Playing the Race Card

By sheer luck, two things coincided last week: I began reading Kevin Kruse's wonderful book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005) and I saw an unusually acerbic exchange between journalists David Brooks and Mark Shields about the McCain campaign's charge that Barack Obama had "played the race card." Obama, as we all know, said in a speech that John McCain and his people are trying to whip up fear about his candidacy because he doesn't look like the presidents featured on our currency (although given the state of our economy, I think that Obama's first presidential act should be to put a picture of George W. Bush on every denomination.)

Now, as someone who is far more progressive than Obama on many issues, including race I suspect, this nevertheless won him my sympathy, and I raced to my computer to make my first campaign donation to --as he is now called-- "the presumptive Democratic nominee."

I too have been accused of "playing the race card," more than once, and in settings various, including comments on this blog. What people mean, as I understand it, is that at moments when I have believed it was crucial to talk about racism, particularly in a situation where damage was being done, I have been accused of introducing, not naming, "race" as an issue. This has become a standard tactic of the contemporary conservative repertoire, whether in the political sphere, the blogosphere, the university, or any other setting where power sharing, rights or equality might be at issue. The outcome that is intended is that I -- and others engaged in similar work -- should be made to feel embarassed, and that I should shut up or recant so that the conversation can go on. What it then means is that we cannot speak about racist behavior as anything but an accident or a misunderstanding, when in fact we need to talk about whether institutional racism (at the very least) is at work, and what we might do to correct the problem so that we can proceed in a fair way.

But of course, as in all things bloggable, "the race card" is more complex and devious than my little life can illustrate. It is a phrase that came to national attention, we should recall, in 1995 when prosecutor Christopher Darden accused defense attorney Johnny Cochran of having introduced -- not pointed out, mind you, but introduced -- race and white racism as a possible factor in the O.J. Simpson trial. That both men were black was confusing to many observers, but shouldn't be. Rather, as Linda Williams points out in her book Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 2001) the use of this phrase is deliberately intended to rescript legal or political narratives as melodrama. In other words, when one accuses one's opponent of "playing the race card" one deliberately diverts attention from the cultural, political and social facts of the history of race in America by claining that such things are -- well, only history. And it articulates racial discourse itself as merely a highly subjective, emotional state of mind, rather than a multi-faceted epistemology that Americans bring to their contemporary social, economic and political encounters because of their collective history.

Linguistically, and socially, the phrase plays another function as well. Some words are constricted by their past, and yet the ideas they express have not fallen out of use: hence, they require euphemisms. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, for example, has argued in a book and several articles that there are only very selective, usually private and contextual, uses of the word Nigger that are not readily perceived as doing harm to social and economic relationships in the contemporary United States. So instead, polite company has chosen the euphemism "the n-word" which allows one to both reference and disavow the concept that this volatile word calls up. Similarly, I think it has always been unequivically rude to call a person -- as opposed to an act -- racist, even during Jim Crow. Hence, a euphemism was called for that not only stood in for the word "racist," but that could be used to describe anti-racist activists as well. Thus, when someone has "played the race card" it means that we are all acknowledging that race is in play -- the point of conflict is whether that has corrupted the conversation beyond repair (the position of the McCain camp and its surrogates), or whether by talking about race we are describing the complexity of political culture in the twenty-first century United States, as it is embedded in a long and well-documented history of attempts to limit or suppress black political participation (my position.) And despite the significance of Obama's candidacy, that history is not over.

This is where we, the people, may be fortunate in the particular personality traits that Barack Obama brings to the table as a presidential candidate. Often there is no way to respond to melodrama but -- well, melodramatically. And Obama doesn't do that. He doesn't have a melodramatic bone in his body. He seems capable of taking almost endless abuse without losing his temper; of responding to nonsense politely, and then walking away. Which returns the Obama narrative to its origins as a story about heroism, not suffering (hat tip).

What is even more interesting to me is that Obama may actually be doing something he claims to care about: changing political culture in the United States. Because of his insistence on a heroic narrative, rather than a melodramatic one, members of what is now called the MSM (main-stream media) seem to be following along and not allowing such events to turn into festering cultural sores that divert us from critical national issues. For example, in a piece that is unusually insightful for a centrist news weekly, Andrew Romano of Newsweek has called the McCain campaign's attempt to slur Obama for talking about (his own) race Playing the 'playing the race card' card, and exposed this moment as campaign strategy intended to obfuscate the issues, not political information. Furthermore, in response to David Brooks' comment on the Lehrer News Hour that "talking about race in this context [of a political campaign], I think, is the worst thing," Mark Shields snapped back, "the charge yesterday that Obama had introduced and played the race card was so over-the-top by the McCain campaign. I mean, it was truly -- it boggled the mind. And it went beyond any concept of rationality." As Shields had pointed out earlier, "Now, did he raise the race issue? The race issue is with him every day of his life. When you see his picture, the race issue is there."

Which brings me back to Kevin Kruse. As Kruse argues, the New Right's claim that their movement and ideology are "color blind" is grounded in the history of white racism. He argues persuasively that the roots of this claim are in the alternative forms of segregation whites constructed when Jim Crow was struck down by the courts and civil rights activists and urban progressives, for similar and different reasons, sought to enforce the law. By the 1970's, when massive resistance to desegregation had failed, southern whites used their economic mobility to re-segregate themselves in the suburbs. Kruse points to what I think is an interesting paradox -- that the structural successes of the civil rights movement forced whites to displace their desire for racial separation onto new social and spacial formations where racism became "invisible" because it was not written into the law. As he also argues, the strand of conservative ideology and political discourse that culminated in the Reagan Revolution was developed in a suburban landscape whose defining halllmark was the absence, except as low wage workers, of people of color. "Inside such a homogenous setting," Kruse writes, "it is perhaps easy to understand how some have accepted without question the claims of conservative activists that their movement was -- and still in -- 'color blind' and unassociated with class politics. Indeed, in the suburbs, with no other colors in sight and no other classes in contention, such claims seem plausible. How could modern conservatism be shaped by forces that weren't there?"

Kruse -- who, by the way, although he is tenured at Princeton, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, a classic case of a city abandoned by whites when faced with demands for black economic equality (good on you, Kevin) -- points us to how someone like David Brooks, could say that while he was "fine with Obama's "grand speech" on race in Philadelphia, and that he does not think that either candidate can talk about race or racism in any other than a "demeaning" or "dirty way."

Perhaps. But the rest of us can, and I think it will be a central role for historians to play in this campaign to do so. And while you are doing your research take some time to go here and do what I did: play the race card. Give a few dollars to the Obama campaign.

Well, It's Deja Vu All Over Again

So here I am in the Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport and -- my flight is canceled because of a massive snowstorm in the northeast! Really! It’s too funny. Not.

But here’s an interesting historical note, one that reminds me of something a now-retired senior colleague, Dr. Tory, used to say when he was trying to shoot down a job candidate. “History,” he would say with an evil smile, and a look of profound pity for the rest of us who did not understand what a terrible scholar we wanted to hire, “is change over time. And I just don’t see change (pause) over (pause) time (pause) in this work.”

Well, I am reminded of this because I am having the same experience I had ten years ago. And yet it is not the same. Why? Technology.

OK. So I was at the Carter Library finishing up my work this morning when my phone went off. “This is Orbitz TLC,” said a chirpy little voice. “Your flight is cancelled!”

Whee!

Now I won’t bore you with everything in between, but it is simply true that in a crisis of this magnitude, where perhaps 100,000 people are trying to get somewhere, there is no point in trying to get information over the phone, which is what Delta always urges you to do rather than coming to the airport to scream at them for their relentless incompetence in the face of any small difficulty. I bet it was Delta that was in charge of getting General Hood and his troops out of Atlanta, and they finally burned the damn city down out of frustration. So you ask yourself: what would Rhett Butler do in this situation? And the answer is clear. You have to either steal a horse and buggy, put the fragile Melanie Wilkes in the back and the irritating-but-sexy Scarlett up front, and haul *** out the old Decatur road to Tara or -- you have to go to the airport.

I went to the airport, as I could not locate Mrs. Wilkes. There I discovered, by standing in a line for two hours, that although I could not get booked to Hartford until Monday, I could get to Baltimore tonight. Step one.

Then I bought 24 hours of wireless Internet time for $7.95. Step two.

Then I logged on to Amtrak, and booked a ticket out of BWI train station at 2:36 tomorrow afternoon (which, by the way, turned out to be a very good idea: during the time I was online, three earlier trains sold out.) Step 3.

Then I went to Travelocity and booked a room at the BWI Red Roof Inn for tonight, as I am too old to sleep in the airport. Step 4.

So instead of being home by dinnertime tonight, I’ll be home by dinnertime tomorrow. Which is significantly better than Monday evening, which was the best Delta could do. Fools.

So you see, I’ve got to hand it to Dr. Tory, many years after those meetings where I would have gladly put a stake in his sorry heart: history sometimes really is little else but change over time.

Leaving Atlanta

The last time I was in Atlanta, except perhaps to change planes, was a little more than ten years ago. It was an American Historical Association Annual Meeting and Saturday night, as everyone was making the rounds of the various smokers and publisher's parties ("I'm not going anywhere that the drinks aren't free!" my friend Ethel, who now works at Harvard, said to me that night) a rumor arose that there would be three or four inches of snow the next day. Eh, what-evah, we from New England shrugged, as we shoved our way through the Oxford Press reception (chardonnay.)

By the time I was throwing elbows at the Penn smoker (foreign beer and two colors of wine), I was hearing rumours that there would not only be snow in Atanta, there would be snow up North too. A lot. And that anyone who had her wits about her would consider booking an earlier flight. Maybe that night. However, this was not an option for Dr. Radical, since I was chairing a panel full of graduate students who had been re-drafting their papers for weeks getting ready for our 9:00 A.M. panel. It was their professional debut, you see. And I was close enough to my own professional debut to be sensitive to that, and not walk out on them.

Little did I know that the decision to act like a professional would doom me to four days of hideous frozen travel.

Now this was before cell phones, and before everyone had email everywhere they went. Today, instead of going on to the Potemkin University smoker (full bar, as befits les universites nouveaux) and then the queer party at John Howard's apartment (I just don't recall what was served, except that along with the drinks was something dinner-ish) I would have emailed to the BlackBerry of a local colleague, gotten him/her to stand in for me, rebooked my flight, and hightailed it out of there on a late flight. But no. That was then, everything was lo-tech, and the best I could have done was leave a post-it on John Howard's toothbrush: "By the way -- can you do a panel in the Jefferson Room, 9 a.m.? There's a good fellow. Toodle-oo."

So instead I went back to my hotel room, got up the next day nursing a roaring hangover, and chaired and commented for the panel as the first little flakes started to fall. I remember sitting there in the hermetically sealed conference room, looking at the six or seven people from Ottumwa C.C. and University of Nebraska -- Pothole, whose idea of a good time was to hit the nine o'clock panels. I had that creeping sensation you get at the beginning of "The Poseiden Adventure," when you know it is a matter of time before Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters are shinnying up a smokestack.

Most of the historians who will read this blog aren't old enough to remember the next few days, but there were no good choices if you lived anywhere on the east coast, and really as far west as Chicago. Snow blanketed half the nation, and it kept snowing for days in the northeast. Every single airport was closed by 2:00 and stayed closed well into the following week. Those who had been smart enough to have booked a direct flight before ten got home; everyone else did not. My sprightly elderly colleague, Professor Chips, and I went to the airport together on the MARTA: he had a direct flight and made it as far as Regional airport, thirty miles from Zenith, but could not get to his house because it was illegal to drive in our state. He spent the next few days in the Regional airport motel. Some people just stayed at the Atlanta Hilton, which kept them on at the conference rate, but since six inches of snow is as bad as three feet in the south, I am told that over the next few days, the hotel gradually ran out of food. There were unconfirmed reports that a few graduate students were -- well, consumed. But I stress-- these reports are unconfirmed.

I made it as far as Charlotte, NC, where flights closed down as soon as I landed. I went to a cash machine and maxed out, and bought a Very Long Book (since it was an airport in the days before they sold real books in airports, and it was the Charlotte airport, I suspect it was a W.E.B. Griffin novel.) I then went to a seedy motel, which had an even seedier diner attached to it. Two days later I got a flight out to Albany, which was open for about three hours before the storm turned around and it shut again. Then I took an Amtrak train, eventually making it to Shoreline, twelve hours later.

And you ask why I have not been back to Atlanta since. Oy. To this day I remember clicking the heels of my ruby slippers at the USAir desk in Charlotte.