[Dems2008] Op-ed: Play The Race Card At Your Own Peril

Play the Race Card At Your Own Peril

By Richard Thompson Ford

Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

It's conventional wisdom that American racism is an inexhaustible well that cynical politicians can always dip into if they want to sink their opponents in a campaign. That's what Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Hispanic pollster, Sergio Bendixen, seemed to be doing when he told a reporter last month that Latino voters haven't generally "shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."

But modern racism isn't like the water in a well. It's more like the scum in a pond: It might settle to the bottom if left alone, but it can also be whipped up into a froth. And that's what Bendixen was really doing.

Clinton went on to win a resounding 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in California on Super Tuesday. But her victory didn't prove her pollster's drastically overstated point (many black candidates -- Charles Rangel, David Dinkins and others -- have enjoyed significant Hispanic support) so much as illustrate how today's race-baiting tactics do more than just tap into preexisting racial animosity: They actually create and inflame it. And this in turn creates a problem that can last long after the election is over.

This is something for Clinton to ponder as the race moves into Texas and Ohio, where she is counting on support from large blocs of Hispanic voters. Already, the kinds of tensions and unexpected dilemmas that this subtle race baiting raises are affecting the campaign itself, with Hispanic leaders angered at the replacement of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, a Mexican American, in favor of African American Maggie Williams.

Clinton defended Bendixen's claim as a "historical statement" and added that "obviously what we're trying to do is bring America together." But by insisting that Hispanics are anti-black bigots and insinuating that black politicians won't serve the interests of Hispanic constituents, Bendixen may well have helped inspire the racial tensions he purported to describe. African Americans have had their worst fears of anti-black racism confirmed by a supposed expert on Latino opinion; Latinos, told that their community rejects black candidates, may well assume that this must be so for a good reason -- such as African American prejudice against them.

Historically, race baiting has mostly played on the latent bigotry or racial anxieties of white voters. But now it's becoming an equal-opportunity tactic, which makes the damage potentially farther reaching than ever before. The black-vs.-Hispanic appeal is the latest twist. But supporters of Sen. Barack Obama also tried to drum up racial outrage over Clinton's reasonable observation that President Lyndon B. Johnson's political savvy was as important to the success of the Civil Rights Act as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiring leadership. And the Clinton campaign has sought to marginalize Obama as a narrow "black" candidate, while also having African American supporters emphasize Bill Clinton's honorary status as the "first black president" and denigrate the Illinois senator as "insufficiently black."

To some, the success of such racial provocations simply reflects the underlying attitudes of the general population. People know better than to announce their prejudices publicly, the argument goes, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they are free to act on their true beliefs. But political campaigns don't just take public attitudes as a given, they also shape them. And race baiting in politics is, unfortunately, as American as the electoral college.

U.S. history is full of examples of political opportunists willing to play the race card to gain an edge in a close election. Even the violent resistance to civil rights in the Jim Crow South wasn't the inevitable result of inveterate social prejudice: It was deliberately triggered by opportunistic politicians desperate to stay in office.

As legal historian Michael Klarman showed in his 2004 book "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights," Southern racism, while still widespread and often deeply held, was in rather steep decline after World War II. Segregationists were losing elections or hanging on to power by their fingernails. When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregated public schools in 1954, segregationist politicians exploited the resulting resentment and anxiety to save their flagging careers, portraying the Warren Court and civil rights activists as outside agitators.

The violent reaction against civil rights was in part the result of such political tactics -- not the root of them. Segregationists didn't just pander to racist sentiment, they deliberately provoked it, nurtured it and intensified it. They made racism worse.

Later, Barry Goldwater's seemingly principled opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave birth to the undeniably cynical "Southern strategy" of the Republican Party, which relied on subtle (and occasionally blatant) racial appeals to scare white voters. By the 1980s, these appeals had helped turn the once reliably Democratic "Solid South" solidly Republican.

In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan extolled the virtues of states' rights to an audience in Philadelphia, Miss., where civil rights activists had famously been killed by racist whites in 1964. To many, this combination of text and context covertly signaled Reagan's opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Reagan also made racial appeals once in office: He used an African American Cadillac-driving "welfare queen" as Exhibit A in his case against liberal social welfare programs.

But as the public consensus in favor of civil rights grew, racial provocations became more subtle, focusing on controversial policies with racial associations such as immigration, affirmative action and criminal sentencing. In perhaps the most notorious racial insinuation in recent memory, the late GOP political strategist Lee Atwater helped George H.W. Bush win the presidency in 1988 by playing to the racial fears of white voters with a campaign ad that dramatically recounted the sexual crimes of Willie Horton, a felon furloughed from prison under a program supported by Bush's opponent, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The ad featured Horton's menacing mug shot, complete with shaggy Black Panther beard and Afro.

In 1990, incumbent Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina won a close race against his black Democratic challenger, Harvey Gantt, by exploiting white resentment of affirmative action: A Helms television spot featured a pair of pale hands crumpling a job rejection letter and a voiceover intoning, "You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority." Affirmative action has been a reliable "wedge issue" ever since, a way to drive white voters away from liberal politicians and toward conservatives.

In 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson of California made support for Proposition 187 -- a ballot initiative to deny undocumented immigrants access to social services -- a central theme of his reelection campaign. Soon after he won, Wilson, once a supporter of affirmative action, attacked it as a "racial spoils system" and threw his support behind the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. A 1996 Los Angeles Times article revealed that behind the scenes, Wilson and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich had candidly told GOP insiders that Proposition 209 had the potential to help Republicans in the upcoming congressional election. Affirmative action supporters weren't above playing the race card, either: They ran ads comparing Proposition 209's supporters to the Ku Klux Klan and, in a stunt worthy of Atwater or Karl Rove, invited former Klansman David Duke to a debate to argue in favor of the initiative.

A lot of contemporary racial antagonism isn't based on hatred and animus, but rather on mutual suspicion and mistrust. Overt racism is rare, but racial inequalities remain widespread and subtle. As a result, we often have to guess whether or not our neighbors are secretly prejudiced. People of color wonder whether their white neighbors and co-workers secretly hold them in contempt because of their race; whites worry that people of color secretly resent them for the color of their skin. And the increasingly complex relationships among black, Latino and Asian groups present similar anxieties, as well as their own unique vexations. An insidious suggestion from an influential person can trigger these suspicions and set off a dismal spiral of mistrust, reaction and recrimination.

It's ironic that, as politicians play the race card for personal advantage, pervasive racial injustices go unaddressed. None of the presidential candidates has proposed a policy response to the real racial problems facing our society: Many of our nation's cities are as racially segregated as they were in the era of Jim Crow, many minority neighborhoods are crime-plagued and bereft of opportunities for gainful employment, and one in three black men between 20 and 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation.

So far, the Clinton campaign's attempt to scare Hispanic voters away from Obama has met with significant success, and we'll probably see more in the future. Perhaps Clinton believes that the ends justify the means because she'll be more effective in advancing racial justice if she's elected. But whoever wins this election, it will take a lot of extra work come next January to reverse the damage caused by playing the race card now.

Richard Thompson Ford is a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of the recently published "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse."

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