Tag Archives: Racism

Playing Field to Prison Pipeline?

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Hank Willis Thomas – “Strange Fruit”

Playing Field to Prison Pipeline?
by David J. Leonard |

In our contemporary moment, sport does much of the ideological work of mass incarceration.  Even more than other forms of popular culture, which peddle in racial stereotypes, celebrate law and order, and turn police into righteous crime fighters, sports has increasingly become a space that is central to maintaining America’s prison nation.  Because of the visibility and cultural resonance of sports, because of the number of African Americans involved in professional sports, and because of the centrality of “American Dream” narratives, sports serve as the public relations wing of mass incarceration.

None of this should be surprising given the racist nature of America’s criminal justice system, and the centrality of race within contemporary discourses.  Public discourses around sports and criminal justice center race.

Writing about basketball, Todd Boyd argues that the NBA “remains one of the few places in American society where there is a consistent racial discourse,” where race, whether directly or indirectly, is the subject of conversation at all times (Boyd 2000, p. 60).  This is equally resonant with football and therefore it is not surprising that racialized conversations of sports and the criminal justice inform one another.

Of course this is nothing new.  According to Elizabeth Alexander, the history of American racism has always been defined by practices where black bodies are put on display “for public consumption,” whether in the form of “public rapes, beatings, and lynchings” or in “the gladiatorial arenas of basketball and boxing.”

Jonathan Markowitz highlights ways in which the sports media contributes to the widespread criminalization of the black body: “The bodies of African American athletes from a variety of sports have been at the center of a number of mass media spectacles in recent years, most notably involving Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson, but NBA players have been particularly likely to occupy center stage in American racial discourse.”

Whether through the media spectacles surrounding Tyson, O.J. Kobe Bryant, Aaron Hernandez and countless other cases, or the adoration and fear imbued in physical bodies (that which is desired on the field is also that which rationalizes mass incarceration, stop and frisk, and law and order), we see the convergence of the front and back pages.

Not coincidently, the increased focus on law-breaking athletes mirrors the integration of sports (and the rise of America’s prison nation).  That is, as collegiate and professional sports became more integrated, sports media and fans began to show an increasing concern about “criminal athletes.”  This is especially the case in a post-1980s context, whereupon President Reagan seized upon the death of Len Bias to expand the racialized war on drugs.

Since then, and with proliferation of ESPN industrial complex, there has been an immense focus on crime and athletes, giving credence to the widely circulated ideas about the pathology of blackness.   The shared language of “discipline” and the administering of punishment for those who violate the rules of society/sports further illustrates the convergence of the sports and the (in)justice system.

If sports are central to the prison industrial complex, ESPN represents the CEO of its public relations firm. Given the longstanding role of the Disney Corporation in circulating dehumanizing images, it should be of little surprise that ESPN is doing the ideological grunt work of contemporary racism and mass incarceration.

Whether publishing articles about drugs and Oregon football, or sensationalizing each and every traffic stop involving a (black) athlete (never mind issues of pretext stops and racial profiling) or becoming the mouth piece for bringing law and order to a post-Palace Brawl NBA, ESPN has been a willing partner in the prison industrial complex.

In recent weeks, ESPN has turned this job over to Jason Whitlock. This is the same man who once refereed to Serena Williams as an “unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber, a byproduct of her unwillingness to commit to a training regimen and diet that would have her at the top of her game year-round.”  Fear and loathing of black youth jumps off his pages; the same sort of stereotypes and narratives that rationalize stop and frisk, and shoot first mentality that plagues this nation.

The sustained nature of Whitlock’s discussion of personal/communal/cultural failures and mass incarceration (see Whitlock Gone Wild), raises the stakes here.  For example, in a recent column on Thanksgiving (never mind the history of genocide and white supremacy), where Whitlock denounced Professor Michael Eric Dyson, he once again peddled his simplistic vision of the world: the personal and cultural failures of African Americans, facilitated by intellectual and cultural enablers, has led to mass incarceration.

And while Mr. Whitlock wants to locate mass incarceration at the doorstep of hip-hop culture, at the feet of Jay Z, Allen Iverson, and Michael Eric Dyson, he is asking us to ignore history.  He wants to erase the linkages between mass incarceration and the history of slavery, between white supremacy, “Black Social Death,” and America’s prison system.  In turning the discussion into choices, values (respectability), culture, single-parented homes, and bad role models, he denies the links between deindustrialization and prison expansion, between the militarization of America’s police forces and the number of African American youth locked up.

As I read column after column that blames hip-hop or the N-Word for mass incarceration, I cannot help but wonder if Richard’s Nixon’s launching of the war on drugs, if the Rockefeller laws, the federal sentencing guidelines for crack, the disenfranchisement laws that saturate our nation, the centrality of racial appeals for law and order, President Bill Clinton’s massive expansion of America’s prison system, and the he investment in police and not schools, was all because of hip-hop.  If you live in Jason Whitlock’s world, and that of the vast number of celebratory commentators, that seems to be the conclusion.

Post Script (1/26/14)

In the aftermath of the sustained demonization of Richard Sherman I am struck by the continued role that sports as an instrument of mass incarceration.  The response to Sherman, the panics, and even the defense (“he is one of the good ones”) all points to the engrained nature of the criminalized/commodified black body within the dominant sporting imagination.

In 2011, C. Richard King and myself edited book – Criminalized and Commodified: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports –  on the anti-black racism that is central to American sports.  While including essays on different case studies, the cultural and media discourses that have been full display this week are prominent within this work.  The original title of this book  was “Thugs and Dollar Signs” in that black athletes are continuously subjected to the logics of racism and late twenty-first century capitalism – they are legible as criminals/”thugs” and dollar signs/source of profits.  And this is not a binary but rather indication that the criminalized black body is a source of profit – financial profit, ideological profit, political profit and indicative of the profits of racism. As evident in this instance (and before) Sherman has been imagined to be a “thug” all while the NFL, ESPN, and others found ways to continue to profit not only off his body but the “thug discourse.”  This represents a window into anti-black racism.  The rendering of Sherman as a “thug” and the profiting of his body and anti-black racism is ubiquitous.  The consequences of these ideological and material systems are daily.  It’s bigger than a play, it’s bigger than Sherman and it’s bigger than the game.

You aint funny or cutting edge: A letter to Jason Horton

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Dear Jason  (@Jason_Horton), AKA “the world’s only white male comedian”; AKA the man who played the slave master rapist in ‘Harriet Tubman Sex Tape.’

How does it feel to be part of one the most vile videos I have seen in a long time.  Spare me your explanations about comedy and satire.  You participation (your role) and the video itself are all about as funny as Paula Deen and Rush Limbaugh.  Your Los Angeles address and hipster jeans don’t mean anything to me.  I cannot see into your heart, but your “work” tells me something. I see a video that perpetuates racism, sexism, and violence.  It traffics in dehumanizing images, finding pleasure in other’s pain. I see you and your partners in moral crime (Simmons and others who made this video deserve plenty of criticism and condemnation – go here and here and take a read and then come back to reflect on your own responsibilities) as merely recycling  ideas that have for centuries justified black suffering, sexual violence directed at black women, and enslavement.

I know the satire argument is coming, but it’s not funny, it’s not satire (what are you satirizing? toward what end?) and if you think that is funny, what does that say.  What does it say that you were willing to be a piece  that feels like a remake of Birth of a Nation.  This slavery porn pathologizes black bodies, renders them as objects of ridicule and violence.

Jason, you once noted “I also grew up in the punk rock/hardcore rebellious culture. I really have a similar mentality when it comes to comedy. I think comedy should be dangerous.” What is dangerous about reinforcing many centuries of white supremacy?  What is dangerous in perpetuating stereotypes about oversexed black women seducing their white masters?  What is dangerous in profiting and relishing off black death?  Stereotypes?

You seem very invested in positioning yourself as cutting edge, as new, and as hip?  Congratulations, you just participated in a video that would make D.W. Griffith proud.  You just acted in video that seems to have taken cues from some of America’s most racist forms of popular culture.  Cutting edge is not 19th century minstrelsy.  Is that what you call hip? Is that what cutting edge looks like to you?  In your eyes, would Thomas Dixon be a cutting edge writer; would bull connor be a cutting edge police man; George Wallace an edgy politician; would Henry Ford be a cutting edge business man?

I imagine you think this video is funny – what is funny about slavery, about rape, about the thousands of black men and women, beaten, brutalized, and enslaved at the hands of people who look you and me.  I predict that you think it’s just a “joke,” but maybe that’s because the “joke” isn’t about you, isn’t about your family and community.

The mere idea that anyone could find humor here is the ultimate expression of privilege – male privilege, white privilege.  Is it easy to reenact rape, to mock black suffering and death, from a distance?  How can you not feel the anguish and pain resulting from your participation and that pain is not just in history but evident today?

Can you name 5 things about Tubman (or even slavery); maybe if you spent less time making infantile YouTube videos and more time reading, you would have known better.  But your lack of knowledge aint my concern. Your participation in this video is reprehensible; your participation is a sign of disrespect and ignorance about Harriet Tubman; you have spit on her life and legacy, her struggle for freedom and justice.

In case you get some time, I encourage you to read about Tubman, about slavery, and about the history of rape and lynchings.  Trying something else cutting edge – intelligence, knowledge.  Try studying and you might learn about the history of black resistance in the face of white supremacy in all its forms. As I am not sure if you will open a book, at least read this brief summary of Tubman’s life from @prisonculture

Araminta Ross (Harriet Tubman) became a “slave for hire” at the age of 5. She did domestic work, field work, cared for children…She once said that one of her mistresses would savagely whip her almost every day, first thing in the AM. When she was teenager, she stood before an overseer who was in pursuit of another slave. He took a lead weight & crashed it on her head. She was deeply wounded. She said that the blow “broke her skull.” She was carried back bleeding. She had no bed. They lay her on the floor. She was sent back to her parents who thought she would die. She survived. She went on to become Harriet Tubman. She freed slaves daringly & without fear. This is the person who @UncleRUSH laughed.

That is the person you mocked; that is the person you disparaged; that is the person whose community you enacted violence on today; that is the person you pretended to rape.  Read it again. Learn about the “Moses of her people”

You have said very little since the release of your historic porn. But I can hear the defense of this video and its participants.

Ignorance is not a defense.  And “I am sorry if I hurt your feelings” is not an apology.   The ability to be ignorant, to be unaware of the history and consequences of racial bigotry, and misogyny, to simply do as one pleases, is a quintessential definition of privilege.  The ability to disparage, to demonize, to ridicule, and to engage in racially hurtful practices from the comfort of one’s YouTube channel, from one’s segregated neighborhood, from one’s hipster enclave reflects both privilege and power. If you refuse to see, think, or feel outside your own experiences you are merely cashing in on those privileges.  At whose expense?

The ability to blame others for being oversensitive, for playing the race card, or for making much ado about nothing are privileges codified structurally and culturally.  Jokes about slavery, about sexual violence, about rape, about a history of white supremacy, about Harriett Tubman, are never a neutral form of entertainment, but loaded sites for the production of damaging stereotypes and violent images.

How about you take some responsibility and condemn yourself for being part of this video; now that would be cutting edge?

—-

Post Script – In addition to the articles above, I encourage any to read Kimberly Foster’s Twitter timeline, this piece by Jamilah King, and this from K Lynn Dreher

Please also read this important contextual piece at Feminist Wire.

Apologies for few typos/errors in original post and getting Mr Horton’s first name wrong.  Should be all corrected now

Reality ‘Written in Lightening’: On ‘Fruitvale Station’

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(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
by David J. Leonard
Originally published| NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Walking out of the theater in West Los Angeles, I felt a lot of emotions.  Even before Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station started, I felt the film at a visceral level: I was sad, anxious, angry, and disheartened as I sat down. Emotionality is central to the film.

As brilliant as the film is at tapping into the emotionality of Oscar Grant’s killing, it is not simply a film of anguish or one that builds upon the outrage and sadness compelled by murders #every28hours.  It is a work of art; a tapestry of images, narratives, and movements.  It is a story of depth about a layered life put together through sight and sound, image and voice.

There is a lot to be said about the film at an intellectual, artistic, and cinematic level.  For example, Coogler’s ability to “make Oakland a character” is crucial to the film; it is done with great precision and depth.  The shots of street signs, the Bay, BART, and several Oakland landmarks are critical to the film’s situating of Grant’s life and death within a physical landscape.  To understand Oscar Grant and to reflect on his death, requires an ability to see and hear, feel and understand, Oakland in post civil rights, post 9/11 America.  His life and death is a story of Oakland; it is also a story of neighborhoods and communities across the nation.

With its use of the camera, from the close-ups of Tatiana scrubbing crabs to the various moments that brought Grant’s humanity to life, Fruitvale Station forces viewers to not only confront Grant’s death and his killing in 2009, but his life: his relationship with his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz); his adoration for his mother Wanda Johnson (Octavia Spencer) and sister; his beautiful interactions with his daughter; and the many obstacles he faced in an unforgiving America.  Wesley Morris offers an important assessment of the film when he writes:

Fruitvale Station speaks to that yawning discrepancy. What feels slight, shaggy, and ordinary about it is also rather remarkable. To present Grant this way — as a son who loves his mother, as a father who loves his daughter, as the sort of person who comforts a dying dog and pleads with a shop owner to permit a pregnant woman to use his restroom — is to remove the stigma. He’s a lower-middle-class kid who got mixed up with crime. But most of the narrative belongs to a charming, charismatic, devoted young man, someone striving to better himself. It’s not only that this Grant is a person. It’s that, to a fault, he’s made to be more than black male pathology.

Rahiel Tesfamariam similarly emphasizes the film’s cinematic and narrative success in humanizing Grant – in challenging the systemic flattening of black bodies.  Fruitvale Station gives voice to Grant and the injustice evident in his death and in doing so challenges America’s racial landscape.

We also see this vulnerability play out in his dealings with the matriarchs in his family… These women are his anchors in life. Sophina keeps him honest, holds him accountable and brings out his sensual side. Through their relationship, we see his desire to be a protector and provider. His mother Wanda grounds him in prayer and nurtures him through wise words and good food. Her “tough love” approach often haunts him in his actions and decision-making. Then, there’s Grandma Bonnie who keeps him connected to tradition and the family history that proceeds him.

This backdrop is so important to the film, and to a larger landscape of anti-black racism; yet as I watched and cried, I found myself asking myself: does the persistence of segregation in Hollywood constrain the impact of such an important film?  Does the nature of distribution limit the reach of films centering African American voices and experiences into “red state America”?

Given the ubiquity of the criminalized black body, and given the widespread practice of blaming Grant or Trayvon Martin for their own deaths, it is disheartening to know that those who continue to peddle and profit in/from anti-black racism will unlikely watch Fruitvale Station.

It is infuriating that those who blame inequality on “single mothers” and “children born out-of-wedlock” will never be forced to digest the beautiful relationship that Tatiana had with her father Oscar, who would be part of that 72% statistic cited without any thought over and over again.

The anger I felt is about the killing of Oscar Grant – and Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Ayana Jones-Stanley, Rekia Boyd, Amadou Diallo; yet it was about a theater with only a handful of people; it is about knowledge of multiplexes across the country screening zombie movies and another about a snail rather than films that have the potential to transform a generation.  It is about knowledge that Madea, the Help, or the Butler will more likely be screened than the stories of Oscar Grant or Ruby.

Frustration, sadness, and anger.

Almost 100 years after the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film steeped in white supremacy and anti-black violence, Fruitvale Station brings a level of black humanity that has remain on the periphery of the Hollywood imagination for a century.  Almost 100 years after the release of a film that celebrated the rise of the Klan as the necessary force to thwart black savagery, Fruitvale Station stepped into a cinematic and larger racial landscape to offer a powerful counter narrative to the anchors of contemporary racism.  Yet, 100 years after Birth of a Nation was celebrated as “history written in lightening,” the prospect of Fruitvale Station receiving similar treatment feels to the right of impossible.

As with the struggle for justice itself, the actual hearing and seeing of Grant, Martin, Diallo, and so many others remains a distant possibility.  As with the activists who have used their cell phones to document the specter of police violence and anti-black/brown racism, Coogler uses his camera to further force a nation to confront these realities.  Fruitvale Station shines a spotlight on this empathy deficit and the denied humanity.  And like the killing of Grant, this is the source of my frustration, sadness, and anger.

But be clear, Fruitvale Station is reality written in lightening; a piercing ray of truth telling that is painful.  It is a disheartening, infuriating, and devastating reality; one that everyone should confront before another train arrives at Fruitvale Station.

***

Racial gap in pot busts extends to SF – SFGate

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Racial gap in pot busts extends to SF

Justin Berton

(06-04) 20:58 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — In San Francisco, a city that prides itself on a progressive attitude toward marijuana, authorities have been arresting fewer and fewer people for pot possession. But African Americans are arrested at far higher rates than whites, according to a report released Tuesday.

The report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which analyzed federal arrest data, found that black people in San Francisco were 4.3 times more likely than white people to be arrested on the charge in 2010. The disparity was twice the state rate and slightly higher than the national rate.

The divide in marijuana arrests – which the ACLU attributed to a “staggering racial bias” – persisted even though black and white people have been found to use pot with similar frequency, the report concluded. It questioned the high cost of marijuana enforcement at a time when Americans are increasingly favoring legalization of the drug.

San Francisco Police Department officials did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment on the report.

The numbers varied across the Bay Area: In Marin County African Americans were 4.1 times more likely to be arrested than whites in 2010. In contrast, in Alameda County they were 1.3 times as likely to face arrest for marijuana possession as white people.

Experts on policing and drug enforcement offered a number of theories on the disparity in San Francisco, including that police officers target enforcement in neighborhoods that have high African American populations and high levels of crime, like Bayview-Hunters Point.

As the core African American population diminishes in San Francisco and concentrates in the city’s southeast districts, some experts said, the group can be disproportionately affected by such enforcement.

Continue reading at  Racial gap in pot busts extends to SF – SFGate.

 

Not Worthy of National Attention: The NOLA Mother’s Day Mass Shootings by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

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Not Worthy of National Attention: The NOLA Mother’s Day Mass Shootings by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Not Worthy of National Attention: The NOLA Mother’s Day Mass Shootings

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Amid the celebration of moms across the nation (amid the passage of policies that directly and indirectly hurt so many moms), America was once again reminded that all moms and all people are not celebrated equally; all lives are not worthy of similar mourning and attention. In New Orleans, 19 people, including 2 children, were shot at a Mother’s Day Celebration.

Hamilton Nolan reflected on the narrative that has already emerged (can you imagine how many stories about mothers celebrating with their children would have been on the air had this occurred in West Los Angeles or Manhattan, NY), offering a powerful comparison to the Boston marathon bombing:

A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into radical Islam and become violent. A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into street crime and become violent. A crowd of innocent people attending the Boston marathon are maimed by flying shrapnel from homemade bombs. A crowd of innocent people attending a Mother’s Day celebration in New Orleans are maimed by flying bullets. Two public events. Two terrible tragedies. One act of violence becomes a huge news story, transfixing the media’s attention for months and drawing outraged proclamations from politicians and pundits. Another act of violence is dismissed as the normal way of the world and quickly forgotten.

The juxtaposition of Boston and New Orleans is striking given the extent of death, given the violence that occurred within ritualized spaces, and given how each is a communal gathering space. Of course one doesn’t have to travel down South to New Orleans or West to Chicago to see the hypocrisy in the separate and unequal narratives. The lack of national attention afforded to violence in Roxbury, Mass; the lack of interventions in the form of jobs, reform to the criminal justice system, investment in education, and economic development is a testament to the very different ways violence registers in the national imagination. Roxbury doesn’t enliven narratives of humanity but instead those dehumanizing representations.

Yet, don’t we need to extend the comparison to Newtown, Aurora, and Milwaukee? Remixing the above: A couple of disaffected young men in search of meaning drift into spree shootings and become violent. Flying bullets wound crowds of innocent people attending a movie, going to school, or praying at their local temple. How is the reaction to Newtown and New Orleans, to Boston and Milwaukie, and to Aurora and Chicago an indicator of who we expect to commit violence, where we expect to be safe, who we see as a victim, and where we see violence as normalized and where it is exceptional?

One comment in the thread made the link between Boston, Newtown (Aurora), and New Orleans in a profound way:

The difference is, of course, that the media and the public focus on Things That Could Happen to Middle Class White People. Bombs placed at a marathon or a plane hitting a building or a gunman mowing down people in Newtown, Connecticut or Aurora, Colorado are things that happened to middle class white people and show the other white people that it could happen to them. Crime is somehow not supposed to happen to middle class white people; it’s supposed to happen to black people.

Whereas violence is supposed to happen in Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, because of “culture of poverty,” because of single parents, because of dystopia and nihilism, because of warped values, gangs, and purported pathologies, the Boston Marathon, an Aurora movie theater, or a Newtown school are re-imagined as safe. These are places and spaces immune from those issues.

The normalization of violence in inner cities is why the suburbs exist; it is why police work to keep violence from entering into those suburban safety zones; it is why police guard the borders, making sure the wrong people don’t cross into the idyllic homeland of the American Dream. It is why white middle-class America avoids “those” communities or activities presumed to be dangerous (or go during the right time with the right people); it is why the white middle-class America reacts when those spaces that are presumed to be safe are simply not.

The movie theater, the school, and the marathon are symbols of Americana and therefore desirable, pure, and the embodiment of goodness. As such, the violence that happens in these “otherwise safe” enterprises and places occurs because of the entry of “dangerous” and threatening people. Outsiders enter into otherwise safe and idealized spaces.

Continue reading at Not Worthy of National Attention: The NOLA Mother’s Day Mass Shootings by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile).

Obama and the Death of White Power – News & Views – EBONY

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Obama and the Death of White Power

by David J. Leonard

The re-election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States prompted a wide range of hateful reactions. From tearful Romney supporters to enraged bigots, the prospects of an African American leading the nation for another four years sent many within White America into panic mode or what I like to call “WDD:” White Delusional Disorder.

Teenagers took to twitter to hurl racial slurs without concern for the blowback; college students at Ole Miss and Hampden-Sydney (among others) took to the streets to voice their anger. In displays of violence usually reserved for sports celebrations, or disgust over an early bar closing, White males made their prejudices clear, hurling racial epithets and rocks with little fear of consequence. As editor Jamilah Lemieux said of those on twitter “the fact that there are so many people willing to publicly express these views… is troubling.”

Predictably, much of the chatter has focused on individual reactions, imagining racism in terms of emotion, anger, and frustration. The media’s shock and awe is not surprising given its failure to shine a spotlight on the resurgent White nationalism since 2008 and persistent racial inequality in the United States. Worse yet, the media has consistently portrayed racism as extreme in nature—-the extremely young, the extremely bigoted, the extremely Southern, the extremely uneducated, and the extremely low-class. But most of us know that it is more common than any newspaper may have you believe.

The anxieties, anger, and outrage weren’t so much about backlash against liberal values, but what Obama’s victory revealed about the nation. There was a clear, alarming message about demographic shifts and waning White male control. According to Keisha Bentley-Edwards, “The anger wasn’t only about President Obama and his re-election. It was overall frustration at the emerging power of diverse people in this country.”

It became yet another moment to lament “White victimhood,” a fantasy too fictitious for even Hollywood. It became an instance to mourn “the end of White America,” which for everyone from Bill O’Reilly to Donald Trump, from David Duke to White nationalists marks the demise of American civilization. O’Reilly laments “a changing country” given the increased power of “people who want things,” recycling the proven politics of White resentment.

Not surprisingly, while White tears were flowing, White nationalists seized upon President Obama’s re-election to further its movement. At Stormfront.org, the hub for global racism, readers were met with a new introduction to the website:

Continue reading at Obama and the Death of White Power – News & Views – EBONY.

Ain’t Your Father’s Southern Strategy: Whiteness as Mass Appeal

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Ain’t Your Father’s Southern Strategy: Whiteness as Mass Appeal

Dr. David J. Leonard

The 2012 election, like every election before it, has been defined by race. This is America, and race always matters. Death, taxes, and race. While 2008-2012 has prompted more explicit racial assault on then candidate and ultimately President Obama, race, racism, and white supremacy defines the history of American politics. Sister Souljah, Willie Horton, anti-Muslim appeals, demonization of undocumented immigrants, “the welfare queen,” the southern strategy, and countless other examples point to the ways that race defines American political campaigns. And these are just examples since the late 1960s from national presidential campaigns.

Yet the vitriol, the explicit racial appeals, and the ubiquitous racial rhetoric has been a noteworthy outcome of the 2012 election. Adele M. Stan, in “Romney Pushed Boundaries of ‘Acceptable Racism’ to Extremes” aptly describes the campaign as a long and winding campaign of racism, one that irrespective of the outcome has had its consequences:

If asked what one thing about the 2012 campaign most impacted everyday American life, one answer stands out above all others: racism. The wink-wink racial coding Romney uses, combined with the unabashed racism of such surrogates as former Bush administration chief of staff John Sununu, adds up to quite a wash of race-baited waters over the campaign. Then add to that the steady stream of racist rhetoric that characterized the Republican presidential primary campaign, and the wash looks more like a stew set on simmer for the better part of a year.

Since the early months of 2011, our politics have been marinating in the language of racial hatred, whether in former U.S. senator Rick Santorum’s “blah people” moment, or former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s tarring of Barack Obama as “the food stamp president.”

The consequences and context of a campaign based in racism, based in a thirty-year racial assault on the civil rights movement is fully visible in AP’s recent poll, which found that both explicit and implicit racial bias against African Americans and Latinos is on the rise. According to the AP, “51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes,” which was a 3 percent rise since 2008. When examining implicit bias, “the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.” Should we be surprised?

The likes of John Sununu and Donald Trump, the sight of racist t-shirts and posters at GOP rallies and elsewhere, and the explicitly racist discourse point to the strategy of racist appeals and the consequences of such appeals. The impact of racism isn’t simply voters picking Mitt Romney because of their anti-black racism, or even the ways that the accusations against President Obama as a “food stamp president,” as “lazy” as a “socialist” and as “anti-White” resonate because of an entrenched white racial frame, but in the yearning and appeal of a white male leader. Race doesn’t just matter in why whites are voting against President Obama but also why they are voting for Mitt Romney. Tom Scocca, in “Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?” argues that anti-black racism, dog “whistles” and prejudice isn’t the only reason why white males are casting their vote for Romney-Ryan but because they are white and because white masculinity is associated with toughness, leadership, intelligence, and countless other racial stereotypes. “White people — white men in particular — are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney’s candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him.”

Continue reading @ Dr. David J. Leonard: Ain’t Your Father’s Southern Strategy: Whiteness as Mass Appeal.