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Watching the second presidential debate, I have to be forthright and divulge first that I utilized my critical lens and my scholarly heart which is rooted in conflict theory . With all this aside, I still find it interesting, no obtuse, that what I witnessed in terms of white racial framing was not thrashed out to the extent for which the topic was justly due. John McCain’s covert, racially amplified rhetoric within the debate was on full grisly display for the world to behold. My brow began to rise when first Senator McCain was asked by a Black gentleman in the audience this question:

Well, Senators, through this economic crisis, most of the people that I know have had a difficult time. And through this bailout package, I was wondering what it is that’s going to actually help those people out.

McCain then responded,

But you know one of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I’ll bet you, you may never even have heard of them before this crisis.

I then had to ask myself, “What makes McCain think that the Black gentleman had no knowledge of this company?” OK, I then thought and chalked the comment up to Mc Cain’s naiveté. But when he later went on to discuss Senator Obama’s health care platform I then was sure that McCain was utilizing the white racial frame when discussing Obama and his stances on certain issues. McCain was quoted as saying:

I want to give every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit. They can take it anywhere, across state lines. Why not? Don’t we go across state lines when we purchase other things in America? Of course it’s OK to go across state lines because in Arizona they may offer a better plan that suits you best than it does here in Tennessee. And if you do the math, those people who have employer-based health benefits, if you put the tax on it and you have what’s left over and you add $5,000 that you’re going to get as a refundable tax credit, do the math, 95 percent of the American people will have increased funds to go out and buy the insurance of their choice and to shop around and to get — all of those people will be covered except for those who have these gold-plated Cadillac kinds of policies.

In my experiences, I have never seen white people associated with driving a “gold-plated Cadillac.”

Next, when McCain referred to Obama as “That one,” the message seemed to be completely understood by observers. I was truly disappointed with the media’s attention to these loaded statements. This morning, the only media observers discussing this issue were on Black satellite radio stations.

It seems that the conversion will continue. What will the effects be upon the voters? Are the covert racist tactics which bring to the top the fears of white America utilized by McCain and his cohorts going to make a difference? If people vote on fear and the ramifications of the white racial frame, one of my favorite movies Blazing Saddles comically summarizes the people who fall prey. In a scene where the Black sheriff (Bart) is looking to receive approval from the racist townspeople goes astray, his partner played by Gene Wilder (Waco Kid) says this: “What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny?’ ‘Make yourself at home.’ ‘Marry my daughter.’ You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know - morons.”

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.

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.

Mike Allen at politico.com has a significant story August 10, 2008 on “Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign.” According to this account, which reports on an article coming out in the Atlantic magazine:

Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic. The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? … Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”

Allen then adds from the Atlantic article that

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

Allen and the Atlantic article focus on conflict within the Hillary Clinton campaign organization and her/their inability to act on various strategic recommendations, but the greater story is, once again, the white racial framing of Senator Obama.

This idea of the “foreign” and “weak values” character of African Americans is very old in whites’ racial framing of African Americans so as to rationalize slavery and Jim Crow segregation, as well as contemporary discrimination, for white minds and consciences.

For example, in a 1690s preamble to a South Carolina colony’s slavery law the elite white lawmakers, slaveholders, comment on enslaved Black Americans: They

are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and . . . constitutions, laws and orders, should in this Province be made and enacted, for the good regulating and ordering of them, as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined.

The terms “barbarous, wild, savage” serve a double framing purpose. They not only conjure up notions of African Americans as foreign and uncivilized, the early cultural stereotyping, but also views of the latter as dangerous, rebellious, and criminal, ideas applied recently in the Dr. Wright case too.

In the 1700s influential Christian ministers also articulated views of African Americans as foreign and alien. Important in this regard were ministers like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, the earliest North American intellectuals to aggressively defend the racial hierarchy and white racial frame of the new colonies. They too viewed African Americans as inferior “uncivilized savages.” Thus, the English colonists often spoke of themselves as “Christians” and of “their negroes” (sic) as non-Christian “heathen.”

Later, these ideas were celebrated by white leaders in the 19^th century like Nathaniel S. Shaler, prominent scientist and Harvard dean, who argued that African Americans not only were inferior, uncivilized, and an “alien folk” in the United States but also but would eventually become extinct under Darwinian evolutionary processes. Again and again, we see that the dominant racial frame was not something on the margins of an expanding and powerful United States, but rather something arising from its intellectual, political, and cultural center. (on this history, see here) Like modern political campaigns.

For centuries white Americans have insisted that they were the “modern” and “civilized” people and have had to contend with “foreign,” “backward,” and “uncivilized” peoples. And now we see it again from some Clinton advisers.

In the August 1^st, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji wrote an excellent article entitled “The Science of Satire” about the failed attempt at political humor by The New Yorker on the cover of the July 21^st 2008 edition. (See here)  She begins by quoting the artist Barry Blitt in his response to Huffington Post when asked if he regretted posting the article in retrospect. Blitt responds:

“Retrospect? Outcry? The magazine just came out 10 minutes ago, at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not.”

Banaji makes clear in her next paragraph that she is not denying The New Yorker or Blitt’s First Amendment rights, merely pointing out their failure to understand

basic facts of information transmission that accompanied the reasoning behind the drawing.

In the same article, Banaji quotes the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick defends the cover saying

“it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.”

She points out the flaw in this reasoning by using examples of other covers from the New Yorker that Remmick claims are equally as offending.

When the artist’s intention was to depict Cheney as the boss, he faithfully drew Cheney as the boss. That’s satire? When the artist’s intention was to depict the drowning of the administration, he sketched the drowning of the administration. Far out!

The difference that Banaji reveals and pokes fun at is that with other satirical comics, the cartoon depicts literally what

When presented with A and B in close spatial or temporal proximity, the mind naturally and effortlessly associates the two. Obama=Osama is an easy association to produce via simple transmogrification. Flag burning=unpatriotic=un-American=un-Christian=Muslim is child’s play for the cortex. For decades, psychologists have described the “sleeper effect” — the idea that information, even information we might reject at first blush, ends up persuading us, contrary to our intention, over time. That often occurs when the content of the message (Obama=Islamist) and the source providing the message (The New Yorker trying to be cute) have split off in our minds. When satire isn’t done right, as in the case of the Obama cover, the intended parody easily splits off from the actual and more blatant association.

With knowledge of the process that the mind uses to digest information, artists cannot blame their own ignorance for placing the association in the minds of Americans whose brains are quick to complete the equation of A=B by simple association.

Harvard psychologists have embarked on much research concerning this idea of implicit association. Check out the website for Project Implicit for more information.

(Note: This was prepared by Hannah and Amanda.)

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.

MediaMatters did an important recent report on the rather extreme racial and gender bias in the distribution of experts/guests who appeared on three major cable news networks (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) during the prime-time hours for one whole month (May 2008). Examining nearly 1700 guest appearances, they found that

67 percent of the guests on these cable programs were men, while 84 percent were white. MSNBC showed the greatest gender imbalance, with 70 percent of its guests being male. CNN and Fox News were not far behind; each of those networks featured 65 percent male guests

It comes as no surprise as to who had the worst record, the most monolithic guest roster:

Fox News was the whitest network, with 88 percent white guests. CNN and MSNBC were close behind, with both featuring 83 percent white guests.

The representation of Latinos, who now makeup 14-15 percent of the U.S. population, was very poor. They

made up only 2.7 percent of cable news guests. The worst of the three networks on this score was MSNBC, which featured only six Latino guests out of 460 prime-time appearances during the entire month.

Asian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans were all but invisible on the networks:

During the month of May, Fox News and MSNBC each featured a single Asian-American guest. Across the three cable networks, there were only four appearances by guests of Middle Eastern descent, two on Fox and two on CNN.

And not one Native American was a guest on any of the networks during that whole month. However, the affirmative action “quota” for white men on the programs was quite high, as it has been for centuries:

Though white men make up only 32 percent of the population, they made up 57 percent of the guests on prime-time cable during this period.

And Americans of color as a group were only represented at about half their proportion in the U.S. population. Again, not surprisingly:

Every prime-time cable news host is white, and all but two . . . are men.

It is interesting how just how “diverse” the U.S. cable new media really are not. In effect, the communications networks called the “mass media” are part of a larger white-dominated societal networking system.

In recent decades white elites—especially white male elites—have continued to dominate the construction and transmission of new or refurbished racial ideas and images designed to buttress the system of racial inequality, and they have used ever more powerful means to accomplish their ends. The mass media now include not only the radio, movies, and print media used in the past, but television, music videos, satellite transmissions, and the Internet. Given that most whites have little recurring, sustained, or equal-status contact with African Americans and other darker-skinned Americans, their views of such groups are significantly reinforced and created by those of their informal networks and those racial stereotypes in the white-generated media images of the still white-controlled mass media. (See here)

On July 4 Jesse Helms, former Republican Senator from North Carolina, joined the likes of former U.S. Presidents Jefferson, Adams, and Monroe when he died of natural causes(photo: ohnocriso). Following his death, the response from the MSM was rather telling in its defense—albeit a subtle one—of white supremacists and white racism. One might expect to see the responses from conservatives like Sean Hannity (who choked up when talking about Helms on air), or President Bush calling Helms “a kind, decent, and humble man,: and “a wavering champion of those struggling for liberty” (see here), or White House spokesman Scott Stanzel remarking that “America lost a great public servant and true patriot today.”

Even white Democrats spoke positively about Helms; Senator Joe Biden, getting attention from the MSM as a potential running mate for Obama, remarked that Helms was “one of the most thoughtful, considerate, and gracious senators I have ever served with.” Anti-racists cannot help but feel disgusted at the respect this man gets from former Senate colleagues, party members and supporters, and the general care taken by MSM outlets reporting his death and his ‘legacy.’ The only exception, at least mentioned in one of the MSM articles (CNN),was from Jesse Jackson:

He was a talented man. A man of considerable power. But he used his powers to maintain the order of the Old South. It was divisive…We offer condolences to his bereaved family, but the senator had a chance to move toward a more perfect union and he chose the Confederacy (emphasis added).

Unfortunately Jackson’s own legacy of progress and equality has been thoroughly smeared by the MSM, and he is simply written off as a lightening rod—even associated with a white racist like Helms. Despite the fact that CNN had a good blog appear on its site by Roland S. Martin, which criticizes the MSM for sanitizing Helms’ racist past, notice how CNN is careful not to associate too closely to Martin’s ‘opinion’ with a headline like “Give Helms credit where it’s due but don’t cover up his racism, columnist says (emphasis added).” Meanwhile, even among white liberals there is difficulty in speaking of Helms’ racism, such as Hitchens’ article in Slate, in which Hitchens calls Helms a “provincial redneck.” Hitchens gets it wrong in that he takes the perspective that racists possess the “authoritarian personality” and (thus) his (and everyone else’s) racism is a product of ignorance and/or stupidity.

So why is this happening?

What we are witnessing is the celebration of racist white men in our culture. This situation is particularly telling, given the current political situation and concerns about white racism derailing Obama’s hopes of victory in November, and the non-stop smear campaign waged against Barack and Michelle Obama by Hannity and Fox News. It’s important to note that Helms, despite a long history of profiting off of white racism for political power, wrote in his memoir that he was “not the least bit racist,” a response similar to David Duke’s denial that he was racist. After investigating his legislative record (his opposition to extending the Voting Rights Act, supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and filibustering the effort to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday), and past statements (e.g., saying once that the Civil Rights Movement was “infested by communists and moral degenerates”), how can anyone believe him? And furthermore, how can conservatives like Hannity and still-President Bush speak so glowingly of him? The sad fact about Helms is that white racism remains potent today, only now no longer requires the blatantly bigoted rhetoric that Helms had used.

We Americans should know just who Jesse Helms was: a Dixiecrat who came to fame when elected to the Senate riding the coattails of Nixon’s Southern Strategy (and later on the coattails of Reagan for reelection in 1984), for the anti-democratic and racist policies he supported (see here for some more examples), and his race-baiting tactics he used, including his “Hands ad” in 1990, to win more elections. We must question the “principles” Helms actually stood for, and that his attack on “liberalism” is a euphemism for “civil rights.” And yet the MSM gave him their blessing!

MediaMatters reports this continuing saga of leading media commentators questioning from a Senator McCain perspective and periodically framing the world, without apology, from the old white racial frame of society: (credit: MSNBC)

On the July 7 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews teased an upcoming segment by saying: “They’re the working-class white voters Hillary Clinton won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama now win over the regular folks, white folks, against John McCain? We’ll ask the strategists.” On the June 30 edition of Hardball, Matthews similarly teased a segment by asserting: “Up next: They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?”

This is the year 2008, right? And we are a “colorblind” society? Right?

I was reading a local Pennsylvania newspaper recently that had one of those all too common articles against the idea of reparations for African Americans and Native Americans that has come up in recent years. In the Wayne Independent Cal Teeple has an opinion article titled, “I Never Owned a Slave…,You?” Then out of curiosity I searched on a major search engine for just one typical white-generated phrase, “My family never owned any slaves.” Well, I got no less that 250,000 hits!
Teeple makes the usual argument:

I mean I never owned any slaves, and neither did you. My parents, grandparents, nor my great-grandparents owned slaves, neither did yours. And unless they come from a family line with Very Long-Lived ancestors, No One living today, nor their parents or grand-parents, were held as slaves!

He argues this takes whites off the hook for any kind of reparations for slavery. Basically the argument many whites make is that their families had no connection to the racial oppression of slavery. (Some whites also argue “my family never segregated any lunch counters,” which they too feel takes whites off the hook for the 350 years of racial oppression of this country.) The problem with all these arguments is that they only work because most whites do not know anything about the history of racial oppression in this country. They are signs of extreme ignorance.
Let me just trace out a little of this forgotten history. As every school child knows, the first task the European colonists undertook was to “settle the land.” This is the euphemistic phrase European Americans have long used for the theft of Native American land–which often required war, often genocidal war, because Native Americans did not comply. Once the land was stolen, the need for labor to work the land exceeded the supply of indentured and other white workers.
From the mid-17th century onward, enslaved Black laborers became ever more essential to the prosperity of the new white-dominated society, eventually becoming a major source of labor that generated significant prosperity for many whites. Black Americans were the only group of color that was internally central, as essential labor, to the prospering of the new North American colonies.
Huge numbers of whites worked in one way or another in the slavery economy. By the 18th century the slavery-centered North American economy and society involved not only economically successful slaveholders, in the South and the North (!), the owners of slave trading enterprises (mostly in the North), associated bankers, insurance brokers, and leading politicians supporting politically the plantations and the slave trade. Many of these white men were in northern cities. There was also a very large number of ordinary whites in all states, north and south, who worked in many occupations linked directly or indirectly to the slavery system. The latter whites included white-collar clerks and other white employees working for these various slave-related enterprises, the overseers on southern and northern plantations, the sailors on slave ships, the slave catchers who chased enslaved runaways, the small farmers who grew produce and other products for the plantations, lumber workers who cut timber for slave ships, ship builders, construction workers on roads for the trade in slaves and slave-produced products, fishers traded fish products to U.S. and Caribbean plantations, local and federal government workers policing enslaved runaways and processing slave-produced products for internal or external trade, and small farmers and urban entrepreneurs who rented groups of enslaved African Americans for temporary profit on their projects. And the list goes on and on.
In addition, all whites gained “racial capital,” either symbolic or material, from this oppressive system. A great many benefitted economically from the slavery-centered economic complex–which encompassed the slave trade, trade with and support of slave farms and plantations, the international trade in slave-produced products, and the great array of slavery-supporting occupations across the country and, indeed, across the Atlantic.
For two centuries slavery was the major foundation for this country, as an economy, a society, and a polity. If there had been no theft of Native American lands, there would be no United States. If there had been no African American enslavement, there probably would have been no huge North American wealth generation–and possibly no modern wealth-generating North America capitalism on the massive scale that developed over four centuries. Enslaved workers cultivating tobacco, rice, sugar, cotton, and other crops generated very large amounts of economic capital, much of which circulated through the European and North American economic systems generating much spin-off prosperity, including important industrial breakthroughs. Enslaved black Americans created much of the surplus capital (wealth) of this country for two centuries, half this country’s lifetime. Without slavery there is quite probably no United States and no U.S. Constitution–at least not when it happened in the 17^th and 18^th centuries–and thus no U.S. international empire later on.
In these early centuries the social relations of economic exploitation created much income and wealth for whites, which in turn provided much wealth for many later generations, to the present day. Thus, in North America white economic prosperity is racialized in its tap roots, although those tap roots are mostly left out of the national collective memory controlled by whites.