Race Relations Blog

Barack Obama will have to confront more direct racism than any major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history, but that doesn't mean that this is the first time racism has reared its head in a presidential election.

In 1860, for example, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with only 40% of the popular vote--the rest of the votes being split between Southern and Northern Democrats--to become the first Republican president. His opposition to the expansion of slavery into Western Territories annoyed rich landowners in South Carolina, who began the process of secession and instigated the American Civil War.

And when a civil rights plank was added to the Democratic Party platform in 1948, Truman lost four reliably Democratic Southern states--and 39 electoral votes--to third-party white supremacist Strom Thurmond. Were it not for Thurmond, the election would not have been close enough to inspire newspapers to erroneously predict the victory of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey.

Twenty years later, another third-party white supremacist candidate--George Wallace--claimed five states and 46 electoral votes to give Republican candidate Richard Nixon a win over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, despite the fact that Nixon only carried 43% of the popular vote. Four years later in 1972, Nixon's stonewalling of the civil rights agenda had given him so much support among white supremacists that no viable third-party candidate was fielded, and he carried the George Wallace states--and 44 others--to win a landslide with 63% of the vote.

By and large, white bigots have trended overwhelmingly Republican ever since in national elections, even white bigots who identify as Democrats for purposes of state elections. In Mississippi, for example, three-quarters of the state House delegation is Democratic despite the fact that Republicans have won the state by comfortable margins in every election since 1980.

So as we read the results of the new Stanford University study indicating that racism and racial resentment could cost Obama some votes, let's take these numbers with a grain of salt. Much is made of the fact that 17 percent of Hillary Clinton's primary voters will support John McCain, for example, but less is made of the fact that white Democrats in conservative states tend to vote Republican in national elections anyway, and would have voted for Clinton or Obama only because the Republican primary wrapped up relatively early, leaving the Democrats with the only interesting national primary.

This dynamic is reflected in the Newsweek racial resentment poll, which revealed (among other things) that:

... Obama trails presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain 40 percent to 52 percent among whites. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's challenger for the Democratic nomination, also trails McCain among white voters but by a smaller margin, 44 percent to 48 percent ... Clinton's white support is unusually high: at a comparable point in the 2004 election, Democratic nominee John Kerry received the support of 36 percent of white voters, compared to George W. Bush's 48 percent, and in June of 2000, Bush led Al Gore 48 percent to 39 percent.

In other words, Obama has been doing better among white voters--a group that presumably includes white voters with high levels of racial resentment--than either Al Gore or John Kerry. This should come as no surprise; he's running against a less popular candidate. But it should put to rest any concerns that he might have a "race problem"--that his racial identity itself is a "problem" for the Democratic Party.

Could Obama fail where a white candidate in his position might succeed? Maybe. He might also succeed where white candidates in his position have failed. In any case, Obama has the same problem attracting voters with high levels of racial resentment that candidates with progressive civil rights agendas have struggled with for 60 years. This isn't really Barack Obama's race problem we're talking about. It's America's.

Related: History of the Civil Rights Backlash

To hear the L.A. Progressive blog tell it:

"So Sambo beat the b--ch!" This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama's win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

The quote is attributed to Palin by "Lucille," an unidentified Alaska waitress.  At first glance it sounds like an offensive, off-the-cuff remark--but there's a lot more to it than that. This year's election cycle was rife (at least among the punditry) with discussion of race versus gender.  Who would be the first to break the white male monopoly on presidential nominations: A black man, or a white woman?  We could have saved ourselves all this trouble if we'd just nominated Shirley Chisholm in '72, but never mind. The 2008 Democratic primary has been characterized as the oppression olympics, as a competition to see whether racism is worse than sexism, or vice versa. But there was another time in our nation's history when an even more fundamental question of race versus gender was being resolved: December 1865.  The American Civil War had just ended eight months prior, and talk was afoot of giving black men the right to vote.  White suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in a letter (emphasis mine):

The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were allowed to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see "Sambo" walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever again close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?

The term "Sambo" has fallen out of favor as a racial epithet in recent years, and so--considering the context of the current presidential election--the phrase "Sambo beat the b--ch" would almost have to be a subtle reference to Stanton's remark. Would a group of fortysomething Republican politicos from Alaska have gotten the reference?  Probably not.  But Sarah Palin might have; she self-describes as a feminist and belongs to Feminists for Life, a group that reveres the writings of 19th-century suffragists but has little use for later feminist material.  But it would have been strange to use it in a conversation with ordinary Republican political operatives, because they wouldn't have understood what she was talking about. McCain had famously fielded a "How do we beat the b--ch?" question (regarding Hillary Clinton) from a supporter months earlier, at a time when Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee.  When Obama defeated her, that rendered the supporter's crude question moot--so the statement would have doubled as a response to the McCain supporter and a wry reference to the history of the race vs. gender issue that dominated the news cycle during the Clinton-Obama primary.  The phrase is too succinct, too complete, to have been the invention of a shrill blogger four months after the fact.  I don't mean to sound like I admire the remark--it's offensive--but it encapsulates so many different controversies, so much history, that it's not something that an enemy of Palin would have created out of whole cloth as a smear because it's too complex.  If you're going to have Palin say a racial epithet, it makes sense to just have her say something crude and simple without all the subtle references.So I don't really know.  I can't see Palin saying it over lunch to a group of Republican colleagues, but I can't see it going unsaid either.  Somebody must have said it.  I don't pretend to know who, when, or where, but it comes with its own why.

NPR's John Ridley righteously dissects a summer of Hollywood blockbusters where 89% of films in wide release had no minorities among the leading cast members:

We had ... the lovely Jennifer Hudson playing a 21st century Hattie McDaniel to the Sex and the City gals. Excuse me, Jennifer's the one with the Oscar. Shouldn't they be fetching Jennifer's coffee? ... Yes, there was Will Smith as a superhero. An alcoholic, abusive, foul-mouthed superhero ... [T]here was redemption at the end of Hancock, but the path was so coarse as to be unsuitable for my kids to watch. So, the only hero of color they saw this summer was The Incredible Hulk. Which, by the way, why does a movie with nary a minority in it have to end with the Hulk destroying Harlem?

Between this and the presidential debate schedule, it's beginning to look like the media--traditionally an instrument of social progress--is actually lagging behind the political world when it comes to diversity.  And that's not easy to do. (h/t: Angry Asian Man)

A few short months ago, the three most viable presidential candidates were a black man, a white woman, and a white man. Now there's a 50/50 chance that the United States is about to elect its first non-white president less than three months, and rumors are swirling that even the white Republican guy is seriously considering a female running mate.

So, taking all of this into account, what do you think the race and gender makeup of the four presidential debate moderators will be?

• One white man, one man of color, one white woman, and one woman of color?
• Three white men, and one woman of color? Or maybe...
• Three white men and one white woman?

No such luck. As RaceWire's Jonathan Adams observes, the four presidential debate moderators will be four white men--a step down from the presidential debates conducted 20 years ago, where Bernard Shaw moderated what would turn out to be the most famous of the Bush-Dukakis debates. What does it say about the media when the presidential debate moderators are less diverse than the presidential candidates themselves? And as Adams asks...

If these are the picks for the presidential debates, what do think the short list looks like for Tim Russert’s job on Meet the Press?

Indeed. And taking the whiteness and maleness of the media into account, the bizarre, idiotic, and divisive coverage of the Democratic presidential primary--"race versus gender," the pundits screamed--becomes much easier to explain.

(Posted by Tom Head, About.com: Civil Liberties)

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil LibertiesThis Flickr photo brings to mind a good analogy for racism: grocery store eggs.

Originally, the vast majority of grocery eggs were brown. But over time, chickens were bred to produce lighter and lighter eggs until eventually, they produced the white eggs that most people purchase today. The theory behind this was that white eggs looked cleaner.

While all this has happened, another change has taken place in the egg industry: mass production. Most eggs are now laid by battery hens who spend very short nine-month lives in cages too small for them to turn around in. They eat and defecate in the same place. They don't eat the sort of free range minerals that chickens ordinarily eat. Their immune systems are shot.

Most of the eggs sold today are actually much dirtier than the brown eggs that people used to eat, and created in circumstances that reflect greater cruelty. But most of them are also white, reflecting a longstanding preference for "clean"-looking eggshells.

Racism is a lot like that. There was a time when race probably mattered less than it does now. Early Egyptian art portrays differences between races but no clear hierarchy, and the association between dark-skinned people and slave labor was not clearly made until the trans-Saharan slave trade began in the 7th century AD.

But beginning at or near that point, our class system was color-coded to race. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan African emigrants who in many instances would have made great physicians, scientists, and policymakers were denied education and forced into lives of slave labor, while hundreds of millions of whites who in many instances would have been happier with manual labor were educated and groomed into roles that they didn't want and couldn't adequately fill. People were denied choices, denied flexibility, denied social mobility--setting the human race back as a result.

We have ended up with white eggs, mass-produced and genetically engineered to look "clean," that are actually far dirtier than the farm-produced brown eggs that preceded them. And we have ended up with white people, traditionally classified at the top of the Western caste hierarchy, dominating a world that many among them are underqualified to lead.

As long as the racist caste hierarchy defines our culture, we are in effect judging the cleanliness of our eggs by the color of their shells--with results that can be far deadlier than salmonella.

Related: Institutional Racism

by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

Some people are just beyond reproach when it comes to racially inflammatory statements, remarks, or actions. Or, at least, they think they should be.

A.J. Plaid sees last week's controversial New Yorker cover as a good example of what Carmen Van Kerckhove calls "hipster racism," defined as:

... ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning "ironic" nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the behavior necessarily has to be meant to denigrate another person's race or ethnicity, but there are definitely solid examples of hipster racism out there.

One example that immediately comes to mind would be the illustrations selected for Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There, published by Seal Press, which used as its motif racist sketches from vintage comic books of white men and women doing battle with caricatures of black African tribesmen. Marcotte, who did not select the illustrations, offered a sincere apology; Seal Press, which did select the illustrations, offered an apology of the I'm-sorry-you-were-offended variety. The apology and stated rationale behind the illustrations seem very, well, hipster:

We apologize for any pain or concern these images have caused ...

We do not believe it is appropriate for a book about feminism, albeit a book of humor, to have any images or illustrations that are offensive to anyone.

Please know that neither the cover, nor the interior images, were meant to make any serious statement. We were hoping for a campy, retro package to complement the author's humor. That is all. We were not thinking ...

This 1950s Marvel comic is not an accurate reflection of our beauty standards, our beliefs regarding one's right to bear arms, nor our perspectives on race relations, foreign policy, or environmental policy.

Seal Press had, a few weeks prior, answered criticisms from bloggers of color by explaining that "you all engage best through negative discourse." But these Seal Press editors are people who do good activism on civil rights issues, whose views on race seem to be very 21st-century in other respects. What's the deal? Good question. No clear answers, though.

Likewise, as a former active member of Integrity--a group dedicated to working or the full inclusion of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender persons in the Episcopal Church--I was horrified when the president of the organization included an illustration depicting apes in episcopal vestments as part of a blog entry criticizing African archbishops. The only people who criticized the illustration seemed to be conservatives, who had their own reasons to do so.

And I have noticed a remarkable silence regarding a recent Rolling Stone illustration depicting McCain being tortured by jarring anti-Asian caricatures of Obama, Clinton, and Bush.

There seems to be a popularly held view that if you have non-white friends, come from a certain income class, and have the right political opinions, it just isn't necessary to worry about doing racist things. But the truth is that racist behavior isn't limited to stereotypically "racist" people; "good" people can make the same mistakes, and need to own up to it when they do.

I have no real opinion on the New Yorker cover. I think functionally the racist imagery can only be seen as satirical, but I also think that an illustration that relies on racist imagery, even when used in a satirical context, is not a brilliant thing to put on the cover of a major national magazine.

What do you think? Share your thoughts below.

Jack Kerwick has written another op-ed dealing with the issue of racism (I took issue with one of his previous articles here). Money quote:

Yet it is a mystery how Obama’s "deep and abiding love for this country" is reconciled with his 20-plus years as a member of a Black Nationalist church saturated with anti-white and anti-American ideologies. Wright, Obama’s spiritual mentor, is a "black liberation theologian," which teaches that the liberation of oppressed non-white people will only be achieved once "white supremacy" is destroyed. Consequently, love for America -- which promotes freedom of speech and expression -- is simply not an emotion black liberationists can be expected to feel. This is the ideology to which Obama has been exposed for more than half his life.

Without singling Jack out (because his errors are remarkably common errors), this paragraph demands a rebuttal.

First, Trinity United Church of Christ is not, strictly speaking, a black nationalist church. Black nationalism preaches that African Americans should either establish a separate black nation (the rationale behind the establishment of Liberia), or conquer the United States and expel non-blacks by force (which even Louis Farrakhan doesn't advocate). Nobody at Trinity United Church of Christ has spoken in support of either doctrine, so it would be inaccurate to describe TUCC as a "black nationalist" church. If TUCC were in fact a black nationalist church, it would be one of the most remarkably uncommitted black nationalist churches in history--welcoming white members, inviting white speakers, and belonging, as it does, to a predominantly white denomination.

Second, white supremacy should be destroyed. White supremacy refers to the disproportionate power that institutional racism gives whites over people identified with other racial groups. People who think white supremacy is a good thing are called white supremacists. People who don't think white supremacy is a good thing are obligated to destroy it. There is no intellectually honest middle ground on this point.

Third, black liberation theology can be accurately defined as a theology that is centered on the liberation of black people. That's all there is to it. Any predominantly black inner-city church that does not preach, welcome, or accommodate any form of black liberation theology is, more likely than not, inadequately serving its parishioners.

I don't know where Jack Kerwick got the idea that black liberation theology is in any way incompatible with a belief in free speech or freedom of expression, but I'm reasonably sure it wasn't by reading black liberation theologians.

The issue of whether the Rev. Wright, a retired Marine and Vietnam War veteran, is "anti-American" because he sometimes gets angry at the country to which he has dedicated his life is of course another issue. For my part, my only disagreement with Barack Obama over Trinity United Church of Christ is that I think he was too eager to distance himself from it. As far as I'm concerned, America could use more patriots like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Related: Barack Obama's Speech on Patriotism

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Juneteenth celebration (Richmond, California). Photo: David Paul Morris / Getty Images.

TheRoot.com's John McWhorter, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, asks: Why celebrate Juneteeth? Excerpt:

Slaves, upon release, generally led lives of miserable sharecropping and other menial labor, and their descendants, as often as not, migrated north to end up penned into segregated slums ...

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War, Northern abolitionists disagreed about what the best approach to ending slavery would be. Most favored instant Emancipation, in which all slaves would be granted citizenship simultaneously. But some favored gradual Emancipation--a policy that would set a date in advance for the emancipation of all slaves, and give slaveowners time to adjust financially to the new reality. The war rendered the question moot, and instant Emancipation won out. In theory.

But the reality of the situation is that, as McWhorter points out, free Southern blacks for the most part weren't discernibly better off than Southern slaves. Jim Crow laws, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, made sure that Southern blacks of the era stayed poor and lacked political influence. After pretending to protect Southern blacks for less than a decade, the federal government left Southern blacks to the Dixiecrat wolves in 1877 and failed to do its job for another 87 years. To this day, racial profiling, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, hate crimes, cyclical poverty, and other vestiges of the old racial caste system remain.

Sure, some blacks benefitted from instant Emancipation. But some blacks were free prior to Emancipation, too, and that didn't eliminate the reality of slavery. If we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there isn't much difference between a slave and an indentured sharecropper. And if we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there is an undeniable family resemblance difference between someone being born to a life in a slave's chains and someone being inculturated into a life in the chains of prison and poverty. We may have a black president next January, but it is a safe bet that this will not change the hard realities of life--that black Americans are three times as likely as whites to live in poverty, that black Americans are far more likely to go to prison or become victims of crime, that we still live in a culture that has judged the next generation of black Americans guilty before they have even been born.

Opportunities have increased over the past 143 years, and Emancipation and the Civil Rights Act certainly represent milestones in that process, but the Emancipation the abolitionists had in mind--a true and universal Emancipation, an Emancipation that, in the words of William Lloyd Garrison, "includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights"--still hasn't happened for many black Americans living today.

So while I wouldn't go as far as to dismiss Juneteenth, I always have to resist the urge to put an asterisk on the word "Emancipation." There is a ghost of Juneteenth past, a ghost of Juneteenth present, and a ghost of Juneteenth future. There is a greater Emancipation, a universal Emancipation, that awaits us still.

See also:

• The Conscience of the King
• Black Civil Rights in America: An Illustrated History

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Although New York magazine cites Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan as an example of the "brownface" phenomenon, both Sandler and the title character are ethnically Jewish. Photo: Rob Loud / Getty Images

The other night I caught a few minutes of The Dragon Painter (1919), an American film starring the husband-wife team of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki. One of the remarkable things about Hayakawa and Aoki was that until the past few decades, it was virtually unheard of for an Asian character to actually be played by an actor of Asian ancestry in an American film. More often the character would be played by a caucasian actor wearing crude makeup--as in the case of the Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu in the famous 1920s serials.

Have we come a long way? Not necessarily, as New York magazine reports (see "The Summer of Brownface"). Excerpt:

... [I]n You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, opening tomorrow ... Adam Sandler plays an Israeli and Rob Schneider an Arab; both have seemingly taken a dip in the same substance used to honey up Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart. Mike Myers’s The Love Guru is quite possibly the first Hollywood comedy entirely devoted to tittering over turbans since Peter Sellers played Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, from 1968. Ben Kingsley, naturally, shows up to meta-travesty his own half-Indian heritage, and by extension his Gandhi role, with a cameo as Guru Tugginmypudha. (Should the homophonic hilarity of that name prove too subtle, there’s also Guru Satchabigknoba.)

Kingsley is also onboard for the just-announced Prince of Persia, the cast of which — unveiled in the past week — includes such notable Persians as Jake Gyllenhaal and Alfred Molina. Nor is the trend limited to Hollywood blockbusters. In the indie thriller Stuck, out now, ethnic Estonian Mena Suvari rocks the cornrows to play a character based on a real-life black woman. On the small screen, meanwhile, it’s a fairly safe bet that the two-month overlap between the general-election and the TV-production cycles will bring us a lot more Fred Armisen as Barack Obama come September.

And none of the above, of course, is even close in sheer audacity (and, let’s admit it, comic potential) to Robert Downey Jr.’s full-blown blackface in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.

I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't offensive, but it seems to me that brownface, or blackface, is problematic when it does one of two things:

• When it reduces the already scandalously limited number of roles available to people of color, and/or
• When it reinforces harmful stereotypes.

If we look at each of these examples based on those standards, we find that not all "brownface" is created equal. Read more...