Color Lines & Immigrant Games at NYU

When I learned earlier this week that the College Republicans at New York University were planning a “Find the Illegal Immigrant” event - meant, they say, to “bring attention to the issue of immigration,” – my first reaction was, “How will the students-playing-border patrol-agents know who the immigrant is, and how will people know who these play patrollers are, for that matter?” It took me about 2 seconds to answer my own question – the patrollers will be white, the immigrant, some shade of light brown to black.

Coincidentally, I happened to show up for part of the event. I’d later learned that the play Republican border patrol were to wear name tags reading INS. And, I never did see who the lucky illegal immigrant was, to confirm my suspicions. Nevertheless the color line – those white on one side, and those dawning darker skin tones on the other – was clearly evident when you looked at the crowd of participants: Those supporting the College Republican’s gimmick, largely white, the protesters, largely non-white. The participation of members of the former group was guided by racist premises, while those in the latter were – and if the youth of today are indeed our future, will continue to be – the unfortunate victims of this racist game, played by those in power and those duped by it.

I should hope that there is no explanation necessary about why the College Republicans’ shenanigan’s were overtly racist. As such, it contributes little to serious discussion and debate about U.S. immigration policy, aside from fueling the racist fears, prejudices and resentments of those who would presume (along with CNN’s Lou Dobbs) that “immigrant” and “illegal” are by necessity joined at the hip, or implicitly believe that today’s immigrants are more dangerous than yesteryear’s because the latter were overwhelmingly whiter than those of the former.

The stunt by NYU’s College Republicans is hardly original, nor is it exclusively Republican. Just last year, would-be elected representatives from the U.S. Senate on down to state legislators, and Republicans and Democrats alike, spent untold amounts of money filling the television airwaves with unfettered images of brown-skinned Mexican illegal aliens, undocumented workers, drug traffickers, and welfare recipients in countless television ads – images central to the political advertising and rhetorical appeals of candidates across the country hoping to capitalize on the inciting racial imagery to gain political support.

Some used the staple trope of hordes of Mexicans jumping a wall at the border, while others used little white girls to showcase the threat posed to their safety by illegal (mainly Mexican) immigrants. And others just came right out and said in no uncertain terms that these black and brown “illegal” immigrants were stealing our jobs, raping our women, and killing our children with the drugs they incessantly traffic.

So, what is quite apparent about the group of students who spearheaded, participated in, or otherwise supported the College Republican event, is that they simply know how to blindly follow the lead of their political elders – right into the deep, dark, murky pit of racism and prejudice that continues to pervade almost every aspect of American society. If they hope to truly be leaders one day, one would hope that they could somehow dispense with the fear and hate that fuels their ideas and choice of political strategies, and change the nature of this debate in a way that many of their own political leaders can’t seem to do.

Note: Charlton McIlwain is the sole author of these comments. Though I'm sure Stephen would agree with me, he did not read this before it was posted.

Barack Obama: Way Too Black but Not Nearly Black Enough

This week (last Saturday), U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) surprised no one by officially announcing that he would seek his party’s nomination to run for president of the United States next year. As the first black presidential candidate branded as “viable” by the mainstream media, it is also not unexpected that much of the discussion this week centered on whether it was more likely for a black man or a white woman (i.e., U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY) to be elected president.

What many might have found surprising is the rather widespread discussion of how much support Obama has in the black community. We aren’t surprised one bit. This controversy centers on two axes.

On the one hand, whites generally perceive African Americans as a monolithic voting bloc. While it is true that black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, such support has been eroding for the past decade. One illustration of this is the slate of very strong black Republican candidates for high-profile statewide offices last year. But this assumption also rests largely on the tacit racist belief that blacks are less sophisticated voters than whites, and that no matter what a candidate’s position on issues or other qualifications, black voters will be drawn to black candidates by virtue of the commonality of their skin color. This is no more true than an assumption that women tend to vote for women candidates based primarily on their gender, which research has shown not to be the case at all.

The other element of this issue is more complicated, but something that our research has revealed to be increasingly common over the past five years. As more black candidates move through the ranks of local and state government and become legitimate contenders for higher positions, black candidates are running against one another, often in districts that are majority black or majority-minority. What we have observed is that when this happens, particularly if there is a generational difference between the candidates, some of the campaign rhetoric centers on what we have labeled “an appeal to African American authenticity.” That is, to compete for black votes, one candidate (usually the older one) will argue that he or she is blacker than the other candidate. This appeal varies from skin tone (literally blacker) to lived experience (the older candidate usually makes references to fighting during the height of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s) to education (particularly if one candidate was educated at an historically black college or a state school and the other attended an Ivy League school).

We saw these types of appeals in 2002 and 2004 in Alabama’s 7th Congressional District race between Artur Davis and Earl Hilliard; in Georgia’s 4th Congressional District race between Cynthia McKinney and Denise Majette in 2002; and in the 2000 and 2004 Newark mayoral races between Corey Booker and Sharpe James (see the excellent film Street Fight for documentation of this contest). In fact, Obama’s failed 2002 Congressional bid to replace incumbent Bobby Rush included suggestions of Obama’s lack of authenticity.

Obama’s perceived authenticity runs even deeper than his light skin (due to the fact that his mother was white) and his Ivy League education. Since his father was from Kenya and therefore is not the descendent of slaves, some have claimed that Obama does not have the right to claim to be African American (see Stephen Colbert’s interview with one of those folks here).

So, as we predicted in our December 1, 2006 blog, Obama has an uphill battle that is rooted in race, but not always in the ways we traditionally think of it. Many black leaders have long-standing associations with the Clinton family stemming back to the early 1990s, and such allegiances will be uncomfortable to sever, even if those leaders wish to shift support, which is certainly not a given even though there is a viable black candidate now in the race.


Read Some Other Stories About Black support for Obama at/in:

NPR
Time Magazine
My Direct Democracy
Black People Speak
Philadelphia Star Telegram
News Max

Caliendo & McIlwain Contribute to News Stories About Obama, Race & the Presidential Election

Watch Stephen's remarks this morning on Chicago's CBS News

Read Charlton's remarks in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (Doll)!

17-year-old high school student Kiri Davis has produced a seven-minute documentary that is leaving audiences scratching their collective heads. She has replicated Kenneth Clark’s famous experiment from the 1940s by asking young African American children in New York City to select from two dolls that are identical except for their race. Overwhelmingly, like in the first experiment, children chose the white doll to play with, identified the white doll as the “nice” doll, and correctly noted that the black doll looked more like themselves.

These findings are important for several reasons.

First, they demonstrate that the original study’s results are not a function of “old” racist attitudes (that is, openly bigoted attitudes). We are clearly not “past all of that,” as many, if not most, white Americans believe. The revelation that at our core we are not more progressive than past generations is an important illustration of the pervasiveness of a seemingly (to whites) invisible undercurrent of white supremacy in our culture. Last month, ABC’s Primetime aired a replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous study of obedience to authority that was originally conducted in the 1960s. The new study revealed that current participants were just as likely to continue to punish (i.e., administer increasingly high levels of electronic shocks) to a stranger when urged to do so by an authority figure (i.e., a researcher in a white lab coat). As if we needed proof that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident after what’s happening in the Sudan or in Rwanda in 1994, this is powerful evidence of our ability to be persuaded to act against our conscious desires and interests – an ability that many would have liked to ascribe to a previous generation or a previous culture of obedience.

Second, the findings illustrate that combating racism will take much more than changing the hearts and minds of white folks so that they are more accepting of and less prejudicial toward people of color. When we reduce racism to individual-level hatred of those of another race, we ignore the real power of its curse – a power revealed in this young student’s replication of an important social experiment. Racism fosters white supremacist feelings in all of the people of a culture in which it operates. It does NOT simply cause people of different races to judge each other harshly.

That’s bigotry, and that’s a horrible thing, as well. But we can get past that, and most of us have. But it is the very invisibility of the persistent enculturation of racist values into people of all colors that is most dangerous. The black children in this experiment did not choose as “nice” the doll that they admit did not look like them because they have been called the n-word by white people. They did not decide to play with the white baby because a mean old white guy refused to give their parents a loan for a new home. They did not learn self-loathing because of peers telling them explicitly that white is good and black is bad. While too many of these things still happen, they happen far less frequently than they did when the original experiment was conducted in the 1940s.

So why the same results? Because we have only been addressing the symptoms of racism and ignoring and/or wishing away the root causes. The actor/comic D.L. Hughely used an excellent analogy in response to Senator Joe Biden’s remarks about Barack Obama (see last week’s blog for more on that issue): “It’s like weight loss. The last few pounds are the hardest to get rid of. It’s the last vestiges of racism that are hard to get rid of.” The last vestiges are not the few Archie Bunkers running around; the last vestiges are the parts of racism that white folks would rather not consider, but Davis’s film forces us to confront them.

It’s ironic that a study about babies taught us how deeply ingrained racism was sixty years ago, and a young girl who is only a decade older than the children she interviewed turns out to offer one of the strongest reminders to date that we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think we have.


Watch “A Girl Like Me”

The Year’s First “Non-Racist”: Senator Joe Biden

We went a whole month into 2007 without someone making a notable racist statement in public, claim that it was a mistake, and have others run to his or her defense claiming that it was clearly not the intent of the speaker to offend. Alas, Joe Biden comes to the rescue and gives us something to blog about (apologies to Bonnie Raitt).

As has been widely reported, Biden was quoted in an interview with the New York Observer as saying the following about fellow U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who is black: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Biden apparently called Obama to apologize, whereupon Obama told him not to worry about it. Obama later told reporters that there are much more important public policy issues to be discussing. But he was clear to point out in a written statement that even if Biden’s remarks did not personally offend him, they are historically inaccurate: “African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”

Well, we’re not sure that NOONE would call those candidates inarticulate (in fact, we’re betting someone posts a response on this blog arguing this point), but it was an important clarification. This, along with the assumptions about Africans Americans in general, is what we should be concerned about. Instead, much of the discussion is focused on the suggestion that most black candidates are not “clean.” It is clear to us that Biden was not referring to bodily cleanliness, but rather absence of scandal or character questions. This is not simply a matter of intent, but a misunderstanding of the way he was using a word that has more than one meaning.

But ironically, it is the “intent” factor that has been used to defend Biden. (Obama certainly bought into this, at least publicly.) And on ABC’s talk show The View on Thursday morning, liberal and conservative roles reversed, as Rosie O’Donnell argued that there were not “racist overtones” in Biden’s remarks, and Barbara Walters and Joy Behar reminded the viewers of Biden’s position on civil rights. After all, he clearly didn’t MEAN to offend (see our post on intentional racism). The token conservative host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, was (uncharacteristically) the only voice of reason during this discussion, though she likely was coming from a partisan angle. But while she chastised Biden for making the comments, she missed the mark, as well, centering discussion on how he should be more careful when he speaks.

When Trent Lott made comments that were racist in nature, he got (appropriately) attacked by Hollywood liberals, but they are bending over backwards to explain away comments made by a Democrat that are equally rooted in racism. The “clean” comment aside, Biden’s remarks are illustrative of institutionalized racism. They rest on the assumption that most African American (presidential) candidates are not articulate, bright, nice looking or without questions about their character. Since there have only been a handful of such candidates, the extrapolation is unwise on its face. The generalization was subconsciously justified because of Biden’s (and all of our) deeply-rooted preconceptions about black Americans in general.

The very characteristics he notes are contrary to widely disseminated and tacitly accepted negative stereotypes about blacks. Storybooks are fantasy. To claim that Obama’s possession of these characteristics is “storybook” is to suggest that it is almost unthinkable that there could be a black candidate like Obama. Why the big surprise? Because we don’t expect black folks to be like this, and we don’t expect that because most of what we’ve been socialized to believe about black Americans undermines their ability to be any, let alone all, of those things.

“Attractive”: Traditional standards of beauty rest primarily on characteristics most common to those of European decent.

“Bright”: The well-noted disadvantages in the educational system in this country are tied tightly to racial segregation in neighborhoods and disproportional poverty in black communities (affirmative action programs notwithstanding).

“Articulate”: Black dialect is considered to be non-standard English – not merely “different” such as a Boston accent or a Minnesota accent, but normatively less desirable.

“Clean”: The myth of Africans American as being untrustworthy has been documented throughout history; it’s connotations are criminal in nature and thus to point it out signifies the standard stereotype of criminality, shadiness, etc.

In short, Biden is racist like the rest of us. His intent is irrelevant to the discussion we should be having. Would it be worse if he intended to offend? That would make him a bigoted jackass, but we do not agree that being a bigoted jackass is “worse” than the pervasive undercurrents of racism that run throughout our culture on a daily basis.

Joe Biden’s statements have very little to do with him as a person and everything to do with how racism still matters in our culture. Whether Biden is a racist or not is irrelevant. He is. Whether he is a bigot or not is also irrelevant. His record suggests that he clearly is not (and here is where these comments are distinct from those made by Trent Lott). What really matters is why this keeps happening (Michael Richards’s comments were only a few months back, remember) and why the two of us keep having to remind the mainstream media that they are ignoring the real issues. Is anyone out there?!