Hillary Clinton Isn't The Only Democratic Presidential Candidate In Denial

The Washington Post reported Monday on young Obama volunteers encountering (gasp) racism as they stump for their favorite. The article states:

"For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president."

As they must, the Obama camp denies it. They state:

"After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."

The article mentions the vandalism of a storefront bearing Obama posters. The incident wasn't reported because, "Obama campaign officials didn't want to make big deal of the incident."

To win votes, Obama must, for the most part, pretend racism does not exist. But in our world of "wishing makes it so," Obama supporters act as if this blatant political pretense reflects a comfy-chair reality awaiting us if we just deny right along with him. Obama has no choice. But the rest of us have no excuse.

Cases in point:

In Salon Magazine, Dr. Rahul K. Parikh wrote about doctors' racial bias and its effects on minority health. He cited a 2002 Institute of Medicine report that concluded, "evidence suggests that bias, prejudice and stereotyping on the part of health care providers may contribute to differences in care" between blacks and whites. He then cites clinical Harvard Medical School research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in which:

"More doctors subconsciously attributed negative traits to blacks (thinking them 'uncooperative' or 'bad') than whites. Worse was the way these biases translated into clinical decisions. While doctors diagnosed more blacks with a heart attack, they ended up prescribing treatment for blacks and whites in essentially equal numbers, meaning that black patients having heart attacks were going untreated. Further, as the degree of bias toward blacks increased, so did their likelihood of not getting treated."

In a New York Times column called "Our Racist, Sexist Selves," Nicholas Kristof, a paragon of internationalist good intentions, wrote of taking a University of Chicago on-line psychological test "in which you encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or cellphones. You're supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the others." Kristof admits that he shot blacks a few fractions of second sooner than he shot whites. "Conversely," he wrote, "I holstered my gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks."

Kristof points to similar online psychological tests at the Harvard site that "very cleverly show that a stunningly large proportion of people who honestly believe themselves to be egalitarian unconsciously associate good with white and bad with black."

I have written before of research by Olsson et al., cited in Science magazine, showing how unconscious, animal fear informs the attitudes between ethnic groups--that negative associations stick more easily and relentlessly to faces that don't look like ours.

Which leads us to Queens, where three unarmed black men were shot, and one killed in a barrage of 50 bullets fired by police officers, two of them black. The officers, black and white, feared the black men, and so their actions were deemed not criminal. Instead, the judge called their deaths the result of "non-criminal carelessness and incompetence." It is now merely "careless" to shoot dead an unarmed black man.

All of these trained, educated and intelligent people displaying their (one assumes) subconscious racism... How many proofs does it take to raise it to the conscious level--to acknowledge, confront, and perhaps even work to overcome it?

In America, black life has historically been less valuable than white. We have all been taught so--white and black (the latter an absurdist tragedy of Beckettian proportions). We have been taught that blacks are less industrious, less intelligent, possess less self-control, more violent, and more profligate.

Our political discourse borders on pretending that Obama will escape all of this. But no such luck. In the coming months, he will be cast as dangerous, arrogant, and unlike "normal" people. Call a white politician "arrogant" and it means one thing. Call Obama "arrogant" and you invoke a history of blacks who don't know their places. Call Obama "unpatriotic" and you raise white fears of black resentment against long-standing oppression.

Colorblind? Post-racial? It's all so much bullshit. When will we finally gain the strength to admit it? We are all animals prone to prejudice. It's in our blood. It's in our lizard brains. It's an impulse as primal as shitting. It may be one we find just as unpleasant. However, we don't deny that we shit. We train our young not to do it where they stand. We teach them that it's unhygienic and distasteful; we teach elaborate rituals to control it.

Our racism is as ubiquitous as shit. Right now, though, we're just running around with stinking pantloads that we ludicrously pretend aren't there.

Denied, it could cost this election. Unacknowledged, it will continue killing some of us.

Comments

[S1m0n]

"...unconsciously associate good with white and bad with black."

????

Uh, yeah. That's called "cultural literacy". The association has been a part of western culture for as long as western culture has been around. It has nothing to do with skin color.

[egal]

Obama has proven himself quite willing to open dialogue on race and other issues of (in)equality and to overcome such issues in government and other areas. But to win against such insidious issues with our social conceptions--against not only the way we think but also the ingrained way we viscerally react with consciousnesses designed to make us-them divisions--one must act as if those thought biases do not exist and thus permit cognitive dissonance to work on making our beliefs match our actions.

That's the prime reason for this lack of admission to the prejudices and biases that are so real--just as pretending to be happy can make us happy, pretending to be fair and open-minded creatures can help to make us that way (neither outcome is assured, but nothing ever really is). And treating our citizens as if we are intelligent, reasonable, and capable of bettering ourselves and our nation--acting as if hope is justified--helps to make these things a little more true.

We may not be as good as Obama gives us the credit of being; but if he treated us as children, as irremediably corrupt or stupid or worthless or any number of other characteristics present within us, we would be much more likely to adhere to these negative thought processes and the actions born of them. By demonstrating faith in us, by trusting our better natures, Obama empowers us to embody them.

[hrayovac]

Colin Powell was the most respected and popular American in many years of nationwide polling as you recall.
Sayonara has it right.
I say you can either squawk like a mynna bird all day long about other people's problems, take to the hills and ignore everyone entirely or become a part of something new. You choose.
As I've been everywhere in America I can say there are hardened beliefs. But everyone now knows what a camera is, how to "recreate" your own reality with computers and I rarely seen anyone attending a concert who doesn't want to have a good time.

[Liss]

They know what's going on, they just won't be baited into agreeing to the parameters that the stupidest and most bigoted among us set for the debate. What's the point of your post anyway? How is the way he's handling himself going to cost him the election because of race? And how might he handle things better?

[bentenrai]

You're stating the obvious. The question is, what are Americans willing to do about it.

[CommonSense121]

Please understand something...
He can't just come out and scream racism everytime something happens.
He has been very carefull to not brand people as racist.. just like Ferraro, Clinton(both of them)...Because that's what people want him to do. So he can fall deeper into this who racism thing, and become the Black Candidate instead of the Change Candidate that is about the issues.
You can also tell how they are trying to get him to take the bait to become really pissed off and fit the tag of the "Angry Black Man".
Barack is too smart for that. And so he has to turn the other cheek for now. His speech on race let us know that he is not naive about the racist people in this country... How can ANY black person, or person of color be naive of that? It's just not possible.
But you have to just keep on fighting, and keep on rising above it. Because if he didn't and he took the bait, even just once... Everything he says after that moment will fall on deaf ears, even if he is right, because he did what they EXPECT of him.

[egal]

Considering how Obama is accused of playing the race card even when his supporters point out flagrant racism, you shouldn't need to explain why they don't bring it up and derail the campaign on the shoals of preoccupation with race and racism. I'm amazed that you do have to, amazed by that ingenuous hint that Obama doesn't recognize the reality when he is also accused of playing the race card just because he's black, and must be the better man rather than taking the bait when so many around him prove themselves racist and otherwise bigoted to the highest degree.

But you well express how he must remain the everyman by ignoring such issues as racism in others, by refusing to play up his own race for sympathy, and by brushing off the stereotypes so many desperately project onto him bcause of their own ignorance and insecurity.

[SayonaraSnot]

Honestly. I can't believe you've had to spell it out like this.

If Obama even acknowledges the role race and racism plays in this campaign, he opens himself to "playing the race card", and "angry black man" charges and characterizations.

Obama is NOT the spokesman for all black people. It is NOT HIS JOB to speak up on these issues. His job is to lead, and to inspire, not to let himself get dragged into the mud, not to let himself be defined by his opponents or manipulated into being defined by them.