Racism in today’s politics is a much more subtle beast than in decades past. Working within a post-Civil Rights Era context, it is simply no longer politically feasible to shout racist epithets and expect to win peoples’ votes. Explicitly racist language opens long-festering wounds in the American psyche, and no would-be elected official can use explicitly racist language without seriously damaging their political career, perhaps beyond all possible repair. It wasn’t so long ago that Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott practically destroyed his leadership future with an off-the-cuff remark. In 2002, Lott gave a speech during then-Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, and declared that “when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”
For those of you who didn’t pay enough attention in high school history, Strom Thurmond ran for President on an explicitly segregationist platform and opposed President Truman’s proposed anti-lynching laws. To make matters even worse, Lott voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, as well as voting against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday. Lott’s implicit endorsement of segregation, as well as his history of making racially-polarized votes, led to his resignation from the Senate Leadership and sent him into the political wilderness until he resigned from the Senate in 2007. However, such obviously racist remarks rarely emerge from today’s politicians. Instead, racism takes a much more subtle character, and the policies of “dog whistle racism” are much more en vogue. Moreover, the same race-baiting strategies that drove the nation apart in the 1960’s are still practiced by the same cynical politicians today. Racism, it seems, is a national illness that only time and patience will heal.
No discussion about race and politics would be complete without an in-depth examination of Richard Nixon and his Southern Strategy. Whatever else Tricky Dick was, nobody can deny that he was a very clever politician. Nixon and his presidential campaign pioneered the racially divisive politics that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush would use to devastating effect. During the 1960 Presidential election, Nixon tried unsuccessfully to woo Southern voters by attacking Kennedy’s frankly milquetoast stance on Civil Rights. Though the plan failed, Nixon succeeded in prying the normally Democratic Virginia and Tennessee out of the Democratic column, and almost succeeded in taking South Carolina as well. After losing in 1960, Nixon came back with a vengeance in 1968, explicitly targeting the “Wallace Voters” (referring to the race-baiting Alabama governor George Wallace) by pledging to end “forced busing” and supporting “states rights.” Unfortunately for Nixon, George Wallace himself was on the ballot, and Wallace ended up winning several conservative states that would have otherwise gone for Nixon. Never the less, Nixon did win South Carolina and several other Deep South states. The Southern Strategy, despite its ambiguous outcome, soon became a staple for Republican presidential campaigns.
If Nixon pioneered the use of racial polarization, Ronald Reagan surely purified it. After nearly unseating sitting President Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan roared back onto the political scene in 1980, and crushed incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Reagan, touting himself as a conservatives’ conservative, Reagan began his now-legendary campaign in tiny Neshoba County, Mississippi. At the Neshoba County Fair, Reagan railed against the encroaching federal government and vowed to “restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.” By most accounts, applause completely drowned out Reagan’s speech. Neshoba County, incidentally, is home to the tiny village of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where white supremacists brutally murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. Considering Nixon constantly used “states rights” where he meant “white supremacy”, Reagan’s message was surely not misunderstood. Reagan also decried the “welfare queens” in Chicago’s predominantly African-American South Side. Reagan’s implicitly racist politics paid enormous dividends; Reagan carried every southern state except Carter’s home state Georgia. The Southern Strategy did not end with Reagan’s elections.
In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush used similar dog-whistle politics to defeat his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis. Dukakis either polled evenly or ahead of George H.W. Bush, and seemed poised to defeat the hapless Vice President. Unfortunately for Dukakis, Bush had a valuable trick up his sleeve, his unquestionably ruthless and morally decrepit campaign manager Lee Atwater. Atwater, a native South Carolinian accustomed to tapping into white southern resentment, vowed to “strip the bark of the little bastard” and unleashed a series of horribly vicious attack ads. Most infamously, Atwater authorized and produced the “Willie Horton” ad, featuring convicted murderer and rapist Willie Horton. Horton was serving a life sentence for Murder 1, and had kidnapped and raped a young white woman while on a furlough program in Massachusetts. Atwater vowed to make “Horton his [Dukakis'] running mate”, and implied that if Dukakis were elected, many more black convicts would kidnap and rape white women. This vicious attack, coupled with the Dukakis campaign’s own Gilliganesque incompetence, allowed Bush to overcome a 17 point deficit in early summer polls and utterly vanquished the ill-fated governor.
Even today, dog-whistle politics are still used in general elections. During the 2000 Presidential Primaries, an “anonymous” (read: probably Karl Rove directed) organization began spreading rumors that John McCain fathered a black child out of wedlock. The smears had their intended effect and McCain lost South Carolina despite an early 5% lead in most polls. Such tactics aren’t limited to the Republicans either; Democrats are quite content to use race when it comes to defending their seats. Former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington was viciously attacked by his fellow Democrats when he sought to become Chicago’s first African-American mayor. Washington won the Mayoral race, but Chicago remained strongly racially polarized even after his death. More recently, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick suggested that the white district attorneys charging him with corruption were doing so in order to take down an African-American politician. He further characterized the Michigan Justice Department as an “illegal lynch mob”. Kilpatrick is currently incarcerated at the Oaks Park Correctional Facility in Michigan. Likewise, Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton is running an explicitly racially-motivated primary challenge to incumbent Representative Steve Cohen. Herenton charged Cohen, a white representative in a 60% African-American district, with “not thinking much of African-Americans” and is running specifically to be the African-American representative in an African-American majority seat.
This dirty and disgustingly racist policies surely leave a foul taste in many American’s mouths. All too often, American elections are less about who can serve their constituents best and more about who has the right skin color or religious background. Fortunately, the tide may finally be turning. Tomorrow, I will help explain why the new Obama coalition may finally start to roll back the ugly race-based politics of the past.
