It is true that they don't hate/oppose Obama because he's black. Just as it's true that they wouldn't have hated/opposed Hillary because she's a woman. However, their opposition is colored by racist language just as, I believe, their opposition to Hillary would've been couched in misogynist terms. People who are not racists do not use racist stereotypes to criticize their opponents. Racists do and will even when their opposition is based on an ideology or position completely divorced from race, e.g., health care reform.
The way they oppose Obama reveals their racism. Not the fact that they oppose him.
A tale of two marches on Washington....
One took place in the late summer of 1963, the other in the late summer of 2009. One was promoted by a preacher from Georgia named Martin Luther King, the other by a former "shock jock" from the state of Washington named Glenn Beck. Ouch! Even mentioning the two of them in the same paragraph is somehow disconcerting.
In 1963, the the people were singing, We Shall Overcome.
Forty-six years later, the chant was, We Shall Undermine.
In 1963, a vast and varied demographic of the American people - all races and religions - descended on the nation's capitol to peaceably and nonviolently protest an injustice that was occurring in certain areas of the country to people of a certain skin pigmentation.
Forty-six years later, a Convention of Pissed-Off White People - united only by the fact that they were all habitual viewers of a single cable news channel - rolled into Washington to hurl invective at an African American president for creating a mess that he had absolutely nothing to do with creating.
In 1963, the signs people held up were optimistic: "With Liberty and Justice for All."
Forty-six years later, the signs were ominous: "We Came Unarmed - THIS TIME!"
On August 28, 1963, the hearts of people who marched on the city of Washington DC were filled with love and hope.
On September 12, 2009 they were just full of shit.
Let us boil the comparisons down to their juicy essentials, shall we? Martin Luther King had a dream. Glenn Beck has a scheme.
http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com
Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
If you remember back to when it became clear that Obama had won the nomination, the right wing was clearly flummoxed since they had convinced themselves that Hillary would definitely be the nominee. It took them a while to figure out how to approach criticizing Obama before settling on simply being upfront with their racism and xenophobia. And the media has pretty much let them get away with it.
But the thing is, they had all their talking points in hand to attack Clinton; it would have been devoid of the anti-Obama racism but would have been instead laced with sexism and the extreme right wing rhetoric they favor.
And one other thing. I really really don’t see these folks as “conservatives.” They’re not conservative about anything; they’re pure distilled right wing hate.
Tom Degan - nicely done!
I'm white, but I am very wary of a study that goes out of its way to declare its subjects are not motivated by racism. If so, why the defensiveness? I'd also look to the complexion of the study's analysts, which - from what I can tell - is entirely white. So there you have it. White folks excusing white folks of racism. Something's fishy.
Meanwhile, threats against this particular president are up 400%. And somewhere between 66,000 and 7 trillion white people marched on Washington to protest, well, it's still tough to tell. White conservatives show up at Obama town halls with guns. A merry group of "concerned citizens" ties up our courtrooms trying to find a judge sympathetic to their charge that our democratically elected president is ineligible to hold office. But race has nothing to do with any of it!
It's true that the right-wing would have been on the attack with Hillary as president. But our president's race has added a whole new dimension to the hate.
Final note: James Carville was an aggressive Hillary supporter in the campaign. He was effectively accused of racism during the primaries. And it stung and stuck. There's a lot more here that should be explored, but I'm not optimistic. Anything that lets white folk off the hook for being racists is good news to the MSM.
Final note 2: focus groups are a joke. No one should be drawing broad conclusions from the conversations contained within them.
A year or so ago, I started posting on an online forum for people in my town to discuss local education issues. The people on the board and I had disagreements and agreements. Discussion was very civil.
Then the election season heated up. It became obvious that several of the people I had been agreeing with were fans of the right-wing media (Beck/Fox/Limbaugh etc.). Discussion turned incivil. The same people I had agreed with on so many local issues became angry with my defenses of Obama and my challenges of their right-wing talking points (Obama's school speech is an attempt to convert children to socialism!! Kids are being taught to sing Obama songs! OMGWTFPolarBear!).
I pointed out to these (guys, they're all guys) that we found plenty to agree about over local education issues. This is because Glenn Beck et al are not telling them what to think about local education issues (until the school speech thing).
It still hasn't sunk in.
It took them a while to figure out how to approach criticizing Obama before settling on simply being upfront with their racism and xenophobia.
But they weren't being upfront about their racism. The xenophobia was a way of coding their racism. And they emphasized Bill Ayers a hell of a lot more than they emphasized Obama's blackness, as they now emphasize "socialism" and "czars" more. That's a carefully crafted mix by the right -- race talk isn't absent by any means, but the race card is played selectively and frequently (though certainly not always) in an oblique way (usually by trying to call us the racists).
Meanwhile, threats against this particular president are up 400%.
I think threats against President Hillary Clinton would be up 400%, or certainly 200% or 300%.
White conservatives show up at Obama town halls with guns.
Oklahoma City? Do you think violent anti-government rage in reaction to Democratic ad ministrations was invented when Obama was inaugurated?
But race has nothing to do with any of it!
Well, if you read the post, you'll see that I'm not saying that. I'm saying, that even though I think there's more racial anger involved than the pollsters do, I disagree with people (like you, perhaps?) who think it's 100% about race.
Carville (et al) are capable of doing sound political research -- you can't win elections if you don't understand what motivates the electorate -- and I think we ought to consider the conclusions he has reached. This right-wing phenomena acts exactly like a cult. The cult happens to contain a lot of racist individuals who try (and fail) to mask their racism. As a young man, I perceived racism to be the society's fundamental problem. Now, not so much. A serious research question for Carville might be: how did this cult get built and what intervention strategies are possible?
Unaddressed, this will be the death of both politics and democracy.
Well, no, they're not motivated by their racism. They're just acting and talking in racist ways about someone they oppose for other reasons. Which in some/many ways is worse, because it makes the racism into just the normal background of discourse.
This is like saying that a guy arguing with another guy in a bar isn't motivated by misogyny when he calls the other guy "pussy" or "cunt". Um.
Steve M. at 10:23:
Those tea partiers certainly didn’t bother with much code, nor did the whackos at the town halls this summer.
The point I was trying to make, not well apparently, was that at first the right wing was circumspect about outright racism only because they were caught with their rhetorical pants down. So to speak. Once it sank in that, indeed a black man was going to be President, they started tentatively making a few oblique racist statements mixed with the socialist and communist and fascist things before finding out that a) the MSM wasn’t going to call them on any of it; and b) the Republican Party leadership was ready and willing to join in.
Those tea partiers certainly didn’t bother with much code, nor did the whackos at the town halls this summer.
I don't agree. Lefties -- for good reason -- collected and published the most racially offensive signs at these demonstrations. But if you watched coverage or saw some full sets of tea party photos on, say, Flickr, you didn't see racist sign after racist sign. The racism is in there, but it doesn't dominate and it is coded sometimes. A cherry-picked worst-of doesn't get that across.
Steve -
I should have been more clear. I was referring to the Carville report, which conspicuously and deliberately goes out of its way to assert the non-racism of wingnuts. I don't believe the facts are there to support their conclusions and, in fact, contradict their conclusions. I agree that the right is more anti-liberal than anti-candidate, and that the rhetorical volume knob is always on high, for ALL Democratic office holders and candidates. But I do believe that race is a distinct and particular aspect of anti-Obama hate that is unique to him - and that dismissing it (again, the report not you) based simply on the anecdotal reporting of the interview subjects themselves (who's going to cop to racism in a focus group?) does not do the cause of race relations much good.
I've always felt its a mistake to talk about it as "either" race "or" real political opposition. Its not "real" political opposition and it is often couched in racist language. There is an actual political and policy argument to be made against all of Obama's policies--from the left and from the right. But the right isn't making those arguments. They are in fact just making shit up to protect the status quo from change.
What is the function of "obama is creating a cult of the leader as exemplified in school kids singing a song?" It isn't about itself at all--its not a principled opposition to the existence of a category, president. Its a scream of rage. And its fomented by the usual cache of coroporate lackeys whose real goals are perfectly reasonable, if utterly corrupt: continued passage of the Bush tax cuts, no health care reform, etc...etc...etc...
The language is (sometimes) racist because people like to make nasty puns, use imagery that appeals to their historical and cultural references, and in the american context most acknowledgement of race is almost definitionally going to be racist. Even things that aren't "racist/bad" can be seen as racist--how about an image of Paul Robeson in his prime? Is that an image of a strong, powerful, charismatic, international black figure or just another scary black man? Sullen and angry black teenager? Is it a "mind is a terrible thing to waste" NAACP ad or an attack on urban youth? Its in the eye of the beholder.
aimai
the other thing I wanted to say is that the weirdest thing to me about the Carville study is that it takes for granted the very thing it seeks to inquire into. In other words, the fact that the target of the interviews/poll was almost uniformly aged and white seems to have dropped from their consciousness. If race and racism werent' a constitutive part of the tea bagger movement the polling sample would have been less lily white in the first place.
If you go into an all men's club, that excludes blacks, jews, and women, you shouldn't really look around and poll each person seperately on their reasons for joining the club and take at face value that its "because its the best golf course around." One of the reasons that the club works for its membership is that it already excludes all the other types from membership. That's what makes it the best club around. But its very seldom spoken out loud.
We have some very nice friends who used to live at "Point of Woods" in the old Fire Island. Point of woods, famously, excluded Jews. One of the ways they did it, aside from covenants, was by having only one store that didn't accept actual cash. You had to be a member, and pay with a "scrip" and settle up monthly. But they would'nt let Jews, or blacks of course, be members of the store. Our friend didn't know that. She was a very nice friend to us and she knew we were Jews. But it had never dawned on her that her little community, so nice, when she was a child actually purposely excluded Jews using hidden but obvious strategies like legal covenants and the "store that charmingly didn't take cash."
I have no doubt that many of the people Carville et al interviewed aren't, or don't think of themselves as, racist. But they've all ended up in the same place, mysteriously, because its more comfortable to them to be in a mysteriously all white group than to mix with non white/democratic groups. Its not really all that mysterious, is it?
aimai
It isn't mysterious at all. These individuals possess racist feelings which some of them attempt to conceal, to not give overt expression to. Not all do that, just some.
The right wing cult is made up of many of these people, a residual of Lee Attwater's "Southern Strategy." As cult members, their belief system excludes many facts and embraces as fact much nonsense. I think intervention into the cult-ness is our main hope. Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom!
who's going to cop to racism in a focus group?
Actually, Stan Greenberg (whose firm conducted this focus group) is known for going into Macomb County, Michigan, in 1985, at the height of the Reagan era, and finding that "Reagan Democrats"
express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics. Blacks constitute the explanation for their [white defectors'] vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live....
The special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.
He believes he knows how to get people relaxed enough to say these things frankly. He's succeeded at that, or at least he did a generation ago.
Stan Greenberg's skill a generation ago is neither here nor there on the question of the racism of this sample. For one thing you've already shown, in quoting directly from the participants in the study, that for *this group* right now one of the most important things is that they *fear being charged with racism.* That's at the forefront of their minds. They also see *being charged with racism* as a way that their "real" concerns are delegitimized by authority. The Reagan Democrats were coming from a completely different place/time on how their own racism was going to be perceived and used against them.
As you've already argued, SteveM, the Fox/Beck/Rush party line is that the democrats are the party of race and racism--offering goodies to blacks and absolution to liberal whites for the imaginary (or real) sins of America's past. At the same time now that Obama is president Fox/B/R are pushing a very hard line that "real americans" are not racist, that the "real america" is not racist and that current rightist critiques of Obama and his policies are merely correct, merely political.
Their followers are very well primed to defensively answer questions that seem to include race as an issue--and very well defended intellectually from addressing their own racism/prejudice with themselves or with outsiders. This racism without racists is, to me, identical to the antisemitism without jews that you find in places from which jews have long been excluded. And its typical of Rush's own approach. He's not a racist--its those other people who see race everywhere who are the problem thrusting race upon him when he's just like MLK and sees "only the content of a man's character."
Under those circumstances I don't care how skilled greenberg et al are--the vast majority of their interviewees are not going to cop to out and out racism or racist beliefs. Not only are they not going to go there in their explanations for what they are doing this form of polling/questioning is simply not ag ood way of eliciting what people actually think. To do that you have to ask a lot of different kinds of questions--not blunt "so, is your antipathy to Obama based on racism" type questions. The pollsters claim that they "gave people a lot of space to answer" by which I take it that they mean that they asked a lot of non judgemental questions about race. But I don't get the impression that they thought at all hard about the ways in which (as others in this thread have pointed out) racism/xenophobia/hysteria are coded forms of each other in this particular context.
aimai
aimai - regarding your second comment, that's exactly it. People of color are conspicuously absent from the same study that asserts that race has nothing to do with anti-Obamaism. It could very well be that race has nothing to do with Obama hate, but I wouldn't draw that conclusion from the Carville analysis. By excluding non-whites from his analysis, he actually makes the opposite point of the one he attempts to make. There are many ways to express racism that don't include anything as obvious as shouting racial epithets on television. Your analogy about Jews/Fire Island is a great example of just how creative expressions of racism can become to avoid the impression of the overt.
James Carville, as usual, is too late to the party to be of any use. We have known for quite some time about the insular, bizarre world of conservatives. But thanks for the "study."
W/r/t racism: lots of these arguments about "are they racist or not" get cleared up if you posit racism not as a set of propositions or beliefs or attitudes, but as a lived relation of dominance that gets expressed in varying ways, the point being that each expression re-produces the lived relation. First it's n-word n-word n-word, and then it's school bussing, etc., but it all amounts to "don't let black people take my shit."
Teabaggers aren't screaming n-word (well, many aren't), but by the same token they're not about to share their neighborhood/school/daughter with black people, ya know what I'm sayin?
Dave, I agree with you. But I also think we have to posit that the category "black people" is also kind of a sliding one. In real life lots of white people have resigned themselves to the presence of black people in their workforce, neighborhoods, schools and even families--cross racial adoption is pretty big and accepted even among groups that we'd otherwise think of and find voting on the racist side of the political spectrum. But as they themselves have said for a very long time "hey, I've got a black friend!" or "hey, I let my daughter marry one!" or even "my grandkids are black!" Its more than possible for extremely bigoted and racist/classist political goals to co-exist with a personal lack of animus towards selected members of the person's own community or family.
What's really interesting, and I think we see it most clearly in the evolution of homophobia is when the rubber hits the road and a family member turns out to be part of a despised minority. We see it all the time when, in the end, an anti gay family turns pro gay when a child comes out/is at risk. Similarly I think when you look at pro-natalist, evangelical families who are anti urban/antiminority/anti democratic but who adopt and lovingly raise minority children we will see an evolution in their perspective as those children grow up and encounter larger racist aspects of society.
One of the important myths of the right is that real homophobia and real racism don't exist, have no structural form, are not real problems. When individuals and families have to encounter these things as problems for themselves and their membership they can convert rather rapidly to believers in structural issues and governmental solutions. Or they have to cast out their own members (which they also do, of course).
aimai
So most of you think we'd be having a relatively collegial time of it with a white Democratic president?
No, we wouldn't be having an easier time, but the language would be different.
I agree with Miriam.
Aimai
There certainly wouldn't be collegial relations with a white Democrat, but some of the fringier stuff (birtherism, e.g.) would have no traction.
Also, aimai, you're totally right. My "racism isn't personal, and you can tell because teabaggers are personally revolting" line was sloppily conceived. As you say, racist ideology operates over and beside the personal
but some of the fringier stuff (birtherism, e.g.) would have no traction.
That's where I disagree. I just think there'd be different fringy stuff. (See, e.g., the Clinton Death List, Mena, Vincent Foster, etc., etc.) There'd need to be fresh material for a new decade iof there were another Clinton in the White House, but I'm sure something would be turned up, or made up.
I just think there'd be different fringy stuff.
For sure, but the traction matters as much as what the fringe is saying. I do wonder if 50 percent of Republicans thought the death list thing was gospel, or even the Vince Foster theories. Given what I know of Clinton's approval numbers over his 8 years, it doesn't seem that stuff captured many minds. I could be totally wrong though.
Weird as it sounds, I "get" birtherism. At least, I get why it would appeal to American racists. I don't see what's to "get" in the Foster story beyond pissing off liberals.
Given what I know of Clinton's approval numbers over his 8 years, it doesn't seem that stuff captured many minds.
His numbers early on were lower than Obama's, at the tail end of a much milder recession.
Racism. A belief that people inherit traits that make them innately and irrevocably inferior or superior.
All this talk about what is racist is pure nonsense. What the bulk of you here don't recognize is the difference between racist ideology and cultural dissonance and there is more than a hint of postmodern doubletalk that won't let the difference be split.
But what's more ridiculous is that there is no end to the accusation. Which is to say all this self-righteous huffing ends with nothing more or less than fingerpointing. "He's a racist, shun him." Which is nothing more or less than bigotry, because the central accusation is false. You are involved in a argument against subtlety in which you allow no criticism of Obama to be anything but racist and to distrust any evidence to the contrary.
The stunning tangent to this screeching is the failure to understand the simplest fact which is that Fox news may very well articulate what that segment of America actually feels, and that what they actually feel is genuine. Instead you actually prefer to argue that there is a crypto-racist conspiracy.
In the end, have you no decency?
"He's a racist, shun him." Which is nothing more or less than bigotry
Thank you, Limbaugh clone. You've regurgitated the table-turning message perfectly. A gold star for your forehead.
You are involved in a argument against subtlety in which you allow no criticism of Obama to be anything but racist and to distrust any evidence to the contrary.
We criticize Obama all the time. On his coziness with Wall Street. On his half-assed support for the public option. On his timidity regarding torture and DADT.
And did you read the damn post, you twit? Did you read the previous comments? I'm saying race is a component, but I agree with GQR that it isn't the explanation of all the anger by any means. I do believe that Fox zombies believe "czars" are un-American and Keynesian spending is the death of America as we know it and putting car companies into what's effectively mere receivership is fascism and government-run health programs are communist -- even though there are perfectly American precedents for all those things. I believe when Fox zombies recite those bullet points, they mean what they say. They're idiots, but they're sincere. So go build your straw man somewhere else.
And so your point is not to analyze the actual component of racism in America, but to label your political opponents as mindless zombies. Good for you.
Just stating the obvious.
Commenting by HaloScan
