Race Relations Issues at About.com - Your Guide to Race Relations Issuesvar ziRfw=0;function zIpSS(u){zpu(0,u,280,375,"ssWin")}function zIlb(l,t,f){var u=new Array([["1/XJ/W9","1/XJ/WP"],["1/XK/WB","1/XK/WQ"],["18/15m","1/XL/WR"]],[["18/15o","18/1Pp"]],[["1/XJ/WA","1/XJ/WP"],["1/XK/WC","1/XK/WQ"],["18/15m","1/XL/WR"],["18/15o","18/1Pp"]]);var p=l.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.id=="oC"?0:1;var clk;if(arguments.length==3){if(t==1){f=0}if(t==2&&!zIos(l.href)){f=3}clk=u[t][f][p]}else{var c=l.parentNode.parentNode.className;var t=c=="obE"?0:(c=="obS"?1:(c=="obO"?2:-1));var f=t==0?2:(t==1?0:(t==2&&zIos(l.href)?2:(t==2&&!zIos(l.href)?3:-1)));clk=u[t][f][p]}if(!clk)clk="18/15p";zT(l,clk)}function zIos(u){var r=(u.indexOf("&zu=")>0&&(u.substr(u.indexOf("&zu=")).indexOf("about.com")>0)||u.indexOf("http://")0)?false:true;return r}zOBT=" Ads"
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z930=zpreC(930,48);if(thin){z930=0};z160=zpreC(160,600);z336=zpreC(336,280);z728=zpreC(728,90);z155=zpreC(336,155);zItw=160;if(thin)gEI('abw').className='thin';Search Race Relationsvar h2=document.getElementsByTagName("h2")[0];if(h2.getElementsByTagName("a")[0].firstChild.nodeValue.length>28)h2.className="long";HomeNews & IssuesRace Relationsif(z930==0 && z728>0){adunit('','',uy,ch,gs,728,90,'1','lb',1)} Emailw(x2+zWl+'?p=1" zT="18/1[N" rel="nofollow">Print')Race Relations if(z930>0){adunit('','',uy,ch,gs,930,48,'1','s',1)}Must ReadsGuess My Race QuizDefining RaceTop 10 Facts About RaceEugenics - What Eugenicists BelieveDefining EthnicityBrowse TopicHistory and RaceRace in the MoviesCelebrities and RaceRace and LegislationRace and DiscriminationStereotypes and RaceRacism and ChildrenParenting and RaceRace and SportsRace Heroes & VilliansNavigating A Diverse WorldTolerance and RaceRace and WorkPower and RaceRace and RelationshipsInterracial CouplesCelebrities Setting an ExampleFrom David Bowie and Iman to Heidi Klum and Seal, read profiles of high-profile couples who have bridged the racial divide.Read moreFurther ReadingGuess My Race QuizMixed-Race CelebritiesProfile: Adriana Limazob();What Is Race?It's not really what you think, and in some ways it doesn't exist. Yet race defines so much about American society. Learn more about this important factor in our lives.Read moreFurther ReadingTop 10 Facts About RaceA Definition of EthnicityHistory of Race in the USRace Relations BlogAdd to: iGoogleMy Yahoo!RSSDid Race Cost John Kerry the Presidential Election?Monday September 22, 2008Barack Obama will have to confront more direct racism than any major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history, but that doesn't mean that this is the first time racism has reared its head in a presidential election.In 1860, for example, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with only 40% of the popular vote--the rest of the votes being split between Southern and Northern Democrats--to become the first Republican president. His opposition to the expansion of slavery into Western Territories annoyed rich landowners in South Carolina, who began the process of secession and instigated the American Civil War.And when a civil rights plank was added to the Democratic Party platform in 1948, Truman lost four reliably Democratic Southern states--and 39 electoral votes--to third-party white supremacist Strom Thurmond. Were it not for Thurmond, the election would not have been close enough to inspire newspapers to erroneously predict the victory of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey.Twenty years later, another third-party white supremacist candidate--George Wallace--claimed five states and 46 electoral votes to give Republican candidate Richard Nixon a win over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, despite the fact that Nixon only carried 43% of the popular vote. Four years later in 1972, Nixon's stonewalling of the civil rights agenda had given him so much support among white supremacists that no viable third-party candidate was fielded, and he carried the George Wallace states--and 44 others--to win a landslide with 63% of the vote.By and large, white bigots have trended overwhelmingly Republican ever since in national elections, even white bigots who identify as Democrats for purposes of state elections. In Mississippi, for example, three-quarters of the state House delegation is Democratic despite the fact that Republicans have won the state by comfortable margins in every election since 1980.So as we read the results of the new Stanford University study indicating that racism and racial resentment could cost Obama some votes, let's take these numbers with a grain of salt. Much is made of the fact that 17 percent of Hillary Clinton's primary voters will support John McCain, for example, but less is made of the fact that white Democrats in conservative states tend to vote Republican in national elections anyway, and would have voted for Clinton or Obama only because the Republican primary wrapped up relatively early, leaving the Democrats with the only interesting national primary.This dynamic is reflected in the Newsweek racial resentment poll, which revealed (among other things) that:... Obama trails presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain 40 percent to 52 percent among whites. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's challenger for the Democratic nomination, also trails McCain among white voters but by a smaller margin, 44 percent to 48 percent ... Clinton's white support is unusually high: at a comparable point in the 2004 election, Democratic nominee John Kerry received the support of 36 percent of white voters, compared to George W. Bush's 48 percent, and in June of 2000, Bush led Al Gore 48 percent to 39 percent.In other words, Obama has been doing better among white voters--a group that presumably includes white voters with high levels of racial resentment--than either Al Gore or John Kerry. This should come as no surprise; he's running against a less popular candidate. But it should put to rest any concerns that he might have a "race problem"--that his racial identity itself is a "problem" for the Democratic Party.Could Obama fail where a white candidate in his position might succeed? Maybe. He might also succeed where white candidates in his position have failed. In any case, Obama has the same problem attracting voters with high levels of racial resentment that candidates with progressive civil rights agendas have struggled with for 60 years. This isn't really Barack Obama's race problem we're talking about. It's America's.Related: History of the Civil Rights BacklashComments (0)PermalinkSarah Palin and the "Sambo" RemarkSaturday September 6, 2008To hear the L.A. Progressive blog tell it:
"So Sambo beat the b--ch!"
This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama's win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
The quote is attributed to Palin by "Lucille," an unidentified Alaska waitress. At first glance it sounds like an offensive, off-the-cuff remark--but there's a lot more to it than that.
This year's election cycle was rife (at least among the punditry) with discussion of race versus gender. Who would be the first to break the white male monopoly on presidential nominations: A black man, or a white woman? We could have saved ourselves all this trouble if we'd just nominated Shirley Chisholm in '72, but never mind. The 2008 Democratic primary has been characterized as the oppression olympics, as a competition to see whether racism is worse than sexism, or vice versa.
But there was another time in our nation's history when an even more fundamental question of race versus gender was being resolved: December 1865. The American Civil War had just ended eight months prior, and talk was afoot of giving black men the right to vote. White suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in a letter (emphasis mine):
The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were allowed to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see "Sambo" walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever again close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?
The term "Sambo" has fallen out of favor as a racial epithet in recent years, and so--considering the context of the current presidential election--the phrase "Sambo beat the b--ch" would almost have to be a subtle reference to Stanton's remark.
Would a group of fortysomething Republican politicos from Alaska have gotten the reference? Probably not. But Sarah Palin might have; she self-describes as a feminist and belongs to Feminists for Life, a group that reveres the writings of 19th-century suffragists but has little use for later feminist material. But it would have been strange to use it in a conversation with ordinary Republican political operatives, because they wouldn't have understood what she was talking about.
McCain had famously fielded a "How do we beat the b--ch?" question (regarding Hillary Clinton) from a supporter months earlier, at a time when Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee. When Obama defeated her, that rendered the supporter's crude question moot--so the statement would have doubled as a response to the McCain supporter and a wry reference to the history of the race vs. gender issue that dominated the news cycle during the Clinton-Obama primary. The phrase is too succinct, too complete, to have been the invention of a shrill blogger four months after the fact. I don't mean to sound like I admire the remark--it's offensive--but it encapsulates so many different controversies, so much history, that it's not something that an enemy of Palin would have created out of whole cloth as a smear because it's too complex. If you're going to have Palin say a racial epithet, it makes sense to just have her say something crude and simple without all the subtle references.So I don't really know. I can't see Palin saying it over lunch to a group of Republican colleagues, but I can't see it going unsaid either. Somebody must have said it. I don't pretend to know who, when, or where, but it comes with its own why.Comments (24)PermalinkMinorities Get Little Respect On The Big Screen : NPRTuesday September 2, 2008NPR's John Ridley righteously dissects a summer of Hollywood blockbusters where 89% of films in wide release had no minorities among the leading cast members:We had ... the lovely Jennifer Hudson playing a 21st century Hattie McDaniel to the Sex and the City gals. Excuse me, Jennifer's the one with the Oscar. Shouldn't they be fetching Jennifer's coffee? ...Yes, there was Will Smith as a superhero. An alcoholic, abusive, foul-mouthed superhero ... [T]here was redemption at the end of Hancock, but the path was so coarse as to be unsuitable for my kids to watch. So, the only hero of color they saw this summer was The Incredible Hulk. Which, by the way, why does a movie with nary a minority in it have to end with the Hulk destroying Harlem?Between this and the presidential debate schedule, it's beginning to look like the media--traditionally an instrument of social progress--is actually lagging behind the political world when it comes to diversity. And that's not easy to do.(h/t: Angry Asian Man)Comments (0)PermalinkDebate Moderator Picks Reveal Insular White, Male National MediaThursday August 14, 2008A few short months ago, the three most viable presidential candidates were a black man, a white woman, and a white man. Now there's a 50/50 chance that the United States is about to elect its first non-white president less than three months, and rumors are swirling that even the white Republican guy is seriously considering a female running mate.So, taking all of this into account, what do you think the race and gender makeup of the four presidential debate moderators will be?One white man, one man of color, one white woman, and one woman of color?Three white men, and one woman of color? Or maybe...Three white men and one white woman?No such luck. As RaceWire's Jonathan Adams observes, the four presidential debate moderators will be four white men--a step down from the presidential debates conducted 20 years ago, where Bernard Shaw moderated what would turn out to be the most famous of the Bush-Dukakis debates. What does it say about the media when the presidential debate moderators are less diverse than the presidential candidates themselves? And as Adams asks...If these are the picks for the presidential debates, what do think the short list looks like for Tim Russert’s job on Meet the Press?Indeed. And taking the whiteness and maleness of the media into account, the bizarre, idiotic, and divisive coverage of the Democratic presidential primary--"race versus gender," the pundits screamed--becomes much easier to explain.(Posted by Tom Head, About.com: Civil Liberties)Comments (2)Permalink See More Blog EntrieszSB(2,5);Apply now to guide this siteif(z336>0){w(''+ap[0]+at[4]+as[0]);adunit('','','about.com',ch,gs,336,280,'1','bb',3);w('')}if(z155>0){w(''+ap[0]+at[4]+as[0]);adunit('','','about.com',ch,gs,336,155,'1','ps',4);w('')}if(zp[7].d){Dsp(zp[7],'ip')}if(zp[4].d){Dsp(zp[4],'ip')}if(zp[11].d){Dsp(zp[11],'ip')}zSB(3,3)Explore Race RelationsMust ReadsGuess My Race QuizDefining RaceTop 10 Facts About RaceEugenics - What Eugenicists BelieveDefining EthnicityWhat's HotHollywood Today: Halle BerryACORN - Keeping us AccountableRace QuizDelivering FeedbackHalle Berry & Gabriel AubreySearchBy CategoryHistory and RaceRace in the MoviesCelebrities and RaceRace and LegislationRace and DiscriminationStereotypes and RaceRacism and ChildrenParenting and RaceRace and SportsRace Heroes & VilliansNavigating A Diverse WorldTolerance and RaceRace and WorkPower and RaceRace and RelationshipssplitList(gEI('bc2').getElementsByTagName('ul')[0]); More from About.com Work Hard, Travel EasyThe best tips for business travelers. 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