Black Steele in the Hour of Chaos

It is darn hard to be a Republican these days. The voters have been clear over the past two national elections that they are not interested in GOP solutions to the nation's problems. One way to look at Barack Obama's victory would be to say that a Black man was able to win the presidency because America has moved forward with respect to its racist preconceptions (some have even argued that his race helped him). Another way to look at it is that the GOP is in such sorry shape that even a Black guy could beat their nominee. After all, research (and history) shows that in most cases, Whites will not vote for Black candidates. Obama was a special kind of candidate, but the contemporary GOP is an especially pathetic kind of party, too.

It was a weekend ruled by Steel (uh oh, Stephen's football bias seeps in). While the Pittsburgh Steelers collected their record-setting sixth NFL championship trophy, we remain somewhat ambivalent about the national Republican Party's choice of Michael Steele, who is African American, as the leader to get them back to a competitive position in American politics.

In a vote with multiple contenders that required a majority (as opposed to a plurality) to win, it took six ballots before Steele was declared the victor.

In some very interesting rhetorical maneuvering in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Steele repeated over and over that he was going to energize the base and bring back conservatism. He is referring to the "Reagan" wing of the party (Hannity, in typical form, could not wait longer than two minutes into the interview to mention Reagan's name), which historically has ignored if not shown outright disdain for the poor but pales in comparison to the most recent "base." Today's "base" has been a bigoted, anti-gay, anti-science, fundamentalist Christian crew that has rendered the Party largely irrelevant to the vast majority of 21st century Americans. So the first order of business for Steele is to redefine what the "base" of the GOP really is. When he said in his acceptance speech, "for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over," he could very well have been talking to those who seek to push the party further to the right and further into irrelevancy. (How Steele does not think Hannity is one of those people is curious, but Hannity supported him for some reason against more socially conservative opponents in the race, so we guess Steele feels grateful.)

In fact, Steele seems to recognize that AM talk radio might be bad business for the Party:

Asked about the controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh and his back and forth with President Barack Obama, Steele was careful not to wholly embrace the controversial conservative talk radio host. "Rush will says what Rush has to say, we will do what we have to do as a party," said Steele.

The election results were predictably met with some skepticism. Like the choice of Sarah Palin, Steele's rise could be seen as a trick -- a hypoctritical quota fill -- by a party for which a perception of exclusion has cost them dearly. Conservatives and progressives alike find such selection distasteful if, in fact, Steele's race was a deciding factor.

The Washington Post reports that the final ballot came down to Steele and South Carolina Republican chair Mike Dawson, who acknowledged belonging to a Whites-only club. Further, concern about Steele largely centered on questions of whether he was conservative enough; ultra-conservative (and also African American) Ken Blackwell of Ohio dropped out after the fifth round of balloting and swung his support to Steele.

So let's recap: despite Sean Hannity's endorsement, Steele 1) was elected despite not being seen as socially conservative enough by many party insiders; 2) beat Dawson, who belongs to an all-White club, after the Party already forced out of the race Tennessee GOP chair Chip Salzman for circulating the parody song "Barack the Magic Negro" (which came from Limbaugh); and 3) Steele has already mentioned America's poor more times in his first couple of days than his last three or four predecessors combined.

For real progress to be made, the GOP's policies have to match its symbolism, but it is reassuring that a White woman and a Black man have been placed in two of the three highest positions in the Party over the last few months. A skeptic will acknowledge that Party officials know that they must make such changes if they are to win the support of younger voters, but irrespective of intent, the outcome is positive. We are sure that we will disagree with Michael Steele on many policy preferences and possibly even political tactics, but the bottom line is that he has lived his life as a person of color in America, and that perspective can only help move forward the cause of similarly situated Americans.

And to be honest, we have always sort of liked Michael Steele because his campaign commercials during his U.S. Senate run in 2006 were so entertaining. But let's not forget: it was Steele who, during his speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, first invoked the "drill baby drill" chant and referenced Jeremiah Wright in order to leverage racist support for John McCain.

Still, given the options and acknowledging our suspicions about pandering, we are pleased for Michael Steele and hopeful that he will lead the GOP in a direction that is rooted in compassion for the poor and sensitivity to America's racist past as it opposes Obama's policies.

Barack Obama: Way Too Black but Not Nearly Black Enough

This week (last Saturday), U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) surprised no one by officially announcing that he would seek his party’s nomination to run for president of the United States next year. As the first black presidential candidate branded as “viable” by the mainstream media, it is also not unexpected that much of the discussion this week centered on whether it was more likely for a black man or a white woman (i.e., U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY) to be elected president.

What many might have found surprising is the rather widespread discussion of how much support Obama has in the black community. We aren’t surprised one bit. This controversy centers on two axes.

On the one hand, whites generally perceive African Americans as a monolithic voting bloc. While it is true that black voters overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, such support has been eroding for the past decade. One illustration of this is the slate of very strong black Republican candidates for high-profile statewide offices last year. But this assumption also rests largely on the tacit racist belief that blacks are less sophisticated voters than whites, and that no matter what a candidate’s position on issues or other qualifications, black voters will be drawn to black candidates by virtue of the commonality of their skin color. This is no more true than an assumption that women tend to vote for women candidates based primarily on their gender, which research has shown not to be the case at all.

The other element of this issue is more complicated, but something that our research has revealed to be increasingly common over the past five years. As more black candidates move through the ranks of local and state government and become legitimate contenders for higher positions, black candidates are running against one another, often in districts that are majority black or majority-minority. What we have observed is that when this happens, particularly if there is a generational difference between the candidates, some of the campaign rhetoric centers on what we have labeled “an appeal to African American authenticity.” That is, to compete for black votes, one candidate (usually the older one) will argue that he or she is blacker than the other candidate. This appeal varies from skin tone (literally blacker) to lived experience (the older candidate usually makes references to fighting during the height of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s) to education (particularly if one candidate was educated at an historically black college or a state school and the other attended an Ivy League school).

We saw these types of appeals in 2002 and 2004 in Alabama’s 7th Congressional District race between Artur Davis and Earl Hilliard; in Georgia’s 4th Congressional District race between Cynthia McKinney and Denise Majette in 2002; and in the 2000 and 2004 Newark mayoral races between Corey Booker and Sharpe James (see the excellent film Street Fight for documentation of this contest). In fact, Obama’s failed 2002 Congressional bid to replace incumbent Bobby Rush included suggestions of Obama’s lack of authenticity.

Obama’s perceived authenticity runs even deeper than his light skin (due to the fact that his mother was white) and his Ivy League education. Since his father was from Kenya and therefore is not the descendent of slaves, some have claimed that Obama does not have the right to claim to be African American (see Stephen Colbert’s interview with one of those folks here).

So, as we predicted in our December 1, 2006 blog, Obama has an uphill battle that is rooted in race, but not always in the ways we traditionally think of it. Many black leaders have long-standing associations with the Clinton family stemming back to the early 1990s, and such allegiances will be uncomfortable to sever, even if those leaders wish to shift support, which is certainly not a given even though there is a viable black candidate now in the race.


Read Some Other Stories About Black support for Obama at/in:

NPR
Time Magazine
My Direct Democracy
Black People Speak
Philadelphia Star Telegram
News Max

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (Doll)!

17-year-old high school student Kiri Davis has produced a seven-minute documentary that is leaving audiences scratching their collective heads. She has replicated Kenneth Clark’s famous experiment from the 1940s by asking young African American children in New York City to select from two dolls that are identical except for their race. Overwhelmingly, like in the first experiment, children chose the white doll to play with, identified the white doll as the “nice” doll, and correctly noted that the black doll looked more like themselves.

These findings are important for several reasons.

First, they demonstrate that the original study’s results are not a function of “old” racist attitudes (that is, openly bigoted attitudes). We are clearly not “past all of that,” as many, if not most, white Americans believe. The revelation that at our core we are not more progressive than past generations is an important illustration of the pervasiveness of a seemingly (to whites) invisible undercurrent of white supremacy in our culture. Last month, ABC’s Primetime aired a replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous study of obedience to authority that was originally conducted in the 1960s. The new study revealed that current participants were just as likely to continue to punish (i.e., administer increasingly high levels of electronic shocks) to a stranger when urged to do so by an authority figure (i.e., a researcher in a white lab coat). As if we needed proof that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident after what’s happening in the Sudan or in Rwanda in 1994, this is powerful evidence of our ability to be persuaded to act against our conscious desires and interests – an ability that many would have liked to ascribe to a previous generation or a previous culture of obedience.

Second, the findings illustrate that combating racism will take much more than changing the hearts and minds of white folks so that they are more accepting of and less prejudicial toward people of color. When we reduce racism to individual-level hatred of those of another race, we ignore the real power of its curse – a power revealed in this young student’s replication of an important social experiment. Racism fosters white supremacist feelings in all of the people of a culture in which it operates. It does NOT simply cause people of different races to judge each other harshly.

That’s bigotry, and that’s a horrible thing, as well. But we can get past that, and most of us have. But it is the very invisibility of the persistent enculturation of racist values into people of all colors that is most dangerous. The black children in this experiment did not choose as “nice” the doll that they admit did not look like them because they have been called the n-word by white people. They did not decide to play with the white baby because a mean old white guy refused to give their parents a loan for a new home. They did not learn self-loathing because of peers telling them explicitly that white is good and black is bad. While too many of these things still happen, they happen far less frequently than they did when the original experiment was conducted in the 1940s.

So why the same results? Because we have only been addressing the symptoms of racism and ignoring and/or wishing away the root causes. The actor/comic D.L. Hughely used an excellent analogy in response to Senator Joe Biden’s remarks about Barack Obama (see last week’s blog for more on that issue): “It’s like weight loss. The last few pounds are the hardest to get rid of. It’s the last vestiges of racism that are hard to get rid of.” The last vestiges are not the few Archie Bunkers running around; the last vestiges are the parts of racism that white folks would rather not consider, but Davis’s film forces us to confront them.

It’s ironic that a study about babies taught us how deeply ingrained racism was sixty years ago, and a young girl who is only a decade older than the children she interviewed turns out to offer one of the strongest reminders to date that we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think we have.


Watch “A Girl Like Me”