In a recent diary, it was suggested that progressives not use the term “[play the] race card” because it is an unfair minimization of racial injustice applied to black or progressive politicians.
Some, including me, found this suggestion to be strange, because the phrase has a long history of being applied to anyone who attempts to shift voters' attention from the real issues to race. It has been used (it seems to me, anyway) to condemn both whites and blacks. Therefore, to condemn the use of the phrase because it is offensive to blacks appears strange, since, depending on the context, it will basically offend those it is intended to offend regardless of who they are.
However, the discussion became vacuous, because there was no actual data on the usage of the term; it was just people's opinions. The purpose of this diary is simply to provide a little data.
Basically, the diary is a brief presentation, description, and analysis of the following graph:
(Note that much of this was posted as a comment in hepshiba's diary, but too late in the cycle for it to be seen much.)
I decided to use the new Google ngram viewer to gain some insight into this question. If you're not familiar with this new utility, it's basically a way to trace the usage of a phrase over time. After a little fiddling around, I came up with the graph posted above. Here is the url to the Google page that produced it. I encourage you to play around with this, perhaps with some other phrases of your choice. Be careful: if you compare a very popular phrase with one that is less popular, the latter may become indistinguishable from all zeros because all the graphs are on the same scale.
The graph traces the phrases “racial injustice” and “race card” from 1800 to 2008 (the most recent possible period). I included “racial injustice” as a baseline to indicate how “hot” of a topic racism was at the time.
Both phrases showed slow growth during the 20th Century, with a big jump for “racial injustice” in WWII, a jump that became enormous in the late 1960's. The use of “race card” stayed constant from around 1920 until the Clinton administration, which also saw a tremendous leap in its use as well as a second enormous leap in “racial injustice”.
Here's my interpretation, FWIW.
The original use of “race card” was, in fact, used by anti-segregation people to criticize the pandering use of race to do things like win elections in the South. This is the usage I am most familiar (born 1947 and raised mostly in the South). Note that “race card” did not grow in usage during the Civil Rights era.
However, then came the well-known reactionary backlash that started growing with Clinton's election, and eventually became W Bush and the Teabaggers. This was a two-barreled increase in both terms, but this time it was all about so-called “reverse discrimination” and allegations of racism toward whites by minorities. In effect, Rush Limbaugh et al. started using the terminology of the Civil Rights movement against civil rights for minorities (as has frequently been stated elsewhere). A key part of this was the reverse usage of “race card”, perhaps because of the RW love of bumper-sticker slogans and catch-phrases.
So, as I see it, the cause for the somewhat stupefied reaction of many to the original diary was the result of these two distinct periods of history: the Civil Rights era, during which “race card” was used to condemn racial pandering by white southern politicians and pundits, and the White Backlash era, during which the old terminology was still in use, but the new, reverse usage of those terms was flogged endlessly by the RW media and eventually became much more widely used than the original.
In my opinion, if we stop using the terms in their original manner to condemn racial pandering by whites, then this will be the same kind of victory for the RW that we already saw with words like “social democrat” and “liberal”.
Greg Shenaut