Race Rears its Head

The Republican party is not a racist party. But American conservatism is the ideological home of racism, and most racists are conservatives, even if most conservatives, as with most members of the GOP, are not racists. And today the vast majority of American conservatives are Republicans. Just as the Democratic party has a racist history to bear (and to a far greater extent and depth than the Republicans could ever dream of at that), so too does today's Republican party, built at least in part on a Southern base of whites disaffected by the national Democratic party's attention to civil rights in the postwar era. This is a complex issue, of course, immune to reductionism, but the broad contours as I have laid them out hold.

Race has come to the fore in the 2008 campaign in the way that most of us could have expected. The racial attacks have not been frontal, and their racial nature has at least been couched in deniable manifestations. But racial, and oftentimes racist, they have been. John McCain is not a racist, but he has aligned with racists because, as McCain has shown, winning now trumps honor and it certainly trumps whatever true beliefs he once held.

Thus Charles Krauthammer's fatuous article accusing Obama of playing the race card (and that's what he does even though all of his examples are of others, many unaffiliated with Obama, alleging racializing the campaign) is particularly rich, but not especially surprising. Conservatives have managed to create a moral relativism whereby accusing someone of racism is a breach of decorum every bit as bad as racism itself and is thus itself subject to condemnation. This is actually a pretty clever gambit intended to enable certain kinds of words and behavior while at the same time chilling criticism. It is also demogaguery of the rankest sort.

I cannot help but wonder what Krauthammer thinks about GOP fundraisers joking about Obama's assassination or Republican officials in California distributing what I am certain they believed to be hilarious postcards depicting Obama on a food stamp voucher surrounded by foodstuffs such as fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool Aid. But of course this has nothing at all to do with racial stereotypes! How stupid do they think we are?

But the height of hypocrisy on the issue of racism comes in the wake of Colin Powell's epochal endorsement of Obama, which naturally led to Rush Limbaugh accusing Powell of racism. This yet again reveals an amazing amount of relativism that is all too common in the playbook of some conservatives. They are quite willing to claim moral equivalency between white racism, built on a historical foundation of white supremacy, and alleged assertions of "black racism," which is nowhere to be found in Powell's endorsement, even if that does not prevent the Limbaughs of this world from spinning their vitriol.

Of course there is another way to think of these matters. My tendency is to become enraged. But at The Atlantic, Matthew Quirk welcomes GOP race-baiting. It reveals the other side for what it is, after all, and when "That One" wins, it will be fun to see the response.

in the midst of all of this comes John McWhorter's piece in The New Republic in which he discourages readers from blaming racism if Obama loses. Matthew Yglesias quite effectively pillories McWhorter's peculiar preemptive strike on an issue that surely will account for some tiny slice of the opposition to Obama, whether it proves decisive or not.

Ironically enough, some of the same conservatives tapdancing around the race issue will be the first to use an Obama victory to claim that we are past race and racism. Having lived, traveled and worked in South Africa during the Mandela and Mbeki years I can assure you that a comparable assertion about racism being over because the country has black leadership would be laughable were it not both demonstrably false and blithely offensive.