Chilton Williamson, September 2008
arack Obama, self-advertised as the first post-political American presidential candidate in history, has been touted by his supporters as the first post-racial candidate as well. Unfortunately for everyone’s idealistic hopes, old-fashioned politics were introduced into the presidential campaign last July through a strong injection of the old racialism by Barack Obama himself, when he charged, very publicly, that the Republican campaign would attempt to frighten supporters away from him this fall by pointing out that Obama bears no physical resemblance to those previous Chief Executives whose faces grace the U.S. paper currency. That was either a very stupid or a very cynical action on the candidate’s part--more likely, indeed, it was both. On the other hand, Obama’s apparently unguarded remark accurately reflects the social and political reality that neither competitive politics nor racial consciousness has been eradicated from American society, as a front-page article, based on a New York Times/CBS poll taken on 14 July and published in the Times shortly after, suggested. According to this story, “Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society….” The poll’s findings show that 80 percent of black voters view Senator Obama favorably, compared with 30 percent of white ones. Moreover, almost 60 percent of black participants indicated that they view race relations in America as bad, compared with 34 percent of white voters polled. The story was captioned: “Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race.”
Really, the miracle would be if the fact of a black man facing off against a white one in the race for the U.S. presidency did not end by aggravating racial feeling in this country almost to a state of irreparableness, as indeed it is almost certain to do. Blood is thicker than ballot ink. And in a multiracial nation such as ours is today, political candidates are as susceptible as athletes to racial symbolism, if not more so. It is inevitable that Barack Obama, running for the White House, should be viewed, both by his own race and by the white one, as the Joe Louis of his generation, and John McCain as Max Schmeling. But Schmeling, in his two battles against Louis, was not compelled to fight with one hand tied behind his back, as McCain seems fated to do.
The furor over the New Yorker’s cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim terrorists bumping knuckles in the Oval Office effectively dramatized the disadvantages a white candidate for the most powerful office in the world is subject to in a contest with a black opponent who is also the love-child of the national media. But the matter is not one of personal taste and partisanship alone. Rather, it is that those disadvantages have been institutionalized by the legal notion of “hate speech,” which is prosecutable at law. No one, of course, considers that John McCain really runs the risk of prosecution under the relevant statutes after November 4, particularly if he is president-elect by then. But, win or lose, McCain and Obama are sure to end up as the Goldsteins of 2008, objects of numerable Public Hates as well as of innumerable private ones, by one ethnic group or another. As the politicians, the managerial class, the academy, and the intellectuals have trained it to do for the past couple of generations, the American public--white, black, brown, yellow, and red--will follow the election campaign with a tender sensitivity, alert for “racist” overtones in even the gentlest salvos leveled by the candidates against one another. Every nuance, every “penumbra” (as the advocates of a “living Constitution” are wont to say) of every political speech and advertisement will be exaggerated and amplified. When the campaign staff for the Republican candidate in the 2006 U.S. Senate election in Tennessee, running against Rep. Harold Ford--a mulatto like Obama--aired a television ad featuring a white woman who winks suggestively at Ford, the commercial was perceived nationally, and denounced, as “racist.” But a Tennessee senate race is small potatoes compared to a run for the White House, and so the Ford incident is more likely than not to be replayed, in multiple and fortissimo, this fall on the national and international stage. Another incident of the magnitude of the Reverend Wright affair would explode like an atom bomb upon world opinion.
There is simply no reason to believe that the United States is “ready” for a biracial presidential contest, in spite of the dreaming “idealistic” minority that wants to believe with all its heart. That minority is distinguished primarily by class--upper-middle professional, for the most part, resident in geographical regions and social enclaves around the country. Hence the McCain-Obama contest risks enflaming class as well as racial antagonisms. The size of the white lower-middle class vote for Hillary Clinton in the last months of the primary campaign last season speaks volumes about the extent to which the Democratic race was divided along class, as well as racial, lines. Now, those same divides are about to be exposed and widened on a national scale, and across party lines.
As for the Latino population (that portion of it that will have to be content to demonstrate from the sidelines, as well those who are qualified, and registered, to vote), recent polls (late July-early August as I write) show it favoring Obama by 60-odd percent to 23 percent for McCain, a preference that is probably faute-de-mieux and strategic, given Latinos’ strong preference for Hillary Clinton during the primaries. If Obama prevails, the white majority might easily feel threatened by a perceived anti-white bias on the part of an alliance of nonwhites, even as Hispanics revert, post-election, to their historically antagonistic relationship with blacks, which a push by President Obama for “comprehensive immigration reform” would do little to ameliorate in the long run. If McCain, on the other hand, takes the election, the white reaction to his promised push for amnesty will inflame racial animosity on the part of Hispanics, who see in the grassroots resistance to immigration only racism, pure and unadulterated.
The afore-mentioned Times article quoted a black Pennsylvania Democrat as saying, “basically it’s the same old problem, the desire for power. People get so obsessed with power and don’t want to share it. There are people who are not used to blacks being on top.” There are, indeed. There are also people who feel they have good reason to resist blacks getting on top, when those blacks are Barack and Michelle Obama, with his activist history of preferential treatment for blacks and hers of racial resentment amounting to racial hatred. However that may be, it should be obvious that we have arrived neither in post-racial nor post-political America; obvious too that we cannot, even if such a thing were possible, achieve the second without having previously attained the first. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.