This is my first diary on this great blog. Usually, I just lurk around and make the odd comment but I wanted to say something about Obama and race that was prompted by Rachel Maddow’s show last night. Rachel made the point that as candidate Obama and his team had a sophisticated fight the smears operation and that that seems to have gone by the wayside during his Presidency.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the reason why these race baiting stories even exist is because they work. It’s because a substantial part of the population is always on the lookout for Obama “doing favours for black people” and will latch onto anything that appears to suggest that the Obama administration is a black takeover of America. Of course, this is absurd but it plays to people’s very real underlying prejudices.
The conventional wisdom about Sherrod is that Obama and his political team are shit scared of Fox News and don’t touch anything to do with race. While I think that, of course, Vilsack and perhaps the political team at the WH acted to quickly in the Sherrod case, this conventional wisdom falls prey to the usual problem of lack of nuance.
This White House has, in fact, been quite strong in pushing back against media triviality ever since inauguration. When people say that Obama is afraid of Fox News, does anyone remember the concerted effort to discredit Fox News as an organisation? Unfortunately, that enterprise was not given any support from the population at large or from the media. People like to point to Van Jones and his resignation as the administration caving in, but if you actually look at what happened there, the administration defended Jones from all the spurious allegations and resisted calls for his resignation until it became clear that Van Jones had signed onto a truther petition.
Sonia Sotomayor is another example – a massive race flap was on foot due to the wise Latina remarks. Did the administration back down and withdraw her nomination? No.
Has the justice departement backed down in respect of the new black panther case simply because it’s been rotating on fox news for the past few weeks?
On healthcare, did the administration back down from implementing it because it was described as ‘reparations’ by Rush Limbaugh? No.
Another thing that has gotten lost in the USDA flap around Sherrod is that Tom Vilsak and the President had recently agreed a massive (over $1 billion) additional payment to black farmers who had suffered discrimination at the hands of prior USDA’s. Congress has yet to vote on that. However, think about how difficult it would be to get that through if there really was a black employee at the USDA that had discriminated against white farmers?
In big picture terms, Obama has and is moving the needle against discrimination and historic unfairness. Yes, they made a mistake but I appreciated the way it was quickly cleared up with honesty, integrity and dignity. That’s exactly how I would want leaders to respond. What shouldn’t get lost in this debate is how courageous and strong the White House has actually been in the face of the worst type of scandalous and outrageous attacks.
For a first-time diary it was very well thought out. Two things though.
These race-baiting tactics didn’t start with Obama. It’s a strategy that conservatives have been using against all democrats. e.g. affirmative action, “welfare queens”, immigrants taking jobs. Each of those things are race-baiting in disguise. Now that it’s a black president, the race-based attacks have only increased to the point where every black organization is demonized as the black panther party incarnate. It’s quite depressing that these attacks still resonate with so many.
Second, I hope that the administration learned something from their mistake. 1. Don’t trust anything fox news “reports”. 2. Don’t trust any video done by that no-talent ass-clone, Brietbart.
You are 100% right that race baiting did not start with the Obama Administration. The Copper Heads mad an art form out of race baiting against Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. They frequently accused him of a plot to free the slaves an set himself up as the Grand African Chieftain and dictator of America. Lincoln was often depicted in caricature drawings with a distorted African looking face with a bone through his nose while wearing his traditional stove top hat. Racially driven politics is actually older than the country itself and was often practiced in colonial government.
Tensions in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (during the colonial period in America) were dominated over the conflicting positions between those who advocated for “bringing African slaves to Christ” at the expense of teaching them to read (for they could not become Calvinist Christians without being able to read the Bible), and those who resolutely resisted teaching slaves to read under any circumstances. These two positions had a great influence over the colonial politics at the time. At the time the argument of either side failed to carry the day and a few significant African slaves not only learned to read but passed the examination and became accepted Christians with rigidly enforced separate seating at church services. We should keep in mind that white America has had over three centuries to perfect the use of race in American politics.