Racial Issues

One of my co-workers, who watched last night's Republican convention against his better judgment, was baffled by the constant jabs at Obama for being a "community organizer." (My co-worker remarked, "Wasn't Jesus Christ sort of a community organizer?") But, as we all know by now, if the Republicans seem inordinately fond of a certain phrase, there's a reason for it. And it won't be a nice reason.

A commenter at Daily Kos has found the explanation, and not surprisingly, it involves Rush Limbaugh:

I had the misfortunate to sit in a cab recently with Rush blaring on radio. I told driver switch the station or lose your tip after hearing Rush going off the wall screetch about community organizer = radicals.

They are reframing community organizing as VERY LEFT WING, filled with -gasp- RADICALS.

It's part of their "Obama's too radically liberal for [the] country" meme.

Billmon adds:

The pieces start to fit together a bit: Rush blasts out the message in its raw form to the true believers, and then they dog whistle back to it at the convention. Classic.

The two theories (race or radicalism?) aren't incompatible, of course: It looks like the game plan is to keep trying to paint Obama as the scary black radical[.]

Update: For the record, Paul Waldman (and others) predicted the GOP's Scary Radical Black Man strategy back in March.

Just go read thereisnospoon at Daily Kos.

In come Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — a black man and a woman vying fiercely for the presidency and making history in the process. Obama triumphs. And looming on the GOP's horizon is its worst nightmare: the possibility that a majority of Americans might vote for an African-American for president. And not just vote for one, but get used to one. Americans might become accustomed to the idea of an African-American family living in the White House and being its public face to the world. That in the process, Americans might actually make leaps and bounds forward on the issue of race and thereby remove the most effective wedge in the Republican toolbox for decades.

And then all Republicans would have left is their deeply unpopular drive to abolish the New Deal. It would, in short, spell utter doom for the Republicans outside of the deep South and certain pockets of the Midwest.

Ezra Klein's reaction to Obama's speech in Minnesota yesterday:

Obama's speech tonight was powerful, but then, most all of his speeches are. This address stood out less than I expected. It took me an hour to realize how extraordinary that was. I had just watched an African-American capture the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, and it felt...normal. Almost predictable. 50 years ago, African Americans often couldn't vote, and dozens died in the fight to ensure them the franchise. African Americans couldn't use the same water fountains or rest rooms as white Americans. Black children often couldn't attend the same schools as white children. Employers could discriminate based on race. 50 years ago, African Americans occupied, in effect, a second, and lesser, country. Today, an African-American man may well become the president of the whole country, and it feels almost normal.

It was, to be sure, not entirely unpredicted. On March 31st, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. preached his final Sunday sermon. "We shall overcome," he said, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Four days later, he was murdered. But 40 years later, his dream is more alive than he could have ever imagined. Not only might a black man be president, but at times, many forget to even be surprised by it.

Columnist Leonard Pitts on Appalachian whites and their Obama problem. According to exit polls, 1 out of every 5 voters in the West Virginia Democratic primary (which Obama lost 67%–26%) said that race was a "major factor" in how they cast their ballots. (And that's just the ones who admitted it.)

[R]ace has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more.

But the one thing they did have — or so the con went — was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.

This, even though they did menial work under menial conditions, earned menial pay, sent their kids to menial schools, were subject to menial indignities, made do with menial health care and lived menial lives hemmed in by want, ignorance and hunger.

Exactly like those they had been taught they were better than. Exactly like those they had been taught to look down upon.

There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people's lives. But they can't and won't so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.

Obama has a very specific problem with white voters — the ones in Appalachia don't like him. The following graph, from DHinMI at Daily Kos, shows the counties where Hillary Clinton won at least 65% of the vote. (The states in white haven't voted yet.)

Interesting pattern, isn't it? However, Obama easily won Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and many other predominantly white states. He's also projected to win white voters in Oregon by 55%–42%. DHinMI concludes:

Obama doesn't appear to have much of a problem with white voters. But it seems quite likely Appalachia has a bit of an Obama problem.

Dahlia Lithwick in Newsweek:

What Obama has done, as in his comments about his daughters, is try to broaden the question of increasing diversity beyond "race and test scores," as he writes in his most recent book, "The Audacity of Hope": "Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students." Gerald Kellman, who supervised Obama as an organizer in Chicago, says the two of them never discussed affirmative action specifically, but did talk about programs that "level the playing field." "Not so much advantages in being chosen," says Kellman, "but things like after-school programs, tutoring, summer jobs. Something needed to be done to make up for the things that poverty had denied [African-American and Hispanic kids]." He also says Obama preferred to work through community organizing and community programs wherever possible, rather than legislation.

Asked to speculate how Obama had managed to sidestep so many of the most sensitive issues about race until the Wright story exploded in March, [Andrew] Janis, his former student, says, "Obama never sees race as in its own special camp. For him race and class and gender are all different kinds of social inequality, and they are all interrelated." That nuance has led some opponents to hear what they want to hear in Obama's rhetoric. The Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick, who is helping Connerly with his anti-affirmative-action propositions, says of Obama, "The fact is that he does not full-throatedly support race-based policies. What Obama is doing is opening the door to needs-based, rather than race-based, affirmative action."

Paul Waldman:

For months, I've been predicting that conservatives would delicately prompt voters to see Barack Obama through the lens of race. They'd drop hints, they'd make roundabout arguments, they'd find a hundred subtle ways to encourage people to vote their prejudices, while denying vociferously that they were doing anything of the sort.

It turns out I was wrong. Not about whether they'd try to exploit racial prejudice (that was about as easy to predict as the rising of the sun), but about how they would do it. After some hesitation and baby steps, the conservative campaign against Barack Obama has finally begun. And there's nothing subtle about it. [...]

The Republicans are certainly setting down their marker: they intend, as they have so many times before, to wage a campaign appealing to the ugliest prejudices, the most craven fears, the most vile hatreds. It's not that people should vote against Obama just because he's black, they're saying, but you know, he's that kind of black. As Rush Limbaugh said on Friday, "It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half, that he's decided he's got to go all in on the black side." Ladies and gentlemen, your "moral values" party. [...]

And therein lies the story as some conservatives are now telling it: The comments of Obama's former pastor prove that deep down, Obama is just a black candidate. He may say he wants to transcend racial divisions, he may say he understands the concerns of white people, but when his mask comes off he'll be revealed as just another [Al] Sharpton or Malcom X, those blacks you've come to hate and fear.

Via Raw Story:

[W]e have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time. [...]

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

Echidne of the Snakes:

[L]ook at the two Democratic primary leaders as demographic specimens: In the right corner we have Barack Obama, a black man, and in the left corner we have Hillary Clinton, a white woman. He is privileged as a man, she is privileged as a white person. Can you see the oppression Olympics begin? Can you hear the questions about who it is who has really been oppressed in this country, and who it is, therefore, that should get the golden cup? Can you imagine how very ugly all this could turn out to be?

[...] Electing either Clinton or Obama does not make any difference to the oppression Olympics. Neither of them has personally suffered the whole extent of the cruelty and oppression that we humans are capable of inflicting on the out-groups, and their election will not kiss the wounds and make them all better. In reality they are both fairly fortunate individuals. [...]

What got us into this mess in the first place? Could it be a political history totally dominated by white guys? Look at the Republican candidates for presidency and what they offer in gender and race variety. In some ways we are fighting for the one scrap that has fallen off the establishment table, the one chance for some power, and we are fighting each other while those at the table snicker. We are not asking how to make sure that the political pipelines have lots of people of all ethnic groups and both sexes, lots of people being mentored to take over one day. Instead, we are fighting each other for the one juicy bone.