- David Wilson

TIME’s Peter Beinart in an article titled “Is He American Enough?“: “With their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn’t, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they’re using race to make Obama seem anti-American.” [Thanks to David Wilson for bringing this article to our attention!]

From an unattributed blog post, “McCain takes on ‘that one’,” on the Chicago Tribune’s Exploring Race forum: “When I heard the comment, I wondered: Was it racial? (And not in a conscious way. It just sort of had a tinge of “you people.”) … That’s the thing about race: if you’re a person of color and you hear something like that, it can pull you up short and you’re simply left to wonder.”

Politico’s Jonathan Martin thinks that “McCain will be accused of racism regardless“: John McCain is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He could never mention Jeremiah Wright and ensure his campaign aides don’t either, and he’d still be accused of running a racist campaign. … But is McCain doing anything overtly racist? No. … That doesn’t matter, though, to the outrage industry, ever on the lookout for any sign of racism and quick to pounce even when it’s not there. … McCain has not called Obama “a terrorist.”

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Christine M. Flowers in “Obama camp’s racial decoders” says that “race has become the not-so-secret weapon of the Obama camp, allowing it to both promote the candidate as a historic step forward while at the same time attack his opponents with the bigot label. And the polls say that it seems to be working. I’m not saying that Obama will win or lose because of the color of his skin. He probably won’t.”

Commentary by Dr. David C. Wilson, Assistant Professor of Political Science & International Relations at the University of Delaware:

Who’s on First?….”That One”
 
So-what John McCain is 72, and has grandparent tendencies, Barack Obama is a United States Senator, a presidential nominee, a father, and a human being.
 
What’s most interesting to me about the “that one” comment is that it’s not necessarily the comment that’s indicative of the underlying racial meaning, it’s the use of it with Senator Obama. Saying “that one” to a white male (or a real child) would be relatively fine in context, but if it’s a woman, a racial minority, or other underrepresented political group member (e.g., disabled person), it’s closer to an “ism.”
 
But, to be clear, there is a difference (in social scientific thinking) between “racism” and “racialized” behavior; they are not one in the same. Racism rests on an ideology of a group’s biological superiority/inferiority, whereas racialized behavior is an action that calls attention to race, bringing about consequences that can be intentional or unintentional. I’m not denying that racialized behavior is not influenced by racism (that would be naïve), but McCain’s “that one” statement is closer to racialized behavior.
 
However, by no means should we look at McCain’s “that one” behavior in a vacuum. His “that one” comment, in conjunction with the personal attacks (e.g., “who Obama is” and a lack of reciprocal admiration for Obama’s storied background), and a refusal to look at Obama along with other very cold interpersonal behavior (e.g., no real salutation at the handshake) are all indicators of McCain’s apparent discomfort or antipathy toward Obama. McCain definitely does not respect Obama. We know this because he hasn’t apologized for anything he’s done or said recently.
 
My point is that John McCain is not racist, but regardless of what most people might think, at the very least John McCain displayed a social dominance orientation targeted at something about Barack Obama. Perhaps it was Obama’s height (i.e., Obama is taller), or his party affiliation…..or maybe it’s just plain okay to say McCain sees more of Obama’s race than he thinks (or knows… shout out to all my psychologist friends).

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain’s purpose so well. As the fallout from Wright’s sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America’s promise to treat all people equally.

Republican strategist Joe Gaylord is quoted in the article saying that it’s a “legitimate strategy to talk about Obama and to talk about his background and who he pals around with.”

UPDATE: Adding commentary by Camille Z. Charles, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania:

Of course there’s racial subtext! Right or wrong, character and “guilt by association” attacks are commonplace in presidential campaigns, but that doesn’t mean that such attacks cannot and/or do not also tap into white voters’ racial fears and resentments.

Republicans and their allies mastered the subtle. implicit racial appeal that has “plausible deniability” more than a century ago: the most (in)famous example being the Willie Horton ad in 1988. The recent attacks by Governor Sarah Palm are a prime example of this approach.

From the outset, McCain-Palin have emphasized their own patriotism with the catchy Country First slogan, sending an implicit message that their opponent is unpatriotic or un-American. Plausible deniability? Easy, it isn’t about race, it’s about being patriotic and loving America; they never even mention race and they don’t have to because you can just look at him and see that he’s, well, black. When questioned about potentially racial motives, they simply respond: What are you saying? That everything is racial? Really, he’s the one “playing the race card.” Sound familiar?

What Republican strategists are counting on is voters’ tendency to equate “American” and “patriotic” with, well, being white. So, the catchy slogan, the emphasis on McCain’s military/POW experience. and Palm’s hockey-mom-who’s-just-like-us-and-knows-our-story persona all send the message that they are real Americans. Implicit in all this is that Senator Obama is, well, not. Remember the uproar over the flag pin? Same thing. Nobody cared that HRC was often sans flag pin.

Obama’s “associations” with Rev. Jeremiah Wright (e.g., “God damn America”) and William Avers (former member of the Weather Underground and the “terrorist” that Obama “pals around with”) are offered as evidence of his lack of patriotism. (Never mind that he’s severed ties with Wright, barely knows Ayers, or that Palin and her husband have a real tie to the API, an organized political party with an anti-American platform that advocates Alaska’s secession from the United States! Oops—sorry. I digress).

That one man is African American and the other is white is a perk for Republicans—allowing them to play on whites’ racial fears again without ever mentioning race. The three of them are angry, dangerous and anti-American. Wright’s inflammatory rhetoric and Ayers’ criminal past both targeted America, so the message goes. These men are angry, dangerous, and clearly hate America; Senator Obama is guilty by association and the American people need to be warned (did I mention that Palin says Obama is “dangerous”?). Plausible deniability? This matters no matter what color they are! Bill Ayers isn’t even black, so how are we playing the race-card? But hey, two out of three aint bad and, you know, they are angry and dangerous and unpatriotic …

Preying on (some) whites’ nagging feeling that they “don’t really know” or “can’t be sure they can trust” Senator Obama perpetuates racial tensions and divisions that most of us long to be rid of; doing it “on the down-low” is dishonest. How un-American.

PBS’s Gwen Ifill, the only woman and person of color to moderate any of the debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, is under attack from conservatives for moderating the vice presidential debate tomorrow night and being the author of a book titled “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”

Ludovic Blain at Stop Dog Whistle Politics posted earlier today a link to a Wall Street Journal blog entry. And Media Matters reviews the issue saying:

On Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Megyn Kelly falsely suggested it was publicly revealed that PBS’ Gwen Ifill was the author of the forthcoming book, The Breakthrough, only after it was announced she would moderate the upcoming vice presidential debate. In fact, media outlets, including the Associated Press, reported that Ifill was the book’s author well before the announcement.

UNITY, the largest organization of journalists in the world, calls on the Commission on Presidential Debates to reevaluate a process that has failed to recognize the nation’s changing demographics and has selected only one woman of color and one man of color to moderate presidential debates in the commission’s 20-year history.

“The journalists who were selected as moderators this year are outstanding, respected members of the profession. It is a glaring oversight, however, to have such a lack of diversity in a nation and an election where race, gender and age play such significant roles,” said UNITY President Karen Lincoln Michel, during a meeting of the UNITY board of directors last week.

Jim Lehrer of PBS will moderate the debate on Sept. 26; Tom Brokaw of NBC News on Oct. 7, and Bob Schieffer of CBS News on Oct 15.

At its recent annual fall meeting, the UNITY Board of Directors denounced the apparent pattern of exclusion and resolved to work with the commission to achieve greater diversity in future election cycles.

“While it is significant that a woman of color will moderate the vice presidential candidate debate, the dearth of diversity in the higher-profile presidential debates is extremely disturbing,” said Barbara Ciara, president of National Association of Black Journalists.  “Gwen Ifill moderated the vice presidential debate in 2004. It couldn’t have been that difficult to elevate her to one of the presidential debates.”

Ifill, of PBS’ NewsHour and Washington Week, will moderate the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2. Ifill is an African American.

“This issue occurs because so few of the nation’s news outlets employ journalists of color to cover national politics, a fact underscored in a study by UNITY and Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University,” said O. Ricardo Pimentel, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “In a recent interview on PBS, Bob Schieffer even noted the lack of women and people of color in key reporting positions and said that led the commission ‘to go to three old white guys’ when choosing moderators for the debates.”

The UNITY study was released in July during UNITY’s national conference in Chicago and found that journalists of color make up only 13 percent of Washington press corps.

“It is difficult to understand the thought process that would allow these debates to have such a narrow spectrum in a nation where people of color will soon be a majority of the population,” said Ronnie Washines, president of Native American Journalists Association. “There is also the additional irony of this being the first presidential election in U.S. history where the candidates so clearly demonstrate the changing diversity of this country.”

In an interview with TV Week, Frank Fahrenkoph, debate commission co-chair, said he had received “absolutely nothing but positive remarks . . . from the general political realm” about the choice of moderators.

“I am not sure who is included in Mr. Fahrenkoph’s view of the ‘general political realm,’ but it apparently is not the millions of people of color, women and young people who should be represented in the discussions about who will be the next president of the United States,” said Jeannie Mariani-Belding, president of the Asian American Journalists Association.