A nice, brisk fall day to have an event in DC, and I gather that a large number of GOP leaders made it to the podium to speak at Michelle Bachman's big tea party.  It's also the day reserved in the UK to celebrate Guy Fawkes' ill-fated attempt to blow up Parliament to get rid of the ruling party of his day. 

So, I'm wondering.  Was the day chosen purposefully, to adopt the mantle of an obscure sometimes folk hero for their anti-government movement?  If so, isn't that a kind of questionable PR move?  And if not, isn't that kind of an unfortunate PR oversight?

There is a lot of talk about what kinds of memes or turns of phrase are racist - "socialist?" "That One?" etc. - but what does it really mean to say that political groups are playing the race card or engaging in dog whistle politics?  Does it mean that the message is intentional?  That it is a secret call out to a cadre of hard-core racists?  If a message has racial implications in one instance, does it always?

 

These are hard questions to answer, and while it is encouraging that, twenty years after Willie Horton, the media is paying more careful attention to race in the elections, the discussion has often been less than illuminating - often a back and forth of accusations and denials of racist intention. 

Like the "Willie Horton" ad of twenty years ago, the most effective messages that play on racism do it in ways that we mostly do not notice.  It isn't a code to be heard only by unrepentant racists - it's a clever psychological trick to play on the unconscious racial attitudes that most of us hold, but few of us are conscious of. 

Want to know more about how it works?  Join us on Thursday, October 30, 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) for a free conference call on race in electoral politics. The call will give an overview of scientific research on implicit bias, a history of how political groups have used it to manipulate us, and some examples of how these tactics are being employed now, how they will continue to corrode our political life, and begin to talk about how to stop that corrosion.

Click here to RSVP for the call. 

I have noticed that the TPM Cafe schism site run by Cafe member Eric Stepp, Project Lucidity, is gone.  Just wondering if anyone knows what's up.

Bob Herbert (9/25/07)

The Ugly Side of the GOP

Quoting Lee Atwater from an interview with Alexander Lamis given in 1981:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.

Crossposted at StopDogWhistleRacism.com

In Clarendon, NC, a letter was recently mailed to residents saying “a friend has recommended that I reach out to you about a problem that you may be having but may not be aware of.”  Signed “A Clarendon Neighbor,” it made a novel argument: the intention to vote for Barack Obama may be a sign of latent white supremacy.

 

The letter goes on to say:

 

Racism comes in many forms, and there is a significant possibility that your sponsorship of Senator Obama is really an obsessive compulsion to prove to yourself, and to others, that you are not a racist. Have you looked within yourself and examined your motives?

 

… Isn’t making a big deal out of Obama’s skin color just another form of racism?

Unfortunately, Senator Obama and his team have approached this question in a very cynical way. Can anyone really brand former President Bill Clinton a racist? After all he had done for Black people? Well, the Obama campaign did. Can anyone accuse the Rev. Jesse Jackson of being a racist against Blacks? The Obama campaign almost did.

You should be absolutely certain that you are not being carried over to the voting booth upon a guilt trip. You should take this opportunity to look deeply within yourself and ask, “Why did I fall for Obama? Why am I, after all that we have accomplished on racial issues, still feeling guilty? Am I an unconscious racist? Am I any better than those who pretend not to stare at an inter-racial couple?”

I’m sorry to tell you that voting for Obama does not absolve you of racism, it may even confirm it.

 

I think this is a novel entry into the annals of voter suppression: don’t let your white guilt drive you out of your home and into the polling booth…

 

News of the letter, and a scan of the hard-copy original, was first posted on The Grove Project on Wednesday, 10/1.  That same day, it was pasted into a comment at StopDogWhistleRacism.com.  Is it going viral?

 

If you have seen this message, please let me know by leaving a comment here.  Thanks.

In the research that led up to The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips helped to orchestrate the development of a Southern Strategy to exploit white resentment of the Civil Rights Movement.  Here is an excellent New York Times profile of Phillips from May 1970:  Nixon’s Southern Strategy ‘It’s All in the Charts’

The highlight, for present purposes, is this:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.

Crossposted at StopDogWhistleRacism.com

Since before the day, in 1976, when Ronald Reagan announced his belief in “states rights” near the Mississippi road where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered twelve years before, tacit appeals to racism have been a regular feature of our political life. 

 

<blockquote> You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

 

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.".

Lee Atwater, speaking to Alexander Lamis, 1981.</blockquote>

 

When they are most effective, this subterranean discourse isn’t intended as coded “dog whistles” appealing to hardened racists; rather, they prime the unconscious racial biases that we all hold.  George H. W. Bush hit Willie Horton hard for many months; in speeches as well as ads.  According to The Race Card by Tali Mendelberg, this was very effective in raising Michael Dukakis’ negatives among whites until late in the season, when Jesse Jackson and (eventually) Lloyd Bentsen called the Horton attacks out as racist.  Making the subtext explicit appears to have defused the potency of the issue, and the poll numbers of Bush’s opponent began to rise in correlation with news stories that made the racial dimension explicit.

 

Have you had enough of it?  A website launched today, StopDogWhistleRacism.com, aims to demonstrate the scope of symbolic racism of this sort by bringing together evidence of its use from news sources, left and right, from across the nation.  The aim is to look closely at both national and local elections, as well as policy debates that occur in this electoral season.  (I helped create the larger project the website is part of.)  Check it out, and if you can, help us out by providing tips about incidents in your community.  (Or if you prefer, join our Facebook group here.)

 

From Too Sense, a fairly compelling look at what the first 100 days of the Obama Administration might bring.

 

From the new conservative website The Next Right, news that Republican policy positions poll very badly, among Democrats, independents and Republicans.  As I read these results, it would seem that Republican adherence to the positions of their party is strongly influenced by a sense of party identity – when the positions are presented without the GOP label, support among Republicans plummets.

For example:

On taxes, the picture gets more complex. On the partisan text [i.e. identifying which party holds a given position], Independents like the Democrats’ message by significant 14% margin, but Republicans still like our message and give us a resounding 39% advantage. That changes drastically on the nonpartisan test.

When the party’s names are removed, Independents are almost evenly split, giving the Democrats’ message a small 5% advantage. However, Republican voters stampede away from the GOP message. Among Republicans, support for the GOP message on taxes drops by a gargantuan 53% when the party’s names are removed, leaving the Democrats with a 14% advantage. You read that right, on the nonpartisan test, Independents like the GOP message on taxes more than Republicans do and even Independents slightly favor the Democrats. 

Here’s a copy of the pollster’s memo on what the Republicans can do about this.  Weep, I’d think, but here’s what he has to say on rebranding the party:

Look at some of the language in the themes that the NPR survey tested from the Democrats. You might not feel comfortable with all of the examples below, but if you think Republicans can not use any of those, that’s simply too much Inside the Beltway thinking:

- “The economy has worked well for CEOs but not for the middle class, and we need a big change in direction.”

- “We should repeal the special tax breaks for companies moving jobs overseas and for the oil companies.”

- “We need to cut middle class taxes across the board, limit drug prices, and make health care more affordable.”

- “We should partner with business to invest in clean alternative energy to create the jobs of the future.”

- “We must strengthen America’s security by starting to reduce our troops in Iraq in a responsible way, force the Iraqi government to use its oil money to pay for reconstruction, and work with other nations to bring stability.”

- “With such financial pressures on families, we need to focus completely on middle class tax relief and making sure government works for them, not the special interests.”

Turns out that you can draw a triangle from right to left as well as the more familiar way.

 

On the way into work today, I saw a news snippet about Monday's State of the Union speech. According to the White House, the central theme of the speech will be that, in making policy (for example, on wiretapping or data mining), "the government should make clear that it places its full trust in the people."

My highly placed, confidential sources in the Oval Office have confirmed that this is indeed the speech. In the draft that they sent me, over the transom and all that, in fact, this very sentence is used in the first minute. It is followed by this statement:

"Of course, as the great Ronald Reagan said, we must trust, but verify."

Back in those heady days when John Yoo enjoyed sovereign immunity, the discussion of how far interrogators could go took two avenues: define torture out of existence, as practices so unbelievably painful that anything a marginally sane agent might be willing to do would be legal, and otherwise to find ways to come right up to the very edge of the definition while leaving some uncertainty on which agents and their commanders could wiggle out of legal liability. The first avenue gave us waterboarding, the second prolonged sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, IV drips to induce involuntary urination and 'short shackling.'

It has been argued again and again that these 'harsh interrogation' methods aren't torture, and aren't something that reasonable people not blinded by emotion might object to. To this end, I recall Donald Rumsfeld saying that forcing detainees to remain in uncomfortable positions for long periods could not be so bad; why, Rummy himself stood all through his working day.

This passage from a letter by the indefatigable Clive Stafford Smith, in the most recent Harper's Magazine, really struck me:

 

There are, sadly, so many follies in this "war on terror." What, for example, should we do about the aural torture that my clients have suffered, earsplitting Eminem and Springsteen tunes blasting at full volume twenty-four hours a day? President Bush has tried to play down the severity of these methods, but a client of mine who had a razor blade taken to his penis during CIA-sponsored detention in Morocco said that the psychological torture he had experienced was worse than the physical, because while enduring mental torture, he had felt his sanity slipping away.

At first glance, it is maybe hard to imagine how disruptive tactics like loud music could be deemed worse than physical mutilation. But as I thought about it, I think this makes perfect sense. What we do when we keep detainees awake for days (as Japanese police interrogators routinely do), or keep them in solitary confinement for years, is aimed at undermining their psychological integrity. Never being able to hear yourself think for the distraction, or the cold, or the fact that your hands are chained between your feet, for hours at a time over days and months and years, or never having a respite from the solitude of your thoughts, is qualitatively much different from being subjected to pain at the hands of another. Physical torture might at least give you something to focus on to distract yourself from the pain, in raw hatred for the person doing you harm. Endless Eminem, keeping you distracted but unable to focus on anything external, I can see how that would be inescapably maddening.

To illustrate the contrast, Jose Padilla manifested signs of severe psychopathology at trial, after years of solitary confinement. Maher Arar, who was beaten in a Syrian prison for a year before getting released back to his family in Canada, appears by contrast to be functional, if scarred.

Perhaps the reason we ostensibly don't torture is that mere torture doesn't go far enough.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Down from a high of over 500, some 275 detainees remain, some of them because the U.S. is unable to find any country that will take them in.

Fittingly, in a cruel sense, an appellate federal court dismissed Rasul v. Rumsfeld today, as if to mark the anniversary. Shafiq Rasul was a lead plaintiff in Rasul v. Bush, the case, filed weeks after Gitmo opened, that won a Supreme Court ruling that detainees are entitled to legal proceedings in 2004. In the present case, Rasul and three other British citizens allege that they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques in the Guantánamo Bay camp that violate international and federal law.

Meanwhile, a recent Times article says that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan has a significantly larger prisoner population than Gitmo, with similar frustrations for those who would reduce and ultimately close the base. Early in the Afghan conflict, Bagram developed a reputation as a secretive place where beatings and other harsh interrogation techniques were common place; two men died in Bagram in 2002, including one whose legs had been beaten so severely as to more or less destroy the muscle tissue. Bagram has expanded fivefold since then, in part because of the decision not to send new detainees to Gitmo. The American Red Cross recently complained that “dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram.”

As much as I know that no one wants to give an honest answer (except perhaps Mitt Romney), I do wish that we could have an discussion of what candidates will do about Guantánamo. As things stand, there is no reason to think that a post-O’Connor Supreme Court will finally rule that detainees have habeas corpus rights, no reason to think that anyone will ever be held accountable for torture in the facility (and that we as a nation will be held to our commitments under international law), and no reason to think that Gitmo is the only Gitmo.  Unless we have a president who takes a strong line against extralegal detention and torture, I could see this being a problem that is with us for much of the next decade.

I have been trying to write something on this for a few weeks, essentially to ask for advice. I think this year could be the moment when the “southern strategy” and its descendants are put to rest. I have been thinking, for work, about ways to forge alliances with social conservatives, especially Christians, who might, flowing from their faith, form a constituency in favor of racial justice on the right.

It is something of a truism that coded messages to opponents of racial equity are a key element of Republican electoral victories since Nixon. From Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, MS to Ward Connerly’s strategically timed anti-affirmative action ballot measures to the attack ads against Harold Ford, tacit or explicit messages about race inform elections in ways that harm progressive causes, and thwart progress on racial justice.

Such pandering to whites disaffected by the civil rights gains of African-Americans has arguably damaged not only our national commitment to racial justice and equal rights, but our commitment to the common good, the commitment to universal access to excellent education, maintenance of infrastructure, and provision of the services and benefits of the ‘social safety net.’

This supposes that there remains a hard kernel of racists within the conservative movement. Taking that as granted, what if there were an equally ardent core of racial justice advocates, coming to that position on the basis of their own moral values and political beliefs? It would create a counterweight to such "dog whistle" racial codes*, such that a politician could only appeal to the one constituency by alienating the other. It might also create the balance necessary for policy discussions among Americans that take the need to address race-based inequity seriously, and act accordingly.

The rise of Barack Obama as a viable presidential candidate, after the Iowa caucuses, is a clear indication of changing times. But in a sense, the surge of Mike Huckabee gives me equal optimism, inasmuch as he represents the ways in which evolving political commitments among evangelicals do not necessarily hew to the modern-day conservative platform. There are indications that many evangelical activists are tiring of the exclusive focus on hot-button single issues like abortion and gay rights, and extending an interest to those who are disadvantaged and disenfranchised in our society. The New York Times quoted the influential conservative minister Bill Hybels on this phenomenon:

“we have just pounded the drum again and again that, for churches to reach their full redemptive potential, they have to do more than hold services – they have to try to transform their communities,” he said. “If there is racial injustice in your community, you have to speak to that. If there is educational injustice, you have to do something there. If the poor are being neglected by the government or being oppressed in some way, then you have to stand up for the poor.”

He brought up the Rev. Jim Wallis, the lonely voice of the tiny evangelical left. Wallis has long argued that secular progressives could make common cause with theologically conservative Christians. “What Jim has been talking about is coming to fruition,” Hybels said.

I've been paying increasing attention to the fissures within the evangelist movement in the past few months, and I think this could be the key factor in a substantial political realignment. To this end, I have suggested to the public policy organization I work with that we seek to disseminate our work to key figures on the right, probably sympathetic evangelical leaders.

Here’s what I have: empirical data on the persistence of structural inequities that disadvantage African Americans and others, and suggest the ways in which a more equitable society would benefit all Americans; a charismatic speaker who speaks compellingly on the topic, and a dozen or so others to draw on.

But while I am not hostile to religion, I’m a left-leaning atheist materialist who only went to church, as a child, when his grandparents came to town, and even then to the kinds of Catholic churches that attracted unionized Irish factory workers. I am, in short, in no real position to evaluate the feasibility or advisability of my own suggestion.

To those of you who are more closely acquainted with evangelism than I am, I pose these questions:

1. Am I right in seeing the potential for a shift here?

2. Are the potential gaps in the conclusions drawn by right and left from the same data dangerously great? That is, if we were wildly successful, would the resulting movement on the right be more dangerous than the status quo?

3. Is it unrealistic to think that conservative religious leaders, even sympathetic ones, might be willing to listen and be in dialogue with progressive racial justice/secular public policy folks?

4. If not, how would you go about reaching out to them?

Thanks! Here's to crazy ambitions, and a pivotal year in 2008.

Santa, it seems, is a civil libertarian.

Echoing CSCS’s post of a year ago, I wonder: where are you giving your money this year?

My friends in fundraising tell me that this is a very difficult year for progressive non-profits, and the next six weeks, when most nonprofits make close to 50% of their yearly income, are looking disturbingly lean. This is not surprising: every election year is difficult, and this one perhaps more so, because so many donors give to campaigns rather and forego gifts to non-profits. The pervasive economic pessimism, too, plays a role.

So, in case there is some money burning a hole in your pocket, here are some causes that are dear to my heart today. I hope others will add more.

Prison Legal News. One of the last of the once-thriving for-prisoners-by-prisoners news media, PLN is the largest and the oldest extant news source covering prisoners, human rights and the law. With thousands of readers and contributing writers in the more than 5,000 prisons in the U.S., PLN provides breaking news and incisive analysis. More than 1 in 150 Americans is currently behind bars. Help give them the news they need to know.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Immigrant farm workers in Immokalee, FL pick nearly all the tomatoes you will eat this winter, for pennies on the pound. They have organized into a highly effective organization that has won fights with some of the biggest fast food conglomerates to improve the lives of workers. On Friday the 30^th, CIW will take to the streets in its fight to stop Burger King from undermining the concessions they have gained.

After I wrote this, this Op-Ed appeared in the paper. So much for highlighting lesser-known organizations….

The Center for Reproductive Rights. Three words: the Roberts Court. A bunch more words: when the staff doing reproductive rights work at the ACLU felt they weren’t getting support within the institution, ten or so years ago, they came in at night, took all their files, and CRR (then the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy) was born.

CRR is (I think) unique in using the law both domestically and internationally in defense of reproductive rights.  For instance, they provided support to litigation in Colombia to end the total ban on abortion (I wrote about it here).

The Center for Social Inclusion. CSI does public policy research to address structural racism, tests for effective messages for communicating these policies to the public, and disseminates the results to grassroots racial justice advocates. Their burgeoning network is hopefully creating an echo chamber in support of policies that will provide greater opportunity to millions of Americans, through progressive housing, education, and urban policy. They also recently hired me: if you click on the link today, you will find no online donation button; the fault is entirely mine (it’s complicated - give me a week).

Happy Holidays!