Obama's Stock: Financial Misdealings a Persistent Criticism of African American Candidates

This week, we sent out an electronic press release addressing the racial undercurrents of the questions that have been surfacing around Barack Obama’s financial dealings. We wanted to use this space to share our thoughts on that with you, as well as to elaborate on them.

This past Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Obama purchased stock in companies that stood to benefit from Obama’s policy advocacy in the U.S. Senate. While such financial dealings should certainly be scrutinized, we cannot ignore that such allegations have been prominent among criticisms of black candidates for other offices in the past. And we know why.

Part of the negative racial stereotype of black Americans is that they are untrustworthy, shady, and predisposed to poverty as a result of their laziness. This is rooted in the “American dream” myth that those who succeed in this country are those who work the hardest. Since blacks are expected to fulfill that role in society, those who have money are assumed to have come by it in ways that are less-than-legitimate. If you see a young black man driving a Mercedes and question how he could afford it (but wouldn’t question why a white man of the same age could), you know what we mean.

But admission of such unequal thinking is very uncomfortable because it violates our consciously held and articulated values of egalitarianism. So we relieve the dissonance by denying that we have such racial prejudices, explaining them away by other means (including “confirmation bias,” where we register that which confirms our assumptions and dismiss contrary information as anomalous), or confront and adjust our expectations and deal with them. Social scientists Lang and Lang (1984), in explaining “pluralistic ignorance,” which is the misperceptions citizens have about what others believe, give this as an example: “Typical of pluralistic ignorance has been the unwillingness of many whites to acknowledge their own antiblack prejudice, which they believe to contradict an accepted cultural ideal” (216). That is, we believe that any negative predispositions we have are unique to us, and therefore try to burry them deep within ourselves rather than confront them. So we can allow ourselves to believe that questioning Obama’s character as a result of these allegations is completely race-neutral; we’d be concerned if any candidate had engaged in such practices.

But we are not color blind; we know that Obama is black, and we have been socialized to accept stereotypes about blacks that are confirmed by this new information. Such denial is deeply-rooted in our (humans’) beliefs of self-control and self-determination. We refuse to feel powerless and admit that we can be driven by that which we cannot readily identify (let alone control).

Stephen A. Mitchell (2002) nicely summarizes how Freud explained the resistance to his discoveries about the unconscious mind:

“Sigmund Freud once attempted to account for the widespread resistance to his prodigious contributions to Western culture by positioning his discovery of the unconscious as the third of three powerful blows to human narcissism. The first, the cosmological blow, was the Copernican revolution. If the earth orbits around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth, we are faced with the hard truth that human beings are not located at the physical center of the universe, not at its core, not at its navel. Rather, we ourselves revolve in orbit around another center. The second, the biological blow, was the Darwinian revolution. If we humans have evolved from other animal species, we are faced with the hard truth that human beings were not uniquely created. We were not instantaneously designed, of a piece, by divine inspiration, but rather emerged slowly, over vast periods of time, in fits and starts, as life responded to changing circumstances.

“His discovery of the unconscious, Freud reasoned, was the third and most devastating assault, a psychological blow, to our estimation of our own importance. Prior to Freud’s revelations, we humans . . . could at least claim self-governance. But, Freud demonstrated, the human being is not even “master in his [or her] own house”: we do not even run our own minds. . . . Our conscious experience is merely the tip of an immense iceberg of unconscious mental processes that really shape, unbeknownst to us, silently, impenetrably, and inexorably, our motives, our values, our actions (21-22).

We have, previously in this space, made reference to Tali Mendelberg’s (2001) notion of the “norm of racial equality.” Consciously, we know how we should feel about racial equality. Most often, we convince ourselves that we do feel that way to resolve our cognitive dissonance. That does not, however, change the reality of what lies beneth our consciousness. This is confirmed through observations of poll results overestimating support for black candidates. Besides what might be considered “the ultimate question” (electoral support), though, we have to consider what other attitudes about black candidates are affected by stereotypes that reside outside of our consciousness – attitudes that lead to, among other things, electoral support (or lack thereof).

We have analyzed hundreds of political advertisements by candidates running against African Americans over the past two decades, and have found that insinuations of financial misdealings appear more than any other form of attack or criticism.

Allegations of financial misdealings can be characterized on a scale ranging from “oversights” to “criminal,” but because of the long-standing stereotypes about African Americans, black candidates are more likely to be assumed to be on the latter side of that continuum. Here are a few examples of accusations that have been made against African American candidates by their opponents:

* Congressman William Jefferson in his 2006 re-election campaign – accused of taking bribes;

* Former Congressman J.C. Watts during each of his congressional campaigns in 1994, 1996, and 1998 – accused of bouncing checks, taking bribes and receiving payment from work not done;

* Former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, during her failed 1998 re-election campaign – accused of illegally using campaign funds to pay for a lavish lifestyle;

* Congresswoman Corrine Brown, during her 1992 campaign – accused of hiring relatives who benefited financially from the government dole;

* Former Congressman Alan Wheat, during his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1994 – accused of bouncing checks; and

* Harvey Gantt, during his 1996 bid for the U.S. Senate – accused of benefiting from his minority status in the quick resale of a television station he purchased.

We are not taking issue with the accuracy of these claims, but rather the assumptions that inherently drive our evaluation of black candidates who are accuses as opposed to white candidates. Further, the frequency with which these types of allegations are lodged against black candidates illustrate a pattern of prejudice that dates back to far before black candidates were seeking the presidency. With an election at this level of salience, though, we are not surprised to see such an attack – even this early on.