What We've Learned This Year

We’ll save next week – our last blog of the year – for the much anticipated "reader response" blog. This week, we want to direct our attention to what we have learned with respect to race and political communication this year.

It’s been a busy one to be certain. We’ve offered you some 50 blogs since 2007 rolled in, each of them focusing on current issues involving the way language and power have intersected with race to shape the way we think about racial difference in America. We’re sometimes asked if it is difficult to come up with new topics each week. A glance through the high-salience topics we’ve tackled reveals the answer: we definitely do not have to dig deep in any given week to find issues worthy of our attention.

[Rather than hyperlink each blog, which would make the text difficult to read, we refer interested readers to the archive links to the right for access to individual blog entries.]

We started the year by reviewing the satirical website "Black People Love Us," noting that the use of racial topics in satire always runs the risk of misunderstanding when the joke isn’t realized and the text is read literally. Later in January, a Fox affiliate mistakenly used pictures of Barack Obama when reporting on a story about a sex offender. The month ended with two black coaches in the Super Bowl (which Tony Dungy and his Indianapolis Colts won).

February brought Joe Biden’s comments about Obama being clean and articulate, as well as 17-year-old Kiri Davis’s film replicating Kenneth Clark’s experiment from sixty years ago, both of which found that little black girls preferred playing with white dolls rather than dolls that looked like them. The month also brought forth what would be a recurring theme in the Democratic presidential nominations – is Barack Obama too black or not black enough? Finally, we commented on an event by College Republicans at New York University where the white students played border patrol agents to bring awareness to the issue of illegal immigration.

March came in like a lion and out like a lamb. We unveiled our differences about who should be able to use the n-word in a blog about New York City’s symbolic banning of the word. Little did we know that we’d be asked to develop those arguments more fully and present them before hundreds gathered at college events by the end of the year. Stephen waxed psychoanalytic about criticism of Obama’s financial dealings, and then we discussed Bill Richardson’s role as the first Hispanic presidential candidate in the running for a major party nomination. We tackled a complex web of "otherness" with respect to reports about polygamy, but finished the month giving President Bush some modest praise about his honoring of the Tuskegee Airmen from WWII.

In April, we wrote about racist comments by Newt Gingrich, Don Imus, Tommy Thompson and the Indiana Secretary of State. That month also brought us a public debate among the Democratic presidential candidates that featured a good deal of explicit and implicit racial language.

May started off with more racist comments, this time by Fox News commentator John Gibson. We discussed a report that found racial bias in National Basketball Association refereeing and a serious interview with Barack Obama that centered largely on race. We finished the month commenting on a Rolling Stone magazine feature about a gay white comic who takes the stage as a black woman named Shirley Q. Liquor.

And then came the summer. Oh, the summer! Topics ranged from five black high school students being denied diplomas because of rowdy behavior by their friends and family in the audience, Obama noting a "quiet riot" in African American culture, Obama Girl’s crush (which is getting a lot of milage in the year-end wrap-ups, by the way), the Obama campaign’s racist comments about Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Indian-American community, and Tavis Smiley’s All-American forum for the Democratic candidates. We dealt with the breaking story about Michael Vick’s ties to the dog fighting ring (for which he has recently been sentenced to nearly two years in prison), more banning of the n-word, and the "on the down low" phenomenon among black males who engage in homosexual sex acts in secret. To that end, we explored the complexities at the intersection of sexuality and race in 21st Century America. Football great Michael Irvin was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and Stephen wrestled with his own racism as he unpacked his distaste for the former Dallas Cowboy wide receiver. We stayed with popular culture by examining the demonizing of Barry Bonds and Elvis Presley’s racial legacy after the release of Lisa Marie Presley’s remake of "In the Ghetto," which features a duet with her father. Very few candidates showed up at a debate organized by American Indians, and we commented on the lack of attention paid (by us, as well as the candidates) to this racial minority group.

The weather started to cool by September, but the racial discourse did not. Black men were encouraged to "read a book," and leading Republican presidential candidates decided to skip Tavis Smiley’s All American forum for their Party’s hopefuls. In Chicago, there were suggestions of racism with respect to objections to the Children’s Museum moving to Grant Park, and Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly had dinner at a soul food restaurant in Harlem where the other patrons were very well behaved.

October brought more attention to the symbolic acts of bigotry around the country, as nooses and other items designed to intimidate African Americans were found in places from Jena, Louisiana to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Hempstead, New York. The Cherokee nation revoked citizenship of its African American members, and Louisiana elected its first non-white governor (Republican Bobby Jindal) since Reconstruction. We got involved in the racist bullying of a not-for-profit group aiming to shut down a diversity education program at the University of Delaware (we were subsequently called "douchebags" – more on that next week), and Dog the Bounty Hunter was caught on tape in a bigoted rant about his son’s black girlfriend. We closed November by reporting on a bill before Congress that would use language as a surrogate for national origin with respect to dictating which cases the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can pursue.

Finally, we discussed Republican scraps over immigration, Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement and subsequent campaigning for Barack Obama, hate crimes at Northern Illinois University, police brutality in Chicago, the housing crash, and, just last week, Cynthia McKinney’s decision to run for president in 2008 as a Green Party candidate.

In addition to scholarly meetings we attended on our own, we attended a number of important conferences together (and with RaceProject research assistants) this past year: National Communication Association in November, International Communication Association in May, Midwest Political Science Association in April, and the American Political Science Association over Labor Day weekend. On occasion in this space, we tried to offer a glimpse into the most cutting edge social science research on race and political communication when we found exciting work being done.

As we gear up for the presidential elections in 2008, we will continue to tirelessly work to bring you accessible commentary on issues of race, politics and language, informed by scholarly theory and empirical research. We wish to thank our loyal readers, our RSS feed and email subscribers, and those of you who took the time to comment on our various posts. As promised, we will reprise last year’s popular end-of-year blog featuring those responses.

Happy Holidays!