Henry Louis Gates arrested for breaking in his own home.

Comic veteran Dwayne McDuffie pitching a DC comic featuring black characters.

Ta-Nehisi riffing on the “I’m not a racist but…” canard.

Now all stories are worth reading on their own. Ta-Nehisi is one of the best in the business, it’s good to see McDuffie getting work…and the Gates story is funny in a way.

But what really fascinates me are the comments. P6 actually hipped me to this.

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I’ll get the poor response out of the way. My good friend Michael Bowen posted a video response. Rather than spend much time on it, I’ll leave it to my thoughtful readers to point out the problems. In the case you don’t see them, please let me know.

Bros. Nulan and Bradley have on the other hand asked extremely good questions. And Bradley has gone above and beyond. The response below is more geared to Bradley, but I think in dealing with his comments I deal with Nulan’s as well.

Bradley argues that I need more information. Of course he is right, although I believe that Harold Ford’s close loss in 2006 rather than Obama’s victory is the first datapoint.

In fact, let’s look at a sample of electoral victories that were based on the Southern Strategy. As an aside I implied that the Southern Strategy was used solely by the GOP. This isn’t true. Bill and Hilary Clinton used it in their primaries (Bill successfully in 1992, Hilary unsuccessfully in 2008) as did Al Gore (unsuccessfully in 1988).

But I’m going to look quickly at the results from a few different races over the years:

• 1988-George Bush beat Michael Dukakis soundly in the 1988 Presidential election. Bush received 426 electoral votes, Dukakis received 110. This although Dukakis was leading in the summer up until the notorious Willie Horton ad. 
• 1990 Jesse Helms beats Harvey Gantt in North Carolina, taking 52.5% of the vote to Gantt’s 47.4%. The race was much closer until Helms ran the hands ad. 
• 1992-Clinton doesn’t use ads but makes a series of tactical moves (including making a point of returning to Arkansas to witness the execution of a mentally retarded black man on death row) designed to establish himself as a “New Democrat”.

Fast Forward…

• 2006-Bob Corker runs against Harold Ford jr. seeking (like Gantt before him) to become the first black Senator in the South since Reconstruction. Again the polls predicted a tight race. Near the end Corker runs the Playboy ad. He ends up taking 51% of the vote while Ford gets 48%. 
• 2008-John McCain runs against Barack Obama. The election was close in the summer according to polls. After Obama begins pulling away, McCain unleashes a series of ads connecting Obama to socialism and liberalism, many like this one implicitly connecting Obama to both (black) grassroots organizing and to the home mortgage crisis (a crisis conservatives attempted to pin on black homebuyers). Obama wins 365-173. 

This is far from scientific. But what I am arguing is that the Southern Strategy–which can only be deemed effective if it produces victories–is dying.

If indeed the cases I’ve selected constitute a trend the “Southern Strategy vote” is becoming smaller and smaller.

Why? I believe there are a couple of reasons:

1. Diminishing white votes as a percentage of the whole. The size of the white population relative to the non-white population is diminishing as we speak. Latino population growth is particularly impressive. The Southern Strategy seeks to do two things: play to white voter fears, and increase white voter turnout. One reason the Southern Strategy is dying is because the size of the white population relative to others is decreasing. Along these lines what is important isn’t so much what whites do, but rather what non-whites do. We are reproducing at higher rates, and are coming out to vote. 
2. White voters are less driven by racial fears. 

This is actually the controversial idea. And as brother Bradley notes, more whites still voted for McCain. Now I don’t think whites voted for McCain just because Obama was black. But let’s assume they did.

But what about the whites who voted for Obama?

Some might argue that the whites that DID vote for Obama weren’t voting for Obama as much as they were so scared they didn’t want Republicans anymore. But the Southern Strategy is at its most effective when it plays to fears. Why would fearful whites vote for the black guy if the Southern Strategy was effective? How would that work exactly? Perhaps because Obama ran on a race-neutral campaign? Perhaps…but then those people must try to figure out why exactly the race-neutral campaign strategy matters now, when it didn’t matter for Gantt, Ford, or other black candidates. 

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that whites are attuned to social justice claims more so than they were, although I do think it interesting that whites were willing to vote for “the socialist.” But it does mean there is much more variance in white racial attitudes here than we have previously assumed. Bradley argues that what we’re looking at is a refinement of white supremacy–sustainability through refinement. It is possible. But I’m concerned that taking this particular position is not so much the radical or the common sense response as much as it is a response that reproduces the thing critiqued. And would then ask how we would know “real” change rather than “fake” change if we saw it.

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Many of us thought this story sounded funny when it was first reported. And Prof. Lacewell is right to note that things have changed a great deal since the Susan Smith hoax (and incidentally the Carol Stuart hoax before that). But the question is how? Is it just the passage of time? Is it that folks just get an epiphany and then realize what the real deal is?

Take a look at this footage. Who is doing the talking for the police department? The racial integration of police departments across the country have not eased the tension between them and the black communities they work to supposedly serve. Some of the police accused of murdering Justin Bell were African American. But the increase in the number of black police officers–which comes as a result of political action– has arguably increased the level of skepticism applied to cases like this.

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Ok. That doesn’t really work as a sound bite, but bear with me.

When Reagan ran off two victories in a piss-poor economy, touting policies that went against his base’s own economic interests, folks were trying to understand why. Democratic strategists held focus groups in Sterling Heights Michigan at Lakeside mall, trying to get “Reagan Democrats” to chime in.

And chime in they did, blaming everything on blacks–their own economic circumstances, the state of the country, their vote for Reagan. In response, strategists burned the report…and they argued that the Democrats should move to the center and should de-emphasize issues that make it appear as if they are coddling “special interests” (i.e. blacks). The Edsall’s book Chain Reaction as well as Paul Frymer’s Uneasy Alliance are important.

In the 1992 race we see Clinton do two things to indicate he wasn’t beholden to blacks. He interrupted his campaign in order to attend Ricky Ray Rector’s state-sponsored murder, in order to diffuse criticisms that he was soft on crime. And he misinterpreted Sistah Souljah’s words at the annual Rainbow Push Convention, in order to decry Jesse Jackson and “black racism” in one fell swoop.

After he was elected he appointed more African Americans to appointed positions than anyone before him. But he also repealed welfare, reproducing racist imagery of African American women in so doing, and derailed Lani Guinier’s appointment as Assistant Attorney General when the GOP labelled her as a “quota queen.” Finally more black men went to prison under his watch than under any other presidency, with Clinton giving at least one speech in a black church blaming black people for the crime wave.

At a number of critical moments in Clinton’s career, he used racist ideas about blacks to increase his support, and to decrease the ability black people should have as citizens to make claims of the government. Now with some of those incidents, blacks helped him. A number of prominent black legislators supported welfare repeal. And black legislators supported the crime legislation he wanted passed. And there were probably some blacks who felt that Jesse Jackson’s role as supposed kingmaker was bad for black people (count me as being among this group).

But yet and still, taking Clinton’s history into account it should be clear that Clinton hasn’t been as “racially innocent” as he would like people to think he is. And in ignoring the history here, people are missing an opportunity to ask a much more interesting set of questions.

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In writing about this I made a mistake that is worth acknowledging (and covering in other blogs).

The writer who broke both the Paris and Jena stories, is named Howard Witt. He’s the (white) Southwest Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune. I mistakenly assumed that Witt was an African American. I’m betting that mistake gets made a lot given his writing.

There has been a significant decline in investigative journalism over the last twenty five years, as well as a decline in stories about racism (as opposed to race relations). I’m glad to see there are a few writers who are still fighting the good fight. And that some of them are white.

On that note, I missed Witt’s latest. This is the type of thing that transparency can aid us in uncovering but inevitably what is needed here is a different level of organizing than that used against old-fashioned rural racism.

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For me?

These bits stand out:

1. How can a society value freedom if it kills its young who don’t conform to societal standards?
2. The politicians were extremely weak, almost effeminate, in comparison to the manly male soldiers.
3. The Persian army was comprised of Africans, East Asians, Southwest Asians, and at least one white soldier. By contrast the 300 were all white.
4. Not only were the Spartans all white, they were all perfect …while the Persian army was not only non-white they were deformed (with a couple of exceptions).
5. The strength of the 300 lay in their ability to bind themselves together into a single unit, and this binding was emphasized again and again.

The end result was the most fascistic movie I’ve ever seen. Even though the movie is told from the viewpoint of the Spartans, there is no reason why someone like me would want Sparta to be saved. It doesn’t value racial difference, thinks democracy is a crock (no compromise! politicians are punks!), has stark notions of who is and is not genetically worthy, over-emphasizes military conflict as a means of building city-state unity and security. I supported the Spartan traits of resilience, and perseverance, but this support was not enough to overcome my revulsion at the society we’re supposed to be rooting for. They may as well have been Nazis.

Beautiful? No doubt. Epic? You bet.

Fascist? Yes.

(Edited to add)

Stephen Hunter gets it right, though he doesn’t drop the f word.

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But I’ll save my comments about Crouch for another time perhaps. And give him a partial pass because as a good Negro nationalist he’s never held much truck in a universal conception of blackness anyway.

Today? I point you to Gary Kamiya’s piece where he critiques Dickerson, in effect taking my own position…but for all the wrong reasons. Indeed, although I think that Kamiya is pretty decent normally, I’m really glad his piece wasn’t written on paper. It’d be a waste to kill all those trees for what is in effect a worn out call for us to move beyond “black” in favor of getting to black.

Check out this doozy:

A majority group’s racial identity, since it encounters no external obstacles, singling out or bigotry, is always invisible to itself. But — and now we come to the interesting racial questions posed by Barack Obama — I would argue that not all members of minority ethnic or racial groups, even ones that have historically been subject to racism, necessarily see themselves as “Asian” or “Latino” or “black.” They may just see themselves as Asian or Latino or black. This doesn’t mean they necessarily reject any cultural traditions or community ties: It simply means they see themselves first and foremost as human beings who happen to be a certain race or ethnicity.

Let me be clear. I am not talking about disavowing one’s culture or background, acting “white,” or any other external actions. I am simply talking about an inner freedom from a superficial definition imposed by others. This freedom can — and in the case of blacks, probably usually does — coexist with a stronger consciousness of one’s racial identity than exists for white Americans, whose racial status is invisible to themselves. For many minorities — even though their minority status makes their ethnicity more visible to others, and thus to themselves, and even though they may have suffered from racial or ethnic prejudice — visibility and prejudice alone do not necessarily create a race or ethnicity-based identity.

And the kicker:

Having no racial self-identification is a utopian state because it allows you to escape this malignant mirror. In America, the white majority is fortunate to enjoy this.

Now in making his case–which concludes by saying that what we need to do is recognize our common humanity by sloughing off the racial burden that people expect us to carry–he does recognize that racism plays a role by constraining our choices. But his end point is the same. Instead of being “black” we need to just be…black. Like Obama, I guess.

Of the various responses to the piece, I think that Malik probably comes closest to hitting the nail on the head. It’s always mildly annoying to read writers who acknowledge that they don’t really live with race write about race. Particularly when it looks like they are padding the word count to do so. How about this–Does Obama think he’s black? Does his mama think he’s black? Does his wife think he’s black? Do his children think he’s black?
When he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, who was he organizing? Where does he live?

(do the POLICE think he’s black?)

He’d have been much better off just saying that Dickerson is off her rocker for arguing that black people need to get beyond race, then arguing the contrary when we are presented with a black person who can do just that.

Oh. Girly girls.

I’ve only recently begun to talk about my family, and even then not really. My wife has another groove going though. She asks a question that is fairly pertinent to those of us (black and non-black) raising daughters. What makes a girly girl? My youngest daughter Niara is going to be a straight up headknocker when she grows up, but at the same time is beautiful in pink. The 21st Century. Go figure.

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