[Marxism] Counterpunch: The new rhetoric of racism

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a good article on the White vs. Black political character of the
election campaign taking place, perfected by McCain's nomination of Palin to
create a truly pan-white campaign against a Black in the presidency.

But its conclusions are misleading. They interpret Obama's refusal to engage
the racism of the campaign against him openly as racist as showing that he
is not strong enough to win the election. This is becoming the standard
version among radicals. In reality, an open campaign against the racism of
the campaign against him would not win him votes. It would lose him votes.
As a bourgeois candidate in a bourgeois election financed on all sides by
the bourgeoisie (and the middle class layers closest to them), he would
become an advocate of racial polarization. Even though he would only be
defending himself.

Similarly, the right-wing pressures which have become normally dominant in
politics in the United States -- shaping the media and much else in all
debates and reflecting real ruling-class opinion -- have convinced Obama
that he should not put any air between himself and McCain on foreign policy.


People who think (always with a touch of satisfaction) that the weakness of
the liberals will guarantee the victory of the conservatives, thus proving
the need for a Third Party assume that Obama must lose because of his
weakness -- mostly actually cold political judgment about the requirements
of imperialist political campaigning today -- and thus dispel the
"illusions" of his supporters.

But the core problem is that the advocates of change forget -- almost as
though it were irrelevant or simply a pure trick -- that there is no bigger
change possible in this election than the election of a Black president.
This will be history in the real.  Not because I have "illusions" in Obama
but because I have "illusions" in the white working people and youth in this
country, I tend to think Obama will win this election and that the event
itself and the complex and certainly not revolutionary results will advance
the struggle for revolution in the United States of America.

Frankly, the attempt to turn the racism of the campaign against Obama into
an argument for hostility to his campaign is objectively idiotic.
Fred Feldman

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor09192008.html

Why Won't Obama Call It Out? 
The New Rhetoric of Racism 
By KEEANGA-YAMATTA TAYLOR 

In recent days, John McCain has been lambasted for telling outright lies in
his campaign ads--from the claim that Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a pig
to the absurd charge that Obama insisted on sex education for
kindergarteners.

The media and the pundits--even the king of dirty campaigning himself, Karl
Rove--criticized the untruths underpinning McCain's increasingly vicious
ads.

But most have been silent about another aspect of McCain's campaigning--an
increased willingness to invoke a new lexicon of racist code words, aimed at
stoking bigotry among white voters.

While McCain and the other Neanderthals in the Republican Party can't get
away with calling Obama a criminal or a welfare cheat, they're using new
terms to get the point across--he's Black, he's urban, and he's out of step
with the "rest of us." And the us, of course, are "hard-working white
Americans," as Hillary Clinton put it toward the end of her failed bid to
win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Last month's Republican National Convention was a cesspool of thinly veiled
racist invective aimed at Obama. Sarah Palin, the Republicans' vice
presidential candidate, sneered about Obama's history as a community
organizer. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise derided Obama
for his work "on the South Side of Chicago."

A few hours before McCain gave his acceptance speech, Republican bigot Lynn
Westmoreland, a member of Congress from the former slave state of Georgia,
referred to Michelle and Barack Obama as "uppity," saying, "Just from what
little I've seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an
elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity." Given an
opportunity to clarify, Westmoreland said, "Yeah, uppity."

"As a native of the South," said political commentator David Gergen, "I can
tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for,
'He's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is
from a Southern background."

For those who have never heard of Westmoreland, all you really need to know
is that in 2006, he and 32 of his other Southern white brethren voted
against renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which, among other things,
guarantees Blacks the right to vote.

The hypocrisy of white Republicans--whose party openly represents the
interests of the wealthy and the most conservative wing of American
capitalism--calling Obama "uppity" and "elitist" would be funny if their
actions weren't helping to legitimize cruder forms of racism that have
emerged during the course of this never-ending election.

A few days ago, at a conservative convention where Newt Gingrich and Mitt
Romney were featured speakers--both McCain and Palin were invited, but sent
their regrets--one stand did a booming business selling "Obama Waffles" mix
for $10 a box.

The box was adorned with a picture of Obama with a big smile, huge lips and
bulging eyes--like something out of the antebellum South. On the back of the
box, Obama was pictured in a sombrero, alluding to his supposed plans to
"flood" the U.S. with "illegal aliens." And, of course, there was the
ubiquitous image of Obama in a turban.

The sellers chalked it up to political satire--and dared anyone to call them
bigoted.

* * * 

THE USE of racism in American politics isn't new, by any means, but the
methods for invoking it have changed.

In the 1968 election for president, Republican Richard Nixon crafted the
so-called "Southern Strategy" of making coded racist appeals to win white
votes.

The Southern Strategy was an acknowledgement that open anti-Black racism
would no longer be tolerated, now that African Americans' right to vote was
firmly established. But with the Democratic Party falling apart because of
its inability to contain the contradictions of being both the formal party
of civil rights in the North and the party of Jim Crow in the South, the
Southern Strategy was, above all, about winning the rural, white Southern
vote into the Republican sphere.

Attacking the Black movement as "criminal" became the centerpiece of this
strategy. Black political struggles, from civil rights to urban rebellions,
were accused of creating a growing sense of chaos, disorder and crime in
American cities. This was conveyed through perpetual references to "urban
crime" or "urban disorder." There were more banal appeals around "urban
problems," but the inference was clear--Blacks were the cause.

Nixon's cynical use of race was only the beginning. A succession of American
politicians--from both major parties--regularly invoked racist stereotypes
that conflated social problems found in all inner cities with Black life.
These, in turn, became the touchstone for all that was and remains wrong
with American society, according to the politicians: drugs, crime, welfare,
teen pregnancy, homeless and poverty.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan picked up Nixon's mantle by campaigning across
the South--he launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three
civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In office, Reagan regularly
invoked fictitious characters like "welfare queens" to justify his program
of cutting back on social programs.

Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, declared a war on drugs--which,
in reality, meant a war on young Black men. Bush used an unapologetically
racist ad--about Willie Horton, a Black man who was accused of a killing a
white woman while free on a prison work-release program--against opponent
Michael Dukakis, but the first politician to raise Horton was fellow
Democrat and future vice president Al Gore.

When he ran for president in 1992, Bill Clinton made fighting crime and
ending welfare big aspects of his campaign--both of which were used to
convey a message that he was not beholden to Black "special interests." The
most outrageous example of this was his public admonition of a Black female
rap artist--a strange target for a presidential candidate.

During the hotly contested election of 2000--the one that George W. Bush
eventually stole--both Bush and McCain, his main opponent for the Republican
nomination, jockeyed over the meaning of the Confederate Flag during the
South Carolina primary. Their pandering signaled their contempt for African
American voters and their desire to win the white, racist rural vote.

In the current election, it was the Clintons who unleashed the racist genie
from its bottle during the Democratic primaries, out of a sense of
desperation and entitlement when Hillary Clinton fell behind Obama. After
all, it was Hillary Clinton--she with a net worth of $34.9 million--who
first accused Obama of being an "elitist" who is "out of touch" with
"hardworking" people.

* * * 

THAT CLINTON'S strategy ultimately failed says quite a bit about the degree
to which the grip of racism on American society has loosened since Nixon's
Southern Strategy campaign 40 years ago. Millions of ordinary whites voted
for Obama, and he now stands on the verge of becoming the first African
American president of the U.S.--a country founded on slavery.

That said, racism remains an effective tool of division and distraction in
the hands of politicians who have no answers for the growing and profound
crises gripping the U.S.

Clinton's campaign did help narrow Obama's lead in the waning months of the
Democratic primaries. Clinton was able to prey on the anxieties, cynicism
and despair among many white workers who are frustrated and angry about
declining living standards and, in some cases, quick to blame immigrants and
Blacks.

McCain and the Republicans are set on using the same strategy. Thus, opinion
polls show that efforts at demonizing Obama as urban, elitist and "out of
touch" have had some success in convincing some white voters, who under
other circumstances would vote Democratic, to consider McCain. Plus, there's
also a small group of former Clinton supporters who refuse to vote for Obama
and threaten to join the McCain camp.

The irony is that Obama has gone out of his way to avoid being associated
with the issues of race and racism throughout the campaign. His rhetoric
about change has generated a lot of enthusiasm, but his actual political
positions belong to the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which has been
complicit in the re-legitimization of racism in American politics and
policies that have made living standards and conditions worse for millions
of African Americans, and working people generally.

Obama's silence has given the Republican creeps a free hand. Asked about
Lynn Westmoreland's comment that Obama was "uppity," his campaign denied
that race had anything to do with it. Questioned about the "Obama Waffles"
slur, Obama's campaign had "no comment."
Since Obama's historic and effective speech on race last spring, his
campaign has been quiet--unless it was to attack Black men on Father's Day
or denounce Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By remaining silent, Obama both
legitimizes media silence on these issues and simultaneously allows the
right to continue with the same garbage.

Obama is no doubt concerned that if he were to speak out against the
different expressions of racism from the Clintons or McCain and Palin, the
media would focus on this alone and bury anything else about his campaign.
He is frightened of being labeled by the media as an "angry Black man,"
running a campaign like Rev. Al Sharpton--in other words, one that isn't to
be taken seriously.

It is certainly true that the media have a long record of trivializing and
dismissing Black candidates and discussions of race in election campaigns.
But there are consequences to the course Obama has chosen.

First, Obama is the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, so it's
unlikely that his campaign will be treated dismissively at this point, no
matter what the past record of the media.

Second, Obama's silence means the smears will continue because there is no
political price to pay for those who make them. If the Republicans didn't
fear being seen as racist, then they would forgo the symbolism and code
words and go for outright slurs.

Finally, Obama's tepid response to campaign racism, combined with his
generally nebulous political message, which has moved to the right since he
locked up the nomination, is blunting the momentum that carried him through
the early primary season last winter.

If Obama were to devote even a small amount of time and energy to
challenging racism--rather than Sarah Palin's governing experience or
whether McCain knows how to send an e-mail--he would stand a better chance
of sending the Republicans back under the rocks they skulked out from. As it
is, his failure to make a stand leaves opportunities for the Republicans to
exploit--and shows that his promise to bring change is about rhetoric, not
reality.

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor writes for the Socialist Worker. 



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