A story, likely apocryphal, circulated during the 2008 election about an Obama campaign worker who was canvassing voters in rural Pennsylvania. When the canvasser knocks, the door is answered by a woman. The canvasser asks, "Who are you planning to vote for in the upcoming election?" The woman turns and shouts into the interior of the house, "A guy wants to know who we're voting for!" A man's voice answers from within, "We're voting for the n*##*r!" The woman turns back to the campaign worker and says, "We're voting for the n*##*r."
Who are we trying to kid? Harry Reid was right. He may have chosen unfortunate words, but his premise was entirely accurate: America was ready to elect for president a biracial person of color. But a black man who "sounds" and "looks" like much of white America's idea of "black?" No way.
James W. Loewen's book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, has a fascinating chapter about how high school textbooks chronicle - or, rather, fail to chronicle - America's history of racism. In one section, he writes:
Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites...The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is appropriate, even "natural" for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom.
These "twin legacies" remain deeply embedded in our society. They aren't going away simply because Barack Obama became president.
I would venture to say that many black people, while perhaps annoyed by Reid's remarks, were not particularly surprised or even offended. In the larger scheme of things, his words were pretty tame. More to the point, they expressed what I'm sure many black people already know to be true: white people, especially the older generations, remain oblivious to the persistent, unconscious racism that still shapes the contours of our everyday lives. As numerous studies have shown, even those who believe they are free of conscious racism still struggle with unconscious reactions to encounters with "blackness."
It's important to recall that one of the biggest hurdles Obama had to clear was the Reverend Wright episode. Reverend Wright displayed an aspect of "blackness" that white America is still very uncomfortable with. Obama's brilliant and unprecedented speech on race probably saved his candidacy.
In the end, Obama was able to win over many white voters because he exhibited enough of the characteristics that many in America still think of as "white." His speech, his looks, his education, his background, his family life - all of these were sufficiently "white" to allow many white Americans to conclude, "Okay, close enough." I have no doubt that had Mr. Obama sounded or looked more "black," - and if he were naturally darker-skinned - he would not have won enough white votes to win the election.
Perhaps the disparity between the real racial issues in America and the Harry Reid episode, which ultimately is a phony racial issue being exploited by politicians, is best illustrated by juxtaposing Harry Reid's comments with another story that appeared a few days earlier in the New York Times:
Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it...What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
The American Law Institute concluded that the death penalty in the United States is a "moral and practical failure" because, among other reasons, it is "plagued by racial disparities."
The United States is executing more blacks than whites, in large measure due to racism and prejudice. But Harry Reid's dopey, innocuous remarks get wall-to-wall media coverage and ignite a shit-storm of Republican hypocrisy.
Who are we trying to kid?
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