It's Time

Stephen will be blogging for the next four weeks from Princeton University, where he is teaching Campaigns and Elections for the Junior State of America summer school program.

Six attempts. There were six previous attempts to post this blog. The number of relevant stories as the week continued to unfold made it impossible to feel satisfied that we’d addressed what we needed to. At the bottom of this entry are links to a number of other stories that deserve our time and attention. There’s simply too much to cover.

Sunday’s Washington Post, however, provided the material that forced us to stop and think about what a truly unique time in our nation’s history we find ourselves. The time to have the most meaningful discussion of race relations in America is not only opportune, but is, we argue below, imperative. At the risk of sounding alarmist, we are at a juncture at which continual navel-gazing, avoidance, and shifting the burden will result in dire consequences for our democratic system. Here’s why.

There were two prominent stories in yesterday’s Post. The first reported the results of a new poll that shows three in ten Americans admit feelings of racial prejudice. There are always many ways to look at numbers, but this finding is nothing short of shocking. It is not shocking that 30% of Americans have racial bias – far more than that do. The number is alarming for two reasons.

First, it surprising that three in ten Americans recognize that they have racial prejudice. We certainly do not see numbers anywhere close to that in informal polling of our own students. Do three of every ten folks you talk to admit to racial prejudice? Given the culture of acceptance and tolerance that has characterized American conscious political culture over the past four decades, it is quite surprising that this many respondents were aware of their own biases.

Secondly, it is surprising that even if folks realize their own biases that they are willing to admit it to survey administrators, even anonymously. It has been very difficult to gain an accurate measure of “racism” (defined numerous ways), and social scientists have consistently assumed that the numbers generated by surveys were low. It is similar to the difficulty of ascertaining the persistence of sexually transmitted diseases without access to medical records. Folks just are reluctant to admit to that which they understand to be socially unacceptable.

The situation becomes dire as we examine the gap in perceptions of race relations between whites and blacks:

Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations "excellent" or "good," about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992.

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.

John Edwards has been often criticized for being divisive by noting that there are “two Americas,” but the more we acknowledge that perceptions of common circumstances between men and women, middle-class and poor, black and white, etc., the more we must admit that we are not living in one common America, no matter how much we wish to be.

What is not surprising are the results of a Post poll last month that found that nine in ten whites would be comfortable with the idea of a black president. (We should be surprised that one in ten admitted discomfort.) Yesterday’s Post story goes on to report, however, that more than half of whites called Obama a “risky” choice for president, while 2/3 saw McCain as a safe pick. While it would be foolish to dismiss the public’s familiarity with McCain, particularly when compared to Obama, it is also hard to imagine that there is not some “substitution” going on. That is, folks tend to evaluate consciously on criteria that are ostensibly unrelated to race, even though historically such characteristics are very much connected to racial stereotypes. A similar scenario exists with gender bias: women are not promoted as often as men to top corporate jobs because they lack characteristics of strong leadership – characteristics that are often associated with males. In other words: Obama is risky because he’s shifty and hates America, not because he’s black, but we “know” that blacks are untrustworthy and are angry at America because they haven’t “made it” at the same rate as whites.

Adding yet another twist to our concern is a corollary article that appeared in Sunday’s Post. Eli Saslow reports on the increased interest and membership in white supremacist groups in recent weeks (since Obama secured the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination).

"I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president."

Another supremacist activist said,

"I get nonstop e-mails and private message from new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected," said [Don] Black, a white power activist since the 1970s. "White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we've lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it's bringing them over to our side."

And yet another admitted the following:

"Our side does better when the public is being pressured, when gas prices are high, when housing is bad, when a black man might be president," said Ron Doggett, who runs a white power group called EURO in Richmond. "People start looking for solutions and changes, and we offer radical changes to what's going on."

And what good is an article on white supremacy and politics without a quote from David Duke?

"One person put it this way: Obama for president paves the way for David Duke as president," said Duke, who ran for president in 1988, received less than 1 percent of the vote and has since spent much of his time in Europe. "This is finally going to make whites begin to realize it's a necessity to stick up for their own heritage, and that's going to make them turn to people like me. We're the next logical step."

So here is how we see it:

• Americans who consciously subscribe to racial equality have long ignored their subconscious racial bias because they are overtly egalitarian (e.g., have black friends, don’t use the n-word, etc.).

• Barack Obama’s candidacy has capitalized on this “norm of racial equality” (see Tali Mendelberg’s work) to form a coalition of progressive whites and African Americans at a time when most Americans are ready for “change.”

• Obama’s nomination will signal to whites who have resisted arguments about continuing systemic oppression against blacks that they were right all along. If black folks just worked harder, such folks will reason, they could achieve anything whites could achieve; and Obama’s nomination is proof of it. (They tried to point this out in the 1980s when the Huxtables from Bill Cosby’s popular television show had “made it!” And Colin Powell? Condoleeza Rice? Clarence Thomas? Hello?! Pay attention, people!!).

• This realization of achieved racial equality will serve to attract more whites to the idea that racial minorities are unfairly advantaged in America by a government that ignores the needs of whites. Under such circumstances (i.e., perceived equal political footing amongst whites and blacks), more whites will feel justified in fighting for “their” rights like black leaders have been doing.

At the end of last week, Barack Obama predicted in a speech that Republicans would use his race against him in the campaign:

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me: 'He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"'

Several news organizations questioned whether he had “crossed the line” by mentioning this (CNN’s Anderson Cooper, for instance). In truth, it has already been shown that Obama’s opponents (of both parties) are willing to draw upon racial prejudices to try to defeat him. His attempt to inoculate against it was predicted by our research findings of congressional communication involving black candidates. (See Obama’s latest ad where he emphasizes being raised on values such as self-reliance and making no excuses, as well as other values that white Americans tend to not associate with African Americans.) He wants to head it off and call attention to it because doing so has been shown to minimize (or reverse) the effects of implicitly racist messages.

As scholars dedicated to educating about power inequalities and the way our use of language can contribute to or challenge those differences, we see a moment in time that we cannot let pass. We are at a very crucial crossroads – not the first and probably not the last, but crucial nonetheless.

In addition to our scholarly work together, we are each embarking on more accessible projects separately to seize this moment and engage as many people as possible in honest and meaningful dialogue about race. We will be available throughout the fall to speak at colleges and universities (as we have for several years), civic group meetings and wherever else we are invited. We will continue to contribute to the broader discussion in this space, and we will continue to make ourselves available to media to facilitate discussions as events unfold.

If you agree (and we recognize that all of our readers do not – we are grateful for your attention, as well), we encourage you to share this blog and others that address similar topics, read as much as you can by the folks who comprise our scholarly base (Dyson, West, hooks, Patricia Williams, etc.), and talk to as many folks as you can.

This is not about electing Barack Obama. That’s a political decision that revolves around more than race. Our immediate concern is to take advantage of this crucial time in our national discourse to be clear about what we are really dealing with in America. When we launched The Project on Race in Political Communication in the summer of 2001, we did not expect to be faced with such a scenario so quickly. Win or lose, Obama’s run has provided us with this opportunity. The time is right to do our part.



Here are the other stories that deserve our attention. We are sorry that we are unavailable to discuss them all, but we encourage you to post your comments about any of them below.

Obama volunteers ban Muslim women from behind-the-podium position

In a testament to the reality that Obama’s campaign has to deal with in terms of people either believing he is a Muslim publicly or secretly, staffers engaged in the inexcusable last week in Detroit, keeping two women wearing the traditional hijab head scarf from sitting behind the podium, since folks in those positions often appear in media clips of the candidate’s speech. This is certainly not behavior befitting of a campaign that expects to be representative of all Americans, including minority groups.

In a related story, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Jewish group in Florida to disregard rumors that Obama is Muslim.

New York Mets baseball team manager Willie Randolph fired in the middle of the night

Besides the fact that Randolph is black, this firing wouldn’t warrant attention in our blog. However, last month, Randolph gave an interview where he wondered aloud whether he was being treated differently by the Mets organization because he is black. See interesting discussion on this issue by William Rhoden, JonGee and “The East Coast Bias.”

Obama eschews public financing

Most Americans probably didn’t even realize that general election campaigns for president have been fully funded by tax money since the 1970s post-Watergate campaign finance reform laws were enacted. Obama will be the first major party candidate to elect to raise his own money (and therefore not be subject to spending limits for the period between the Democratic National Convention and the general election in November). Those who have pushed for more equality in elections have long advocated public funding as a remedy to the interest-group-soaked fundraising that takes place in other campaigns and in presidential nominating contests. For them, Obama’s decision will be of great disappointment. For his part, Obama claimed that the public financing system put him at a disadvantage because Republicans were better poised to take advantage of loopholes in the existing law (that John McCain famously co-wrote and pushed through Congress).

Sock Obama monkey doll gets sacked

Stephen’s colleague, psychologist Heather Coon, alerted us to a short-lived controversy by a Utah-based company that planned to manufacture sock monkey dolls in support of Obama’s candidacy. After a day or so of vociferous complaints, the company scrapped the plans and offered a curious apology, claiming that they were too naïve to know that there was any history of linking Africans and African Americans to monkeys as a source of dehumanization. Though the original page is down, you can read Andrew Sullivan’s pre-apology blog on the subject (which includes a picture of the doll), as well as an interesting article by Kyle E. Moore on racial iconography generally.