Yes We Can?

White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency

Adia Harvey-Wingfield, Joe Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136156540
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama's historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama's service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama's presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama's presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

1

WHITE RACIAL FRAMING AND BARACK OBAMA’S FIRST CAMPAIGN

In an interview soon after the November 2008 election of Senator Barack Obama, the conservative Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice commented thus about the election:

I was just enormously proud of Americans for I think setting race aside. I think what you really saw here was that race is no longer the factor in American identity and American life, and that’s a huge step forward … But it is very clear that the message of America as a place that has overcome its wounds, America as a place where race didn’t matter in preventing the election of the first African American President.¹

After the remarkable 2008 election, Secretary Rice’s viewpoint was often stated by hundreds of other commentators across the country.

The election campaign and resulting election of Senator Barack Obama as the first African American president in U.S. history were indeed striking in their impact on U.S. society. However, this rosy view of “the end of racism” or a “post-racial America” is very much out of touch with the everyday realities of continuing racial hostility and discrimination in this society. In 2008, a substantial majority of whites did not vote for Senator Obama. In addition, then as now, many research studies have shown widespread racial discrimination in areas such as housing and employment. This post-racial notion is just a whitewashed fantasy.

Indeed, one of the most disturbing aspects of the 2008 campaign and Obama’s presidency has been the great hostility and negative reaction of many white Americans to Obama and his family. For example, just a few weeks before the November 2008 election, a major Florida newspaper reported that an inflammatory email message from a Republican volunteer had been forwarded by the influential chair of the Hillsborough County Republican Party, who suggested that his team pass it along to help “us to win this election.” The political message was all in screaming capitals:²

THE THREAT: HERE IN TEMPLE TERRACE, FL OUR REPUBLICAN HQ IS ONE BLOCK AWAY FROM OUR LIBRARY, WHICH IS AN EARLY VOTING SITE. I SEE CARLOADS OF BLACK OBAMA SUPPORTERS COMING FROM THE INNER CITY TO CAST THEIR VOTES FOR OBAMA.

The email was sent around in these capital letters, thereby indicating a high level of emotion, probably including some fear. The message signals an image of African Americans that is quite stereotyped and negative—one of scary black folks “coming from the inner city” and voting “in carloads” in this whiter Florida area. The pointed email continues:

THIS IS THEIR CHANCE TO GET A BLACK PRESIDENT AND THEY SEEM TO CARE LITTLE THAT HE IS AT MINIMUM, SOCIALIST, AND PROBABLY MARXIST IN HIS CORE BELIEFS. AF TER ALL, HE IS BLACK—NO EXPERIENCE OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS—BUT HE IS BLACK.

Notice again the level of racialized emotion. In this turbulent 2008 campaign, some conservative Republicans saw their efforts as still fighting a cold war against “Marxism,” a theme that was part of the national Republican political effort. These political themes seem to have been cover for viewing Senator Obama in older antiblack terms, as the harping on his blackness suggests. The email continues in capitals:

YOU AND I UNDERSTAND THE DANGERS THE POTENTIAL OBAMA PRESIDENCY PRESENTS TO OUR WAY OF LIFE … THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO STOP OBAMA: VOTE!!!—(AND GET EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE)

So, once again the writer accents an emotional we/them language of “dangers” and threats from Senator Obama and his black supporters. Punctuated by several exclamation points, the widely circulated email continues in the “get out the vote” vein, with an accent on getting out the (presumably white) vote immediately.

Together with the numerous negative comments from white readers placed after the news report on this story at a Tampa Bay, Florida website, this email message points up the naïveté in the “end of racism” comments of conservative analysts such as former Secretary Condoleezza Rice. In the pathbreaking 2008 election most whites did not vote for Senator Obama as the first black president, even in the midst of the greatest economic crisis the country has faced in 60 years. According to exit polls, only about 43 percent voted for this African American candidate, including less than a majority of whites in 32 of the 50 U.S. states. (See Chapter 10 for how he did with white voters in the 2012 election.) In this book, we examine, among numerous other issues, the powerful character and significance of the negative and racist responses by many whites to the Obama political candidacy and presidency as a way of examining the continuing importance of systemic racism in this country.

The racial hierarchy at the heart of systemic racism has from the beginning been a central, provocative, and driving force in North American society. From the onset of this society, the oppressive treatment of Americans of color has coexisted uneasily with the professed ideals of equality, freedom, and liberty and justice for all. In the mid-1800s, the astute French visitor and famous political commentator, Alexis de Tocqueville, cited this as a major contradiction in U.S. society, and numerous others since then have urged this country to resolve this issue of racial oppression and to live up to its rhetorical ideals and promises of liberty and justice. Yet, after 400 years of this North American democratic experiment, racial inequality still prevails and is characterized by marked racial disparities in virtually all major institutions. Today, for example, black Americans still experience generally higher rates of illness, poverty, unemployment, and incarceration than white Americans.³

Social scientists have employed several perspectives to explain these racial disparities and the continuing reality of a racial hierarchy in this society. In this book, we argue that systemic racism and its attendant concept of the white racial frame offer the best analytical framework from which to understand the extensive, ongoing racial dynamics of the exciting and unprecedented 2008 presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.

Contemporary Theories of Race and Racism

Over recent decades, several social science theories have been advanced to explain persistent, ongoing racial inequalities in U.S. society. Many social science theories have assumed that U.S. racial relations regularly follow what sociologist Robert Park once described as an adaptive cycle of contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation. Since the 1920s, Park and his later followers have generally focused on immigrants and “ethnic groups” and have argued that this cycle of assimilation can be applied to the experiences of all such groups in society. Social scientists working today in this tradition of Robert Park—and in the more recent tradition established by assimilation theorists such as Milton Gordon—have rarely challenged the underlying assumption that an ethnically driven model can be easily applied to U.S. racial groups.

While these important mainstream theories have provided some useful conceptual tools for understanding patterns of adaptation and discrimination in this society, their theoretical discussions have significant limitations and carry hidden assumptions that frequently trap social scientists and other analysts into a limited understanding of this society’s extensive patterns of racial oppression. Included among these are the traditional concepts of race, prejudice, bigotry, stigma, stereotype, ethnicity, assimilation, integration, and discrimination. These terms have been widely used, but they do not provide the essential array of conceptual models necessary to make sense out of a highly racialized society such as the United States.

Even a quick look at today’s social science journal articles and text-books reveals the frequency and limitations of these conventional concepts. Interpretive approaches using them often start from a liberal social science perspective that views racial “problems” as not foundational to this society, but as more or less temporary “cancers” tacked onto an otherwise healthy democratic society. In addition, the conventional prejudice-causes-discrimination model of the mainstream tradition is oriented to individual or small-group processes and does not examine well the deep structural foundation in which acts of discrimination are always embedded.⁴

With the development of the racial formation perspective in the 1980s, however, social scientists such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant helped to shift the focus from the older assimilation/ethnicity approach to an approach accenting racial institutions and formations.⁵ The racial formation theory argues that racial thinking is not only a central organizing principle of U.S. society, but that racial thinking is embedded in social actions at the macro and micro levels. This approach specifically emphasizes the ways in which racial thinking is imbedded in the legal and political system, which they argue plays a significant role in shaping racial interactions at the micro level. Racial formation theory refocused sociological attention on the ways “race” exists as a societal concept distinct from ethnicity, and one that shapes social interaction in a myriad of ways. While influential, the racial formation theory has been accurately criticized for overemphasizing the role of the legal and political system (the state) in shaping racial inequality, and for overlooking the major racial inequalities and realities in other institutional systems. The approach of Omi and Winant accents an array of competing and changing “racial formations” over time in this society and neglects to assess in detail the antiblack racial formation that has long been the most central and integral part of the U.S racial structure. Furthermore, their approach also fails to name clearly and examine well the principal creators and controllers of the foundational and systemic racism of the United States—those whites in the political–economic elite and other whites with substantial societal power.⁶

Several critical social scientists have worked to move analysis of U.S. society in the direction of an even more critical approach. For example, social scientist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has attempted to correct some weaknesses in racial formation theory with an introduction of the concept of racialized social systems.⁷ Bonilla-Silva argues that in U.S. society, racial groups are hierarchically ordered and that this unequal ranking produces inequality in major institutions. This inequality is legitimized through ideological practices that change in accordance with shifting racial practices. According to this framework, the eras of slavery and legal segregation marked earlier racialized social systems where racist practices and ideologies were more overt and obvious. The current racialized social system, however, is one in which practices of inequality are more covert and hidden and are thus justified by a “color-blind” ideology in which most whites disavow awareness of racial difference in order to continue practices that perpetuate substantial racial inequalities. This theoretical perspective is an important step forward in understanding the ways in which continuing white racism shapes social institutions and interactions, and it offers key insights into how a racial ideology sanctions racial practices. We will see how this color-blind ideology operates throughout the election campaigns of 2007–2008 and 2011–2012.

Still, in our view this important “color-blind racism” analysis, which was first developed in the 1990s by Leslie Carr, does not go far enough in assessing just how foundational and systemic that racism—especially antiblack racism—remains for this particular society. Additionally, this perspective fails to explain how and why whites still engage in a great many overt and explicit racial practices that still perpetuate extensive racial discrimination across the society. It also does not go far enough in positioning the country’s racist ideology as part of a larger societal worldview, one that we term the “white racial frame.”⁸

Systemic Racism: A Brief History

The systemic racism framework fills in this gap by arguing that in the U.S. case, enduring racist practices, perspectives, and institutions are quite fundamental and foundational in this society—and that in several important ways, they have changed less than these other theoretical approaches suggest. Specifically, the systemic racism perspective developed by Joe R. Feagin and his colleagues suggests that white racism is not an incidental part of this society, but is endemic and foundational. It is much more than an undesirable component of an otherwise healthy societal whole. Building on the visionary research and activism of black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Kwame Ture, and Oliver Cromwell Cox, contemporary systemic racism theorists argue that white-on-black oppression and inequality were built into the foundation of this society in the 17th century and have been manifested for centuries in its major institutions—including the legal and political system, the mass media, the educational institutions, the labor market, and other economic institutions. Du Bois was one of the first social scientists to draw attention to the ways in which deep societal structures impacted group outcomes and to emphasize the ways in which these outcomes were often racialized in the United States.⁹

The contemporary systemic racism perspective develops these important ideas further in considering the many substantial ways in which contemporary racism is still a core part of, and reproduced through, the various institutional systems of U.S. society. As we will demonstrate in later chapters, systemic racism is complex and is both class-shaped and quite gendered, thereby frequently creating differential racial outcomes for men and women of color.¹⁰

One major contribution of the systemic racism perspective is that it puts racial oppression and inequality in their full historical context, and emphasizes the ways in which white-on-black oppression and inequality have been foundational, and thus critical, to the continued functioning of North American social institutions and systems. For example, in his books Feagin traces the ways in which racial oppression, hierarchy, and inequality have been at the core of this society since its inception.¹¹ Rather than mirroring mainstream analysts’ tendencies to suggest that racism is a minor, steadily declining part of society, by examining North America’s long racial history the systemic racism analysts have shown that the nature, character, and indicators of racism have in numerous ways remained remarkably consistent and persistent over time.

In the early stages of North American society, the legally sanctioned system of slavery and the widespread genocide directed against Native Americans marked conspicuously overt aspects of the ways that racial oppression was endemic to societal institutions and structure. Domestic policies that emphasized whites’ power, citizenship, and rights led to Native Americans’ mass displacement, and a stereotyped framing of Native Americans as dangerous and heathen savages justified their wholesale slaughter or major physical displacement by whites.¹² Furthermore, the system of slavery abolished all of African Americans’ human rights as individuals and rendered them subject to property ownership from whites who could afford to buy them. Even African Americans who were not enslaved had, by decree of the Supreme Court, “no rights a white man was bound to respect.”¹³ With laws, social customs, and governmental and economic systems based on principles of slavery and genocide, racial oppression and inequality were embedded early and deeply into the basic foundation of this society. This racial oppression and inequality were sanctioned and defended by major founders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who argued among other racist arguments that the innate inferiority of black Americans mandated their subordination and, if freed, a necessary separation of “races.”¹⁴

The extremely oppressive North American system of slavery was legalized and legitimated by the European colonists and their descendants. It principally targeted black Americans and lasted nearly two and a half centuries, more than half this country’s history. It persisted from 1619, when the first Africans were purchased by European colonists off a Dutch-flagged ship in Jamestown, Virginia, until 1865 with the passage of the 13th amendment, which finally prohibited slavery. Of course, virtually no African Americans, whether enslaved (most of them) or free, participated significantly in the politics of this country during the two centuries of slavery. With rare exceptions, they were not able even to vote, much less to hold political office. The bloody centuries of slavery were followed by Reconstruction, a brief period in which African Americans made unprecedented advancements towards racial equality, including some significant political participation.

Reconstruction lasted from about 1866 to 1877, during which time freed black Americans were able to vote and campaign for the first time and black politicians served in elected office. Significantly, the first black person ever to serve as U.S. senator was Hiram Revels, who was elected to represent the state of Mississippi and served from 1870 to 1871. Blanche Bruce, also of Mississippi, became the first black person to serve a full term in this congressional body, from 1875 to 1881. Both men represented the Republican Party, which in those days was considered the “party of Lincoln” and thus the political party that represented the interests of black Americans. Indeed, both Revels and Bruce ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 White Racial Framing and Barack Obama’s First Campaign
• 2 “Too Black?” or “Not Black Enough?”
• 3 From Susan B. Anthony to Hillary Clinton
• 4 The Cool Black Man vs. The Fist-Bumping Socialist
• 5 The Dr. Jeremiah Wright Controversy
• 6 The 2008 Primaries and Voters of Color
• 7 November 4, 2008: A Dramatic Day in U.S. History
• 8 A “Post-Racial” America?
• 9 President Obama’s 2009–2013 Term and the 2011–2012 Primaries
• 10 The 2012 National Election
• Notes
• Index