim, a less misleading approach would be to report on the candidate’s discovery of Christianity after a secular youth.

Offer the true storyline! Frame analysis would put this a bit clearer: You do not accept the framing of the negative story of your opponent or other false presentation, and you do not repeat words and images from that inaccurate or negative frame, but you reframe an issue from another and accurate frame.