"Excuse us for the news
I question those accused
Why does this fear of Black from White
Influence who you choose?"
PE's front-man, Chuck D, strikes at the heart of a division that has been sown for decades in American culture and society. Michael Omi, a leading voice on the relationship between race and popular media, has argued that "a crucial dimension of racial oppression in the United States has been the articulation of an ideology of difference, or 'otherness'. This involves defining 'us' (i.e., white Americans) in opposition to 'them.'"
I've been making the case that recent efforts — undertaken both by the McCain-Palin campaign and a growing legion of official and unofficial surrogates and supporters — to de-Americanize Barack Obama not only taps into some Americans' xenophobia, but to some white people's racism. In other words, Obama has become a triple threat: a racial, religious and national Other. Now white. Not Christian. Not American.
Political campaigns, especially at the presidential level, are bloodsports. When one campaign has a lead and a large cash advantage, moreover, the campaign that is trying to refocus attention will often resort to negative campaigning. People say they don't like it, but history shows that it's an effective technique.
I'm not one to argue that Obama should be spared this rite of passage; he wasn't during the primary and it would be foolhardy to think he should or would be now. My concern is with the theme of the negative attacks. Calling Obama inexperienced didn't work. Deriding him as a 'celebrity' didn't work. Mocking his popularity didn't work.
If there's a silver lining here, perhaps it's that the right-wing attack machine saved the best/worst for last. But this is tinsel wrapped around a hurricane; as we've seen recently, McCain and Palin may have dialed down their rhetoric, but it really doesn't matter. The meme is out there, and others have picked it up and run with it. For instance, three days ago, the Chafee County Republican Women organization featured the image below in its newsletter.
Diane Fedele, who included the image, said she had received it as part of a chain email and has apologized to anyone who was offended but insists she did not mean this to be racist. She thought it was funny, since Obama had made a crack about not looking like all the other guys on U.S. currency. She did not see watermelon, fried chicken or ribs as being specifically associated with black Americans any more than she thought it might be problematic to circulate an image that links Obama to food stamps rather than currency. Ironically, the person who claims to have created this image did so back in May as part of a satire about Republican fears that Obama was going to run a 'black' campaign. The blogger, listed only as TK, maintains a blog called Please God, No, which seems to be in the vein of The Onion and features over-the-top satire and parody pieces. The giant flap Fedele has sparked seems only to have proved TK's original point, and goes some way as a cautionary tale about quoting someone out of context.
Meanwhile, the Sacramento Republican Party posted the image below to its official site last week before apparently bowing to widespread condemnation, including a sharp rebuke from Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state GOP:
County party chairman, Craig MacGlashan, who manages the web site, offered a pretty spineless defense to the Sacramento Bee: "Some people find it offensive, others do not. I cannot comment on how people interpret things." Translation: any impropriety was purely inferential, not implicit.
And while I'm the last one to defend crowd behavior at any sort of event, it seems worth including this assortment of McCain-Palin supporters in Johnstown, PA last week, not because the things they say or do is particularly represenative of, or particularly exceptional to, other things that are circulating in the air these days. Rather, I offer it as a coda to my initial point... now that the meme is out there, others will carry it regardless of what the campaign's official line is. Short of aggressive, repeated condemnations, such behavior is probably going to continue in certain situations, and as it does, it continues to promote an 'ideology of difference' that has historically worked to solidify and normalize racial antipathy in this country.
Update: In keeping with the growing frequency of these images starting to crop up, this flyer was just mailed to voters in Minneapolis and St. Paul, warning everyone about their vision of American under an Obama presidency. Unsurprisingly, the mailer seems have been sent anonymously. Not only classy, but courageous.
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