Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas has made a name for herself over the years by expressing some very controversial views, like advocating arms sales to Hugo Chavez’s regime in Venezuela. For many, she has richly earned the right to be dismissed. But her widely reported speech last week, charging that the unwillingness of Congress to raise the debt limit stems from racism toward the President, should be taken seriously as the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. Mainstream liberal thought has been edging closer and closer to legitimating the idea that opposition to Barack Obama can be equated to racism.
Just a few days before Representative Lee was telling the House to “read between the lines…only this president–only this one–has received [these] kinds of attacks,” Harold Meyerson, one of liberalism’s most lucid commentators, was pressing a similar line of attack in the Washington Post. Fueled by “the politics of racial resentment,” conservatives loathe what their government is becoming–”multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan and now headed by a president who personifies those qualities.” Two years of relentless liberal assaults on the Tea Party helped to prepare this ground. The movement was said to be a front for racist policies, not the popular uprising against big government and uncontrolled spending that it claimed to be. Paul Krugman told his The New York Times readers that Tea Party activists might well imagine themselves starring in the “Birth of a Nation” (the classic 1915 racist film), while E. J. Dionne artfully made it clear that, “Opposition to the president is driven by many factors that have nothing to do with race. But race is definitely part of what’s going on.”
This continuing talk about racism, which is likely to be a liberal theme in next year’s presidential campaign, is sure to strike most Americans as not just disappointing, but unexpected. A great hope of the 2008 presidential election was that it would put to bed, not the existence of racism in society (the country is still a long way from that), but its role in presidential politics. Like the question of Catholicism, which evaporated almost overnight when JFK was elected in 1960, race would cease to matter. People could favor a president or oppose him without taking into account, or worrying that others might accuse them of taking into account, the president’s race.
For liberals who proclaim the continuing power of racism over our politics, the analogy of 2008 to 1960 does not hold. Although they cite few instances of overt racist comments by leading conservatives, this is only because–as they see it–conservatives managed to learn from bitter experience how to avoid cruder expressions and to speak in code. But the feelings are there at, or just beneath, the surface. (For the record, the only important figures to use race language directly against Obama have been Bill Clinton, who in the South Carolina primary in 2008 labeled him “the black candidate” and accused his campaign of “playing the race card on me,” and the Princeton philosopher Cornel West, who recently called Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”)
But another possibility is that the analogy to 1960 does hold–or at least that it would, except for the efforts by liberals to inject the theme of racism for their psychological and political benefit. It is an instance of “playing the race card,” one that is all the more cynical for being deployed by those who celebrated Barack Obama’s “historic victory” as inaugurating a new day in American politics.
Why should liberals now risk throwing away a real benefit to the nation? One answer is that racism provides a convenient explanation for why liberalism has not had the success that was expected. For those like Paul Krugman, who declared that “the progressive philosophy won,” or like Harold Meyerson, who assured the faithful that the “future of American politics … belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats,” it is consoling to think that temporary setbacks are not the result of any inadequacies of the progressive philosophy or its leader, but of dark and sinister forces plotting against the future. Just as likely, the card is being offered as a calculated gambit to keep the loyal in tow and, especially, to minimize potential defectors among decent people who despise racial injustice. They are the target group in this stratagem. Liberals have become high-stake gamblers willing to bet the house–and at any price.
July 22nd, 2011 | 10:09 am
This is is a perfect example of the “willful ignorance” engaged in by those so-called “conservatives” who claim to be “colorblind” as to the question of “race” or “racial politics.” Krugman and West are right about Obama….He is nothing more than a tool of rightwing oligarchs. He was chosen by them to do exactly what he is doing — dismantle the Neal Deal and the Great Society — something that simply would not be tolerated if done by a “white” conservative or “white” liberal.
Problem with most “conservatives” (white or otherwise) is that they tend to ignore or deny this country’s long and sordid history of white supremacy. They refuse to acknowledge that that history accounts for much of the obvious and glaring racial disparities in income, incarceration rates, wealth accumlation, etc., ad nausem between “whites” and everybody else.
Sheila Jackson Lee is also correct in her analysis of the opposition to Obama. Although he is obviously nobody’s “flaming liberal,” most white conservatives simply cannot accept, refuse to accept that “their” country is in the hands of the “other”, that is someone who does not look like them.
July 22nd, 2011 | 10:57 am
Good to “see” you net-wise Jim…now that I’m back in Virginia (WLU) we’ll have to connect in person again.
I’d title your post “The Democrat who Cried Racism, part 74,924.”
And I’d say that this race-card move has been continually employed by Obama-promoters. In my judgment, it’s only been for the past eleven months, when it began to dawn on various MSM and Democrat leaders that the Tea Party was a) not going to be squelched by calling them names(“racists” included) and was b) quite broad and electorally significant, that we’ve seen a temporary let-up in the race-card rhetoric.
And we all know that if Obama loses or comes close to losing, we are going to see it played endlessly.
July 22nd, 2011 | 7:58 pm
“For the record, the the only important figures to use race language directly against Obama” are Bill Clinton and Cornel West! That’s right, because when Rush Limbaugh opines that “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations” and pens ditties about “Barack the Magic Negro” he’s not even indirectly using “race language”. And we all know that Limbaugh’s standing in the Republican Party pales next to Cornel West’s in the Democratic Party. Seriously, is “Professor” Ceaser really as dumb he acts or just pretending to be?
July 25th, 2011 | 5:47 pm
The phrase “Barack, the Magic Negro” was invented by David Ehrenstein in a Los Angeles Times op ed. His “father was a secular Jew with Polish ancestors, and his mother was of African American and Irish descent,” and he is apparently gay.
Attempts by the Left to paint criticisms of Obama as the product of racism among voters is going to alienate everyone who already thinks Obama’s economic policies have failed, because they know that they do not harbor racist feelings toward him. They will resent the false accusation by Obama’s supporters, and will correctly see this accusation as an attempt to create a red herring to distract the national dialogue away from the substance of Obama’sd failures.
In other words, the tactic is going to backfire, because most Americans are, unlike those on the Left, not plagued with a constant sense that any success they enjoy has been at the expense of downtrodden minorities. And that will be especially true among critics of Obama who are also members of minority groups, who are confident of their own lack of prejudice. Accusing their opposition of “racism” instead of defending the substance of Obama’s programs will simplify solidify the opinion of most Americans that Obama cannot even honestly articulate a rational defense for his policies.
It will just confirm for most people that Obama hypocritically claims immunity from the same standards of performance and accountability that most of us expect of ourselves, in the same way that he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize before he had made any major decisions affecting war and peace, and then proceeded to increase troops in Afghanistan and assassinate Osama bin Laden.
August 18th, 2011 | 3:38 pm
Hey, Professor:
this week alone Republican Senator Tom Coburn opined that Obama’s policy preferences were influenced by the alleged fact that “as an African-American male,” he got a “tremendous advantage” from them.
And, in the same week, Rush Limbaugh, having previously penned ditties about “Barack the Magic Negro”, went on about how Obama was an “oreo”.
Now, are you still blowing that “For the record, the only important figures to use race language directly against Obama” smoke out your sphincter?
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