Conservatives and Civil Rights Redux

We are very excited about the blog THIS WEEK. After our discussion of William Voegeli's excellent Wall Street Journal piece two weeks ago, we engaged in a discussion with Dr. Voegeli via email. We all agreed to reprint that exchange here for the purposes of stimulating additional dialogue. Though Dr. Voegeli did not have time to write a formal response to our response to his response (dizzy yet?), we leave open the invitation for him to do so in the comments section below. Further, we very much encourage you to also join in the discussion.

The following is the text of the email exchange with no changes except the inclusion of hyperlinks to additional material where we feel it might be helpful to you, the reader. We want to thank Dr. Voegeli for his willingness to engage us with this important topic and for agreeing to share the conversation in this space; we all three agreed that it is a great "teaching moment."

Before reading further, please take a few moments to read Dr. Voegeli's article and our blog about it. The following will be much more meaningful in the context of the original WSJ.com article, as well as our treatment of it.


Dr. Caliendo and Dr. McIlwain:

Thank you for bringing my article on civil rights and the conservative movement to the attention of the readers of “This Week in Race.” I appreciate, as well, the compliments and attention you paid to it. I’m guessing you won’t mind if I respond to some of the points you raised.

I should begin by saying that I haven’t read Echo Chamber, so when you discuss my article in the context of that book’s argument, everything I know about that context is based on your description of it. If reading the book invalidates anything I say here, I will, naturally, revise my positions.

As I understand your reading of it, Echo Chamber argues that conservatives further their agenda by “framing” the information the public receives and assesses. When I do read the book, the question I will want it to answer is whether this isn’t something that everyone in politics does. And, if so, what’s the big deal? Will Saletan’s book, Bearing Right, for example, argues that all the participants in the abortion debate try to frame the issue to their benefit. The choice frame competes against the life frame. In a democracy, the one that makes the most sense to the most people will prevail. If liberals feel that conservatives have been selling too many frames to too many voters, the thing to do is offer better frames that will have wider appeal, and explain clearly why the liberal frames are better. The thing not to do is complain, as Thomas Frank does, that wicked conservative rhetoricians cynically put forward arguments they don’t believe to ensnare stupid conservative voters who do believe them.

According to your analysis of my article, there is a conservative frame and a civil rights frame, each advancing distinctive and generally opposed ways to think about the requirements of racial justice in the U.S. The conservative frame is preoccupied with states’ rights and limiting government, the civil rights frame with correcting an American system that is “fundamentally stacked against people of color and those who are impoverished.” If I understand correctly, you think my essay was in some ways an analysis of how the conservative frame fails to appreciate the more compelling and admirable assertions of the civil rights frame, and in other ways was an example of that failure.

I agree with that argument to this extent: I am a conservative who thinks the conservatives were fundamentally wrong and civil rights activists fundamentally correct on the questions about which they disagreed from 1955 to 1965. At the same time, I think the conservative framework is, in general, better than all the alternatives to it for helping Americans to govern ourselves satisfactorily. Clearly, there is some tension between these two propositions. Your analysis of my essay welcomes its criticism of the way conservatives responded to the civil rights movement, but criticizes it for not resolving the tension I’ve described in the obvious way: by admitting that conservatism is essentially wrong, if not evil.

You won’t be surprised that I’ll decline that invitation, and you will be relieved that I won’t offer a full explanation for why I am (still, after the failings I describe in my essay) a conservative. To be as brief as possible, I agree with George Will that liberals think the point of politics is to make the world a better place, while conservatives think the point is to keep it from becoming worse. In the context of domestic American politics, the way things can get worse that worries conservatives the most is when social reformers become so convinced of the necessity and superiority of their plans that they become quite comfortable with the government’s using its inherent monopoly on legal physical force to compel other people to fall in line with their vision.

This was the thought that led me to write that conservatism came to grief over civil rights because it had no starting point for ending Jim Crow, while liberalism came to grief because it had no stopping point after Jim Crow had been defeated. I’m thinking about busing, for example, and specifically about the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley. By a vote of 5-to-4 the Court rejected the mad scientist scheme, devised by a federal district court at the behest of civil rights plaintiffs and approved at the appellate level, to bus school children all over the Detroit metropolitan area - the city plus 53 suburban school districts - in order to achieve racial balance. Had such liberal heroes as William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall been able to find one more vote, the plan would have been upheld and conservative justices like William Rehnquist and Warren Burger would have been the dissenters.

Perhaps you think busing was a fine idea, that it’s a shame the Milliken decision prevented it from being extended to entire metropolitan areas, that conservatives (and whites generally) who opposed busing were, yet again, “privileging the values of individualism and states’ rights over values of equality and (social) justice by buying into myths and stereotypes about people of color.” But the question about the absence of a liberal stopping point will not go away. Bill Clinton was aware of it in his “mend it, don’t end it” speech in 1995, saying that affirmative action “should not go on forever” and “should be retired when its job is done.” It’s clear, however, that the refusal of its advocates to state clearly what it would mean for its job to be done – or what it would mean for an affirmative action plan to go too far and violate rights of citizens who aren’t part of any minority group and whose well-being doesn’t figure into any scheme of social justice, but who deserve, simply and merely as citizens, to have those rights respected – guarantees that affirmative action will be retired only because of the victories of opponents like Ward Connerly.

Let me note, in closing, that I dispute your interpretation of my quotation of the Ta-Nehisi Coates article on Bill Cosby. I was making the same point that Coates made: black voters have entirely plausible reasons for voting Democratic, even those black voters whose worldviews are, in important respects, conservative. Thus, it was untrue and unfair for you to say that I was implicitly criticizing black voters by making the inherently racist assertion that they are “so unsophisticated that they vote against their interests.” (Do you think, by the way, that Thomas Frank was in any way bigoted, or simply condescending, for explicitly making the same generalization about white, working-class voters?)

Secondly, you misconstrue my “swipe at the social science” used in the 1954 Brown decision. I was not trying to evaluate the Clark doll experiment, but to argue that Supreme Court justices lack the capacity to do so, and shouldn’t have tried. It’s an argument the historian James Patterson, no one’s idea of a conservative ideologue, made in Grand Expectations, where he said that Clark’s research was “dubious and subject to different interpretations. Black children attending desegregated schools in the North, for instance, seemed to have lower self-esteem, as Clark defined it, than black children in segregated schools. The fact of the matter was that in 1954 there simply did not exist sufficient research that could ‘prove’ whether any particular racial mix in schools was superior – or in what ways – to any other. The Court would have done better to avoid socio-psychological speculation, which opened it to criticism.” The best way for the Court to have avoided that criticism would have been to overturn Plessy by embracing the “color-blind Constitution” Justice Harlan’s dissent called for.

Best regards,

Bill Voegeli
Claremont, CA


Dr. Voegeli,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply to our blog. We don't at all mind that you responded; to the contrary, we'd like to include this exchange in a future blog, if you agree to do so. We'll be happy to extend you an invitation to write the final entry if you wish to respond to what we write below.

First, we want to be clear that our blog focuses on race, politics and language, so our treatment of Jamieson and Cappella's Echo Chamber was less designed to be a review of the full volume as it was intended to situate your essay in the context of its discussion of the Trent Lott situation, which they use as an illustration of their larger point in chapter 2. Their thesis is not simply that conservatives frame information to further their political agendas. You are absolutely right that everyone does that. The point of their book is to show the relationship between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and Fox News television broadcasts. They discuss framing and priming, but those comprise the theoretical basis for their research, not the thrust of the book. The close relationship of message framing and the potential effects it has on the audience is the primary contribution of this work. It is certainly true that conservative frames have been more effective than liberal frames in the past thirty years (at least). George Lakoff's 2004 book Don't Think of an Elephant speaks directly to that.

Second, we want to note that one of the premises upon which our work rests is that there is too much debate and not enough dialogue in politics today. In that spirit, we'd like to elaborate and, perhaps, clarify the points you raise, but we do not wish to persuade you that we're "correct." The mission of THIS WEEK IN RACE is to apply scholarship from the fields of political science and communication to current issues of race, politics and language. Our work is not value-neutral, of course; we are decidedly committed to racial equality and exposing the way language tacitly serves to perpetuate racial inequality. So while we strive for objectivity, we do not attempt to be neutral, nor do are we naive enough to believe that our own values do not inform our work.

So the criticism you make of Thomas Frank's claims about "wicked conservative rhetoricians cynically pu[ting] forward arguments they don't believe to ensnare stupid conservative voters who do believe them" is beyond our scope. Indeed, one of the things that we've argued consistently is that as social scientists, we are interested in the effects of language, not the intent of those who use it. Intent is often inferred (by our readers, as well as the broader community), but it's always speculative. We try to point out inconsistencies and poor logic by those who use racialized language, but we are not interested in "outing" bigots as much as we are in pointing out the inherent racism in all of us.

It is on this point that we are concerned that you may have taken offense to our point about our criticism of your use of the Coates quotation. TWIR readers will recognize that we use the term "racist" very purposefully. It refers to systemic racism, not individualized bigotry. Everyone who has been socialized in the United States is racist in a way that privileges whites. That "racism" is mostly subconscious, but it exists, and it exists for everyone, irrespective of skin color. This is why you will hear scholars claim that "black people can't be racist." Black people can certainly be bigoted, meaning that they have animosity toward whites or members of other racial groups, but racism is the internalized assumptions that we all posses about people of color, even as our conscious minds strive to counteract that socialization. In that context, what we perceived as your assumption that blacks are so unsophisticated that they vote against their own interest did, indeed, reflect your racism. You may, as some conservatives (like Sean Hannity do) argue that you are not racist. Lots of folks do because most of us do not consciously judge people negatively by the color of their skin. We will not try to convince you otherwise, but we will say that racism is like an affliction such as alcoholism or even cancer: until we recognize that it's there, we cannot treat it. We've long argued (alongside others) that an unfortunate legacy of Martin Luther King is that white civil-rights progressives agreed with him so much that they convinced themselves that they were no longer racist because they were not bigoted. It is largely that reason that racism (not bigotry) is still so prevalent today. We haven't dealt with it squarely. So, even though Coates is black, he very well can make racist statements based on his assumptions. That's the real revelatory power of the Clark experiments.

On that point, we may not have been as clear as we wished to be about the possibility that Clark's work did not necessary imply that segregation was the cause of the black children preferring the white dolls. We are in absolute agreement that such an inference was a stretch (at best). Our concern was your original sentence, which we took to implicitly criticize the study itself by characterizing the research as "problematic." We agree that it was problematic to use the results in the case the way it was used, but the study is not problematic -- it is an important indication of the way racism (as opposed to bigotry) works in America -- it affects all of us in a way that we do not usually even recognize, and it leads to what Dr. Cornel West argued in his 1993 book Race Matters is one of the largest problems facing black America: "too little self love" (he pairs this with "too much poverty"). We intended our discussion of the scholarly debate over footnote 11 in the Brown case to suggest that we were sensitive to the argument about employing Clark's work in this way, but we may have not been as clear as we should have.

We chose to highlight your essay because it is one of the few works by a conservative where the writer is not trying to explain away misunderstandings of racist policies or language. We appreciate that you are frank about the mistakes conservatives made with respect to civil rights. But you certainly are aware that you are unique in this respect. That's precisely why we invoked Jamieson and Cappella's chapter on the Lott incident. Rather than own his racism, Lott argued in his memoirs that he was misunderstood. After all, he asks us to understand, he doesn't use the n-word and he's had black friends, staffers and supporters. Again, he's making a fine argument that he's not a bigot, but that's not the same as not being racist. Further, the conservative media, while distancing themselves from Lott, didn't do as you do and argue that those policies were flawed -- instead, they turned the tables to argue that liberals were being hypocritical (which they were). From our position, it is this inability or unwillingness to embrace the way racism really works that is at the heart of the problem.

As committed as we are to racial equality, we must, by definition believe that "conservatism is essentially wrong" on the issue of civil rights. We wouldn't say "evil," because that implies intent, and we can't ascribe intent or speculate on motives (well, we can, but it's not useful or grounded in any way). So we want to make two points here: 1) we do not comment at all on conservatism writ large; we are focused on race, so in that context, we believe conservatism is wrong. 2) we do not come to this conclusion by a skewed perception of conservatism but by its history and current practices by adherents.

We were not aware of George Will's explanation of contemporary American ideology, but we find it to be accurate. So by that definition, "liberals think the point of politics is to make the world a better place, while conservatives think the point is to keep it from becoming worse." Inherently, those who are disadvantaged (the poor, the uneducated, women and racial minorities) will be less interested in maintaining the status quo as those who are in relative positions of advantage. "Worse" is relative, is it not? If one is homeless, how much worse can it get? If one is illiterate and living on minimum wage, how much worse can it get? It can always get worse, but the floor is a lot closer to folks in these situations than it is to you (presumably) and us. On the other hand, if one is advantaged, it is attractive to have the boat not be rocked because there is more to lose. For most middle-class Americans, the perception of their position (as a result of living beyond our means) allows us to view ourselves further up the socio-economic ladder, and thus less likely to support policies that would do anything other than "keep things from getting worse." If one accepts that the racial and economic inequality that exists in America today is unacceptable and not solely the fault of those who suffer the disadvantage, then keeping things from getting worse is not a viable option; we want things to get better.

Perhaps this is where we part ways. Part of the conservative position has been the reliance on a model of American democracy that stresses meritocracy and personal responsibility. Given an equal starting point, it would be hard to argue with these values. But it is clear that the starting point is not equal. There continues to be documented inequality with respect to income, wealth, education, incarceration, teen pregnancy, etc. There are two possible explanations for this: it is the fault of those who continue to make bad choices, or it is a systemic problem. (There is another argument -- a biological one -- as well, but so few subscribe to it that it's not worth mentioning here.) While individual choice is always a variable in one's social standing, bad choices by a wealthy teenager in a suburban town are less likely to have life-changing results as such choices by a person of color who lives in the inner city. Where a white kid's mom with connections might be able to plea down a DUI, a city kid relying on a public defender my lose his or her chance for financial aid to college. Further, meritocracy is a myth. For example, inner city schools are vastly underfunded compared to suburban schools. Conservatives argue that "you can't throw money at the problem," but while some suburban children take Advanced Placement classes and, therefore, can have a GPA above 4.0, the smartest kid in the school with no AP classes is bound by a maximum GPA of 4.0. Relying only on "merit" for college admission, then, is inherently disadvantaging persons in certain situations and advantaging others. Those sorts of examples rarely surface in affirmative action discussions amidst the "I knew a guy who was denied admission to college because he was white" stories.

In short, then, we don't have a policy position on busing, but we agree that it certainly didn't work. We disagree, however, that liberalism has (you said "had," referring to the Jim Crow era, to be fair) no stopping point. We're aware of no thoughtful advocates of affirmative action, to take but one example of a liberal position on civil rights, who believe it's a permanent fix for racial inequality. It has, however, helped to level the playing field (though there is clearly a long way to go). We agree with Justice O'Connor's position in her opinion in the U. of Michigan cases in 2003 that there should be a time when it is not needed, but that time is not now. Quotas were wrong, and we agree with their illegality. Giving a person of color points on an entrance equation is not denying a white person his or her civil rights, though; that person got "points" throughout his or her life that cannot be codified on an admission form. Very poor whites are not helped and often harmed by affirmative action. We concede that point for sure. That's unacceptable. Poverty in America is disproportionately black and brown, though, and even wealthy people of color face systemic disadvantages. In short, the "end point" of liberal positions on civil rights is when these situations no longer exist. The end point is when a white parent would just as soon have his or her child go to an inner city school than a suburban school because children in both schools have the same chance of gaining admission into a four-year college. The end point will be when persons of all races can choose where they want to live because income ranges are evenly distributed within racial groups. The end point will be when political figures' use of racial language is not effective.

We'll close, then, by noting that we were very critical of comments by Hillary Clinton and her surrogates during the primary campaign. We were critical of Joe Biden's comments about Obama being "articulate." We were critical of the Washington Democratic Party suggesting that an Italian-American opponent was attached to organized crime. Where we see language that plays on racial predispositions, we point it out. That's not only done by conservatives, but, as your essay so nicely points out, conservatives have been on the wrong side of this issue for a long time (RNC chair Ken Mehlman admitted as much in 2005). We hope that your work makes conservatives more likely to come forward and embrace those mistakes rather than pointing the finger at others or rationalizing them. If conservatives in the public sphere were as honest as you are, we would be satisfied that we are having a fair and open debate. If John McCain would say, "In my presidency, I would advocate policies that would keep things from getting worse in America," that would be refreshing. But we all know that he will not say that, even if he believes it (though maybe he's not a conservative in the Reagan form, so he may be a bad example). If conservative public figures are against judicial activism, they should denounce the Brown decision (it didn't integrate schools anyway), but they do not. They should address why white privilege (e.g., the AP courses) is acceptable, but affirmative action is not. We agree with you that "[i]n a democracy, the [frame] that makes the most sense to the most people will prevail." We have taken it upon ourselves to unpack those frames as they concern race, politics and language, and we appreciate your willingness to engage with us on the topic.

Best wishes,

Stephen and Charlton

Inside the “Echo Chamber” of Conservatives and Civil Rights

THIS WEEK, we seek to situate Professor William Voegeli’s excellent article (“Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement”) from The Wall Street Journal’s website in the context of Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella’s new book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford University Press).

Echo Chamber provides a thorough, theoretically-grounded and empirically supported (with a variety of social science methods and data) look into the interaction and effects of conservative media. Jamieson and Cappella specifically examine The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, conservative talk radio (Rush Limbaugh) and Fox News to reveal a pattern of (seemingly) organized messages that seek to undermine “mainstream” media and further conservative policy and electoral agendas. We strongly recommend the book (it’s on sale in hardback for $17 at Amazon.com!), which doe not focus solely or even primarily on race. But given the relevance of Voegeli’s article (which was published the same week as Echo Chamber) to race relations in America, we could not resist to discuss them together.

Voegeli presents a thoughtful, well-constructed article (that we also recommend highly) that was apparently stimulated by the death of William F. Buckley (and the subsequent commentary on his work) earlier in the year. The author puts forth a host of claims about how the conservative movement has made mistakes with respect to its positions and strategies with respect to civil rights in America. It’s difficult to disagree with many of the points, but we feel that he, like many others, misses a crucial aspect of the struggle for equal rights in America: the system is fundamentally stacked against people of color and those who are impoverished.

Central to conservatism in America has been two interrelated elements: states’ rights and keeping government out of individuals’ lives. The focus on states’ rights was, of course, a primary point of contention in both the Civil War (which revolved in a large part around the issue of slavery) and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (which largely revolved around state-based Jim Crow segregation laws). Likewise, as Voegeli points out, non-bigoted conservatives opposed much of the civil rights platforms of the mid-20th century because of their reliance on governmental (often federal-level) involvement. As Voegeli notes,
integration and black progress were welcomed [in the pages of Buckley’s National Review] when they were the result of private actions like the boycotts of segregated buses or lunch counters. . .
But the conservative movement “opposed the civil rights agenda when it called for or depended on ‘Big Government.’” Voegeli notes that the National Review spoke out in strong opposition to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) because it was an act of judicial activism (which offended their view of what the Framers intended for what Alexander Hamilton referred to as the “least dangerous branch” of government). Voegeli argues that conservatives in the early years of the Movement were not the only ones who did not jump whole-heartedly aboard the struggle:

One difference between Eisenhower-era liberals and conservatives is that the former kept their distance from the civil rights movement for practical reasons while the latter did so for principled ones. Democrats would imperil their chances for a majority in the Electoral College and Congress without the Solid South, a reality that constrained both FDR and JFK.

The accuracy of the electoral reality cannot be questioned, but trying to rehabilitate the image of some no-shows and not others is dubious and unwarranted. But it gets worse. Voegeli continues to explain that well-meaning conservatives’ hands were tied by their own commitment to ideological purism:

Conservatives opposed to racial discrimination, however, had few obvious ways to act on that belief without abandoning their long, twilight struggle to reconfine the federal government within its historically defined riverbanks after the New Deal had demolished the levees.

Besides the insensitivity of using a “broken levee” reference in an argument defending (in some aspects) those who sought to maintain a system that contributed to Hurrican Katrina’s wrath being centered heavily in poor, black neighborhoods in New Orleans, Voegeli tacitly accepts (but does not advocate) the privileging of 18th century decisions over 20th century values of equal rights. Political scientist John Zaller and colleagues have written about “ambivalence” in American citizens’ attitudes that occurs when core socialized values come into conflict with one another. When that happens, individuals need to resolve their cognitive dissonance in some way, privileging one value over the other (at least temporarily). We have argued in this space that conservatives have become comfortable privileging the values of individualism and states’ rights over values of equality and (social) justice by buying into myths and stereotypes about people of color. We do not argue, of course, that this process takes place consciously – in most cases, it does not.

In Echo Chamber, Jamieson and Cappella tackle this very issue. Using Trent Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party (Lott told Thurmond that the country would be better off if Thurmond, with his segregationist platform, would have been elected president in 1948), the authors explain how conservative media defend conservatism. First, they distanced themselves and the GOP from Lott’s comments. (24). After Lott apologized, the conservative media commented that the comments were indefensible (25). But after dismissing Lott as not indicative of conservative sentiment, Rush Limbaugh turned the tables to criticize the mainstream media who were criticizing Lott. Then, Fox News commentators began alleging that liberal leaders were hypocrites for not chastising their own when insensitive remarks were made. This led into an assault on the Democratic Party historically, and the championing of Republicans who advocated for civil rights.

As we see it, this is an example of conservatives wanting to have it both ways. Segregation WAS the conservative position in 1948. Conservatives HAVE perceived “all these problems” (Lott’s words) as being related to progressive programs designed to address racial inequality. Lott WAS a leader in the conservative movement, and therefore presumably was an authentic conservative. But when he spoke from his heart and violated the “norm of equality” (Mendelberg 2001), conservatives were unwilling to take the heat and stand by their man. If that’s not political opportunism, we’re not sure what is. So much for principled opposition.

Voegeli also directly addresses the Lott issue in his article. After noting that 99% of conservatives in the 21st century “would never praise segregation” and, in fact, largely would not “even realize that there is another 1% (emphasis in original),” Voegeli noted that the vast majority of modern conservatives “quietly abandoned the old complacency about racial discrimination, but never really repudiated it.” He notes that Buckley joined liberals in criticizing Lott’s attitudes of “nostalgia,” not just his comments. But Voegeli goes on to cite other conservatives and Buckley as they argued that Jim Crow was about states’ rights, not segregation:

The troubling incongruity [between conservatism and the triumph of the civil rights movement] is not conservatives’ initial tolerance of segregation for the sake of limited government, but the later, tacit admission that America did well to expand the purview of the federal government in order to end Jim Crow. Trent Lott had only to suggest lightly that relying on those means to secure that end was still regrettable to set off a stampede of conservatives to denounce him.

And so Voegeli puts his finger on the very problem with conservatism and racial equality: advocating a system that is inherently biased against some Americans while advantaging others can only result in sustained inequality, no matter how much lip service or sincere intent to end it is offered. As much as conservatives rail against “judicial activism” in the cases of gay marriage, few if any are open enough (or consistent enough) to denounce the Brown decision, for example. That decision, as we’ve noted recently, has not brought about equality in schools or elsewhere on the whole, but it did serve as a symbolic spark to a movement that needed access to power to achieve its goals.

On the contrary, however, Voegeli argues that

[t]he soundest reading of Buckley’s insistence on “organic” progress was that the only safe and legitimate path to those markedly difference sentiments was through incremental changes in attitudes in response to social rather than political pressures.

Voegeli notes that Buckley himself admitted that he was wrong about this when asked about it in 2004. Buckley said, “federal intervention was necessary.” Buckley’s original sentiments were in line with Justice Brown in the original Plessy decision that condoned “separate but equal,” as well as Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory strategy in the earliest years of the 20th century.

Finally, Voegeli takes a swipe at the social science that was an important part of the decision in the original Brown case. Specifically, he calls Kenneth Clark’s black and white dolls experiment (recently replicated) “problematic.” There is legitimate criticism about whether black children preferring white dolls was a result of segregation. In a very interesting exchange in the Harvard Law Review in 1987 (volume 100, No. 8), Philip Elman and Randall Kennedy spar over the history of the NAACP and school segregation cases. Addressing Professor Clark’s work in his reply to Kennedy, Elman reminds careful readers of footnote 11 in the Brown decision, which referenced social science research (including that of Clark). That note later became the topic of much discussion, as it was added by a clerk and not paid much attention to by the justices (including Earl Warren, who authored the decision).

But this is precisely the point we are making here. One can always find weaknesses in social science research. By its nature (involving humans), it will never be as definitive (even in the positivist tradition) as natural science research is widely (but not exclusively) perceived to be. Looking for airtight social science research on which to base results is yet another rationalization for not moving forward with policies to rectify social inequality. We are anxiously awaiting conservative criticism of Echo Chamber. Two of the most prominent and gifted social scientists of a generation will not escape the hole-poking criticism of those who are concerned that a systematic study documents the effects of a conservative media cartel.

The point, however, is that it should not even have had to take social science research to convince political actors in the 20th century (let alone today!) that something needed to be done to rectify racial injustice. The humanity is more important than the social science (or should be). Study after study has documented racial inequality in income, wealth, hiring, arrests and incarceration, capital punishment and education. How much more “evidence” is needed?

Voegeli implicitly criticizes black voters by citing an Atlantic Monthly piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charged that

a sizable portion of the black electorate consists of latent conservatives “who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention.” Invariably, however, the black American who feels this way “votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he [sic] feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him [sic].”

And herein lies the problem – reminiscent of Ralph Nader and Geraldine Ferraro – with arguments from Barack Obama’s detractors. The above quote (as Voegeli uses it – Coates was using it in a descriptive sense to discuss supporters of Bill Cosby's social commentary) suggests that 1) progressives prefer complaining (protesting) to “hard work” (presumably because they favor government handouts to the laziest of citizens), and 2) black voters are so unsophisticated that they vote against their interests because they don’t want to vote alongside bigots. TWIR readers will have no trouble identifying the inherent racism in such an assertion. African Americans may not vote Democrat out of “any love for abortion rights,” but rather out of the understanding that Democrats on the whole appear to be more attuned to rectifying racial and economic injustice than Republicans.

But the fact of the matter is that neither party in our two-party system is in a position to advocate for the sort of change that will bring about social justice quickly. Voegeli points out that Martin Luther King was a radical and not so ideologically different from Malcolm X as we tend to think. He’s right, of course (though some of us don’t feel as if this is a problem). He points out that affirmative action is an offshoot of a “by any means necessary” strategy that stems back to Malcolm and King. He correctly notes that affirmative action has given conservatives fodder for criticism by allowing them to position themselves as champions of “equality”:

Conservatives have been delighted by the chance, finally, to present themselves as the ones articulating a principled egalitarian argument on behalf of innocent people whose prospects in life were diminished when they were judged according to the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

This, of course, typically ignores the inherent systemic privilege of whites vis-à-vis people of color in America. And coming from a group that did not advocate such equality when it was legally occurring during Jim Crow – and that refuses to do so today, even as it stands up for “innocent” whites – leaves cries of principled adherent to core values ringing rather hollow. Voegeli notes the problem with affirmative action is that it fails to consider that “one employer’s. . . covert discrimination is another’s good-faith effort to hire and retain the best available workforce at market wages.”

This sounds wonderful, but the fact is that a system built on slavery and slowly altered to incorporate black Americans into that flawed system (avoiding systemic changes along the way) is bound to result in the hiring of a disproportionate amount of whites if left to “objective” measures of “the best available workforce.” What’s defines "the best?"

The most educated? Blacks lack access to a quality education in many areas as a result of a system that privileges schools in wealthier areas.

Experience? People of color are disproportionately denied access to experience because of inherent employer bias, as well as lack of educational training in most modern occupations.

Defining the meaning of key terms is what Jamieson and Cappella argue is most effective about conservative media. This occurs largely through the concept of “framing,” which is providing a context for information. Rather than relying on outright lies, framing allows the communicator to help the audience think about information in a particular way. According to Jamieson and Cappella:

In a world in which the public sphere is full of competing frames, the consistent redundant framing the conservative opinion media use gives their audiences a way to navigate politics, even when the conservative opinion media are silent or distracted. (142)

Ultimately, Jamieson and Cappella neither vilify nor champion conservative media. Rather, they put forth a complex picture of a seemingly organized effort to inoculate an audience against information by mainstream media. It’s good social science. In fact, it’s excellent social science.

Must be biased.


We would like to thank TWIR readers Patrick Skarr and April Green for bringing Professor Voegeli’s article to our attention. We would like to thank Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella for providing us with a copy of Echo Chamber.