race

In the sixth part of his exchange with KA Dilday, Anthony Barnett realises that Obama's victory was hardly as comprehensive as it seemed. Catch up with part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. 

Dear Kay,

You are right to mull it over. There are big issues to be addressed, from celebrity to Afghanistan not to speak of the recession. But not immediately. I had a shock about 36 hours afterwards. I'd known - I'd put it as strongly as that - since January that Barack Obama could win and that in his case his race would not prevent this. I suppose I must have been too confident that he would. It was only afterwards that I suddenly saw how close it was. Obama needed Lehman Brothers to turn all the "palling around with terrorists" junk into froth.

One American in three did not vote at all! Most Americans did not vote for Obama. He got 66 million to McCain's 58 million votes. Nearly a quarter of the US's 300 million plus population are under 18, still leaving over 230 million of which less than 130 million voted. Obama got the actual votes of barely more than one in four American adults. He and his supporters must do something about the extent of what remains, in effect, a form of disenfanchisement in the USA.

In the fourth part of his exchange with KA Dilday, Anthony Barnett argues that Obama sees the US as part of the world, not apart from it. Catch up with part 1, part 2, and part 3.  

Dear Kay,

Senator Obama - and I SO hope by tomorrow morning it will be "President-elect" Obama - agrees with you. In an otherwise masterful opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, he writes, 

I'll finally finish the fight against bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century, and restore our moral standing so that America remains the last, best hope of Earth.

Right up to the implication of your last clause I agree with you that 

What Obama has demonstrated goes beyond the example that, no matter how far-fetched it seems, one can achieve one's dreams. He has shown people that there are many different ways to be black; that one can be comfortable and at home with people of all races and religions; that intellectualism is valuable to anyone of any race; and that America has done it again.

I'd say he has done more in that he has shown people of all colours, including white, that there are many different ways of being themselves, that their skin and background is not their fate. (And intellectualism is valuable - hurray! Have you tried to say that here in Britain?)

Here is the main point: America is special, yes. It is different. It is unique in its own way. But so too in their ways are all other countries. America is especially special because it is so powerful. But this is not inspiring - look what it has done with its power, from Vietnam to Iraq. Yes, Obama represents another America from Bush. The immense importance of his campaign is that it means one cannot say about George W Bush's Guantanamo-USA, "That's it folks - there is no other America".

There's been much talk this year of the Bradley Effect, or the Wilder Effect, or whatever name you want to give to the phenomenon of polls overstating a black candidate's support. It is bound to be one of the things which keeps anxious Democrats up tonight. But, as Harvard's David Hopkins has shown, there is no convincing evidence that this effect still exists.

So, for those left-leaning readers looking for another reason to worry, I submit the Shy Tory Factor. British readers will remember that the pollsters badly overestimated Labour support in the 1992 general election. Even the exit polls got the result wrong: this strongly suggested that Tory voters were either failing to speak to pollsters or lying about their choice. The most widely-accepted explanation for this was that the Conservatives had become 'politically incorrect'.

This is simply my own speculation, backed up by a handful of anecdotes, but it is possible that the same thing is going on in America today. In many (though certainly not all) parts of the country, Barack Obama is the 'politically correct' choice, for a variety of reasons - not just race, but also Bush's abysmal approval ratings and the cultural image of the Republican party. This is certainly something to bear in mind if the exit polls show an Obama lead. They also had Kerry ahead in 2004, and we all know how that turned out.

In the second part of an exchange with KA Dilday, Anthony Barnett argues that the novelty of Obama's candidacy places the Democratic nominee in the company of leaders across the Americas. Kay's first letter can be read here, as well as part III, and part IV.

Dear Kay,

I well remember our conversation. I also recall how I first started to listen to and read Obama in January and thought, "Damn, he really means to win and can." It was because of his deliberate appeal to conservatism. It meant he was genuinely serious about the presidency - and not in running as a radical, let alone as a "black" (as Jessie Jackson, at least in part, did). So here is to your dish of crow! May I garnish it in just two evenings time! 

But will - or would - Obama's election mean that the US is exceptional? Or that it is the beacon for humankind? Or at least that it is more liberal or tolerant than western Europe as you suggest? Here also we argued. First things first. It was not even slavery in America that was so exceptional. It was the civil war. Without the civil war the South would surely have abandoned slavery of its own accord. Instead, it suffered its appalling devastation and long aftermath as revenge was administered on the coloured through Jim Crow. To overcome this is to become normal. 

Obama presents himself as a candidate who will heal division. Like all good doctors, he joins exceptional self-belief and a measure of modesty. The immediate division he seeks to heal is also the civil war of the Sixties - in a word, "Vietnam" - that echoed your original civil war. But I want to emphasise that this healing, if it happens, will make America more healthy and normal, not boost its exceptionalism.

A few months ago, the Washington Post published a story recounting the attempts of the African American political theorist Danielle Allen to get to the bottom of the false claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Allen's Internet archaeology turned out to be as interesting as the actual answer - the origin of the claim seems to be a rather odd and anti-Semitic character named Andy Martin, who has recently reappeared in the Fox News "documentary" "Obama & Friends: The History of Radicalism." Allen's quest helped bring to view how smears circulate in our "new media" environment.  

If you've been following the American elections as obsessively as I have, you might also have noticed another odd, and even more inexplicable meme that has been circulating in Republican circles: references to the possibility of a "second holocaust." Most recently, an email was sent by Pennsylvania Republicans to Jewish voters in the state warning that "Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008. Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!"

According to the October 25 Associated Press story that reported this bizarre and offensive attempt to associate Obama with National Socialism and the genocide of Jews in World War II, the email further "warns ‘Fellow Jewish Voters' of the danger of a second Holocaust due to the threats to Israel from its neighbors and touts Republican presidential candidate John McCain's qualifications over those of Obama." 

Republicans have disavowed this particular email, but in fact the rhetoric it uses is consistent with statements that both McCain and Palin have been making in interviews and speeches. For instance, in a 19 September post on its "Political Radar" blog, ABC News reported that "Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pursuit of nuclear weapons for a ‘second holocaust.'" According to Palin's remarks at a rally in Minnesota, "John McCain and I are committed to drawing attention to the danger posed by Iran's nuclear program and we will not waver in our commitment. I will continue to call for sustained action to prevent Iranian President Ahmadinejad from getting these weapons that he wants for a second holocaust."

Despite recent talk of Palin's tendency to "go rogue," it seems unlikely that she came up with this line of argument herself. Indeed, back in July, as MSNBC reports, John McCain went on Israeli television and, again a propos of Iran, declared, "I have to look you in the eye and tell you that the United States of America can never allow a second Holocaust."  

In the final week of the campaign the attempt to link Obama to Iran and alleged threats to Israel has become one of the McCain camp's central talking points (second only to the anachronistic attempt to portray Obama as a "socialist"). The "death to Israel" smear is being repeated in advertisements, direct mail campaigns, "Joe the Plumber" pronouncements, and other detritus of the campaign's last gasp efforts.  

At least one person in Europe isn't going all soft and misty-eyed for Obama. The irascible Melanie Phillips recently penned a fevered attack against the presidential hopeful, warning that Obama "will take an axe to America's defences at the very time when they need to be built up." While The Spectator may not be regular fare across the pond, equally frenzied denunciations of Obama have become common in the last few weeks in the US. Evangelicals beseech their co-religionists to vote for McCain in order to stave off a "far-left agenda [that] would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently." Elected Republicans try to tar and feather Obama as a radical: "With all due respect," Senator George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, said, "the man is a socialist." In terms that echo the shrillest of these fear-mongers across the pond, Phillips claims an Obama victory would invite apocalypse.

For a hack who imagines the end of western civilization around every corner, Phillips unsurprisingly finds the most self-destructive instincts of the west in him. "Obama stands for the expiation of America's original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor," she writes. "Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west's fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted."

According to Phillips, Obama is the epitome of the guilt-ridden, multicultural self-hater. His inevitable failures as president would not only be those of diplomatic compromise, but of cultural and historical surrender. Overreaching minorities will be coddled within their obliging societies. Terrorists will become objects of politically-correct sympathy. Iraq and Afghanistan will be evacuated. Israel will be sacrificed to the Arabs. Obama will strip the US - and ultimately, the "West" - of the right to assert its identity and strength. Under an Obama presidency, there will be no safe buffer zone - political and psychological - between the west and the rest.

Of course, Phillips has no real interest in looking at Obama seriously. She only wants him to be a woodcut in her shadow world of demons and angels. So it makes sense that her rant impresses other paladins of the clash of civilisations (see the comments below her piece on The Spectator website). It's as willfully deaf to reality as they are.

A remarkable story has been unfolding (or should that be unraveling?) over the last few days in Pennsylvania. It is the story of Ashley Todd, a local McCain campaign volunteer who on Thursday claimed that she had been mugged by a looming African-American who then spotted her McCain bumper sticker and proceeded to beat her up and cut the letter 'B' into her cheek, telling her "you're going to be a Barack supporter". Here is a picture of her after the alleged attack:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Todd's story soon crumbled as the police found she was nowhere to be seen on the CCTV camera covering the ATM where she claimed the mugging took place, and administered a damning polygraph test. On Friday, she confessed that the whole tale was a hoax, designed to damage Obama. This was not the first such hoax she had pulled: in the primary season, she had been a supporter of Ron Paul, and claimed that in retaliation for this her car's tires had been slashed. She seems to have a history of mental illness, and perhaps our judgement on her should not be too harsh.

The more interesting judgement to make is whether we should blame conservatives for jumping on this story as eagerly as they did. Both McCain and Palin called Todd with their sympathies before her lie was exposed, and their campaign pushed the story on the media, with its Pennsylvania communications director confidently relaying a dramatic version of the story to reporters complete with imagined dialogue from the black assailant ("You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson.") that he seems to have contributed. Prominent conservative blogger Ace of Spades initially claimed confidence in the story on the basis of Todd's extremely sketchy evidence.

This is all pretty embarassing for those concerned. But I don't think such gullibility is an exclusively right-wing problem. We shouldn't forget the scores of hoaxes that America's left has fallen for, including the recent Duke University lacrosse team rape scandal. The real lesson of Ashley Todd is to remind us of something both sides of the political spectrum really should have learnt a long time ago: there are plenty of disturbed people out there, some of them will make wild allegations, and when they do we should wait until getting some real evidence before believing them, however much they tickle our political fancies.

Today in my inbox, I have an email from Color of Change asking me to sign an open letter to the McCain/Palin campaign asking them to stop being racially divisive. They've teamed up with Brave New Films in distributing this video collage of racial attacks and media hype.

If we are to believe the media right now, Gov. Palin and Senator McCain are getting the extremists to creep out of the shadows to hurl racial epiphets at Senator Obama.

Am I the only one who can't help noticing it's the same examples being used over and over?

A recent piece on Politico takes the temperature of the Republican base, and sees it reaching feverish desperation. The mood at recent McCain-Palin rallies has turned more "frenzied" and "visceral". Examples of this nastier turn can be seen in the video posted on openUSA yesterday. Are such demonstrations of emotion admissions of impending defeat? Or inklings of a last ditch Republican tactical coup? More likely the former. As Tom Ash pointed out this week, negative campaigning doesn't seem to work.

Earlier this week, conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh played a terrifying game of racial semantics. He insisted that Barack Obama  was not, in fact, African-American, but rather "Arab". Limbaugh mused: "Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood? He's Arab. You know, he's from Africa. He's from Arab parts of Africa. ... [H]e's not African-American. The last thing that he is is African-American." Nevermind that Kenya - Obama's fatherland - is hardly an "Arab" part of Africa. Nevermind the implied assertion that it's unacceptable to be Arab. It is frightening that something as straight-forward - and typically American - as Obama's background can be tossed about in Limbaugh's false and malicious racial taxonomy. And it is even more frightening that such an outrage passes without provoking the ire of the mainstream press.

Of course, America's tormented relationship with race has never lurked too far from the surface of the election campaign. The irony is that Obama himself must continue to row through the waters as if there was very little roiling below. Obama's opponents flippantly and indelicately invoke race; Obama must steer clear. As Brent Staples puts it in his excellent and essential editorial in the New York Times,

Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone. These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.

 

 

The email below has been doing the rounds in American cyberspace, and recently arrived in openUSA's inbox. It makes a stark point about the double standards in media coverage of the election. 

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

The inevitable echoes of John F Kennedy reverberated around Barack Obama's speech before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin last month. Jane Dailey, a professor of American history at the University of Chicago, recalls the visit to the divided German city of an altogether different US leader: Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1964, King was invited by Willy Brandt - then mayor of West Berlin - to speak at a commemoration ceremony for the slain JFK. The adoration of West Germans was not enough; King insisted on crossing into East Berlin, where he "preached a sermon of non-violence and universal brotherhood to an overflow crowd in the Marienkirche". Despite having his passport - as well as his German translator and guide - confiscated by the American embassy, King came through a seemingly unbreachable divide, transcending the implacable politics of the Cold War.

Some Republicans seem to think so. He may not have the muscle to turn Republican bastions against John McCain in the presidential election, but some GOP representatives fear that Obama's mobilisation of black voters may have lasting consequences for congressional races throughout the region.

While Obama claims to seek the "transcending of race" in the United States, his campaign for the White House is having quite opposite effects elsewhere in the world. According to the New York Times, Obama's success is spurring African youth in France - where institutionalised laïcité suppresses the recognition of religious and racial identities - to return to Négritude, the black intellectual movement of the 1920s and 30s that was pioneered by the late Franco-Caribbean writer and politician Aimé Césaire.

Accepted wisdom has it that Barack Obama's race and mixed background will help repair the image of America abroad. This is supposed to be particularly true in west Asia. As Yasser Khalil wrote in the Christian Science Monitor recently, Obama's Muslim heritage and promised diplomatic approach to the region could herald a new dawn in the US' relations with the Arab and Muslim world.

Nouri Luhemiya on The Moor Next Door blog offers an altogether darker suggestion. Critiquing the way Obama's international appeal has been represented, Nouri writes:

The reporter, like many, focuses on Obama’s blackness as an asset outside of the United States. It is not quite PC to ask whether or not it would be a hindrance. My view is that, when one gets to a certain level of power, his color does not matter whatsoever. He will be treated with respect by heads of state, though there may be some gaffes on the part of European or Asian leaders.

It is interesting, though, to ask, just for asking’s sake, whether or not Turks, Syrians, Egyptians, or other peoples in the Muslim world would elect someone like Barack Obama. My guess is that they would not. (The status of blacks in Middle Eastern countries, in everyday life and even folk traditions lead me to this conclusion.) This also makes me skeptical as to the extent to which Obama’s “face” could dissuade people in the region from becoming or remaining anti-American. There is an exceptional amount of severe contempt that many Levantines hold for black people (and other dark skinned people), that many Westerners, especially Americans, entirely miss. I do not know for sure where it comes from on the whole. Part of it is surely the identification of blackness with social and racial inferiority, the result of the fact that blacks and most dark-skinned Arabs have slave ancestry (Arabs have very little sympathy for the descendants of slaves, especially from what African-Americans who have been to the Gulf have told me, and my own understanding of the way that most Arabs view black people). Being black is not as much an asset in the Muslim world as it is in American white liberal circles.

It is hard to believe that the ascension of a non-white leader to the Oval Office would not change in small part the way much of the world, including west Asia, sees the US. Surely even the most bigoted Levantine would register the momentous nature of an Obama presidency. Nevertheless, Nouri is right in his general scepticism. America observers are not simpletons; a charismatic "change in face" is no substitute for the much more arduous and subtle change in policy.

An old professor of openUSA's, David Bromwich, reads dark omens in the tea leaves. Sifting through the recent insinuations of Obama's possible assassination, Bromwich finds a writhing worm in the belly of American society.

Race comes easily and inevitably into discussions of Barack Obama, and never far from race is the thought of violence. It is there when you hear mentally feeble persons say, "I am afraid of this one; so afraid! something makes me afraid!" And race comes into the discussion when you hear clever people say, "He can never win the white vote; the white working class just aren't ready for him."

An unmeasurable but well-recorded condition for the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the campaign of delegitimation that preceded that terrible event. Anti-Castro Cubans hated Kennedy because he had disappointed them at the Bay of Pigs, and seemed to be a warm friend cooling. Many Southern white people hated him for his indications of solidarity with the cause of civil rights. There are other actors and reactions that might be added; but all shared the belief that Kennedy was not a legitimate leader, that he didn't deserve to be given the chance to go on governing. The hatred was especially virulent in the South. Death threats were in the air and Kennedy had been warned against taking the trip to Texas.

When a democratic society fails to honor the contract by which we elect our leaders in peace, and let them govern in peace, and show our approval or disapproval by keeping them or turning them out of office--when the incantation "He is not one of us" dips so far below sanity that we pretend the rules and decencies aren't in force any more--it is more than one person who is harmed. This loose way of talking and thinking of violence hardens us against real responsibility if the violent thing should happen. We are administering shocks to ourselves in advance so as not to be surprised by the actuality. But such preparations are in their very nature corrupt, and corrupting. And they are not less so when used against any person of dignity and estimation, on the public stage, than when they are leveled against an elected official.

The entire piece makes very compelling reading.

Late update: Keith Oberman's unforgiving response to Hillary Clinton's "incomprehension".

Are we supposed to be hoping that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s hair-raising 15 minutes of fame are over?

The black polymath Glenn Loury and I are puzzling in conversation here about all that the YouTube and network frenzy left out — the blessed insight and fellowship of black church life in America, but also the radicalism of its perspectives.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Glenn Loury (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3)

Following our posts in recent days on race in the Appalachian primary contests, this al-Jazeera video offers a glimpse of the kind of obstacles that lie before a politics that seeks to transcend race.

Is this selective demonisation? How easy is it to exaggerate the pitch of racist passions in the impoverished corners of Appalachia?

Hillary Clinton once more trounced Barack Obama in an Appalachian primary, winning Kentucky by a commanding 36 percentage points. As in West Virginia, at least 20% of voters claimed that their decision was influenced by race. Team Clinton is likely to cite the landslide victory in Kentucky as further evidence of Obama's "unelectability" - never mind that he won convincingly elsewhere in the Deep South.

Clinton's rhetorical attacks on Obama are unlikely to significantly defer his inevitable triumph in securing the nomination. But they do highlight vulnerabilities that he will have to address in the run-up to the general election. The only two Kentucky counties that went to Obama were Jefferson County and Fayette County, home to the state's two major urban centres. In the hollows and thinly-populated wilds of the rest of the state, Clinton reigned supreme. Is Obama's urbane charm lost on the thickets and brambles of much of the American interior? And will his campaign's efforts in the coming months to register black voters be enough to compensate for his lack of white rural support?

The Washington Post catalogues numerous incidents of horrific racism during the West Virginia primary, including a voter who asked for Obama to be lynched. On the Daily Kos, John K Wilson glumly breaks down the figures to expose a hard reality.

As the West Virginia primary shows us, in many parts of the country racism is alive and well and controlling our political process. Many commentators assume that Obama's success with the young and well-educated is due to some "elitist" support he has among the latte-sipping crowd. The real reason is racism. Younger people are less likely to embrace racist views. Well-educated people are less likely to embrace racist views. And that makes all the difference in America, where the continuing significance of race can be measured with alarming detail in West Virginia's primary.

We agree, and we find it all the more troubling that so many commentators, particularly those leaning towards Hillary Clinton, insist that these are the kind of bread-and-butter voters that Obama doesn't have the wherewithal to win. In fairness, it is very easy to brow-beat one of the country's most impoverished, least diverse regions. But it would be tragic indeed if American democracy hinges on intractable bigotry.