The dominant sociological paradigm about whites’ racial attitudes is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “colorblind racism.” In short, Bonilla-Silva, building from the work of other scholars, argues that the racial ideology of whites has entered a new phase in the post-Civil Rights era. In this era, racism is less overt and more subtle. Rather than using older, Jim Crow-era forms of racism — e.g., blacks are biologically inferior to whites, they are subhuman, etc. — whites now use a variety of rhetorical frames to blame blacks for their collective place in our socioeconomic hierarchy without sounding explicitly racist.
When you ask whites about residential segregation, for example, you will often get answers along the lines of “it’s natural to want to live with their own kind.” Further, whites will criticize race-based programs such as Affirmative Action by claiming that they go against our national ideas of egalitarianism, equal opportunity, and democracy. And so on. This leads to a society that is full of, as Bonilla-Silva’s book is titled, Racism Without Racists. (If you are interested in more on this, Rachel’s Tavern has a nice discussion on “Colorblind Racism vs. Old Fashioned Racism.”)
As a story in today’s Washington Post demonstrates, however, old-fashioned racism is alive and well, particularly in response to the Obama campaign. Here are just a couple of the racist anecdotes documented in the article by Obama campaigners in Indiana and Pennsylvania:
* For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
* Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”
* On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.
What is especially sickening about this is the extent to which the Clinton campaign has encouraged this through their surrogates and via Senator Clinton’s most recent comments on the matter:
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
There sure is, Hillary.
np: John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio - Traneing In