Mission Accomplished

"We tried our plan.  It worked."

Well, I guess it's a question of what the plan was meant to achieve.

It's been borne in upon me that to associate the President with dishonesty or failure is irreducibly racist. (To dip even further into the crazy punchbowl, try this theory.)  So I will take him at his word, and believe he was successful on his own terms.

9 comments:

E Hines said...

"black dialect," is it?

I talk like that, and I grew up in lily-white, segregated Iowa and Illinois. Last I looked, though, my pasty white face couldn't come close to matching the deep, deep tan on my black doctor. But she talks like that--which is to say, like me--too.

Oh, the confusion. I need a government program to straighten me out.

Or, what others are afraid of seeing is that most Americans really do see our President as an American--who only happens to be black--and a significant fraction of those see him as a complete failure in the office, based not on the color of his skin but on the content of his character.

Eric Hines

james said...

The CS Monitor goes farther than that. Point 5: if you advertise in a majority white population, your ad is racist--possibly only if you disagree in some way with His Excellency, but if this analysis came out of academia you never know. Maybe all SuperBowl ads are racist.

Of course assuming that politicians always mean what they say is a recipe for madness. But you can't assume they always lie, and if His Excellency wants to double down and declare victory in the economy, I agree that we should look at what he means by success.

Grim said...

I saw that CSM piece. It's interesting to compare the "It's OK" ad that we were talking about at VC with these standards.

1) Does the ad reference racial stereotypes? Not that I can tell. This standard seems like it might be reasonable.

2) Does the ad show the president's image alongside a racial stereotype? Not unless a shuttered factory is a 'racial stereotype'. Properly applied, this standard seems like it might be reasonable.

3) Are the people surrounding Romney white? Romney actually doesn't appear in the ad at all. So... no. However, all the people in the portions of the ad that are brightly colored instead of drab black-and-white are white people. All the people the ad suggests are supporters of the message are white.

This standard seems unreasonable, however. It's not racist to refuse to police your audience to ensure that it looks like a McDonald's commercial. In fact, it's much more racist to do so -- that's actively thinking about race and insisting on tokens.

4) Does the ad create an 'us' versus 'them' racial contrast? Maybe, as per (3) above. The only black people in the ad are Obama and his family, though, so it's not strong. However, the ad is clearly pitched to white people. Is this standard reasonable? It might be for clear-cut cases of "those people," etc., but not for cases like this one where we end up with "Maybe."

5) Is the audience where the ad runs mostly white? I don't know where the ad is running, so maybe. However, this standard is ridiculous. The country is mostly white, and so are all the swing states. Unless Romney restricts his advertising to ethnic enclaves, he's going to be unfairly trapped by this standard; it really does force us to consider almost all of his ads racist.

The last sentence in the article is maddening: "Thus, while airing an ad for a majority white audience does not guarantee voters will be seduced by a potentially racist message, their being white makes that more likely."

Well, I guess a racist ad suggesting some sort of white supremacy would naturally be more appealing to white people than non-white people. Congratulations on that leap of logic. But the real question is: how much more? Aren't most white people actually put off by racism? Indeed, repelled by it?

So I have long believed, based on observation.

Texan99 said...

"Does the ad reference racial stereotypes?" The authors actually concluded that it did, because there is a racial stereotype that blacks are dishonest. So any accusation of dishonesty is off the table for a black candidate, but not for a white one (they actually argue this), because there is no stereotype of white people as dishonest. So go ahead and accuse Romney of being a felon, no problem.

By the same reasoning, the authors conclude that complaining about the President's golf-playing habits is exploiting the stereotype that blacks are lazy. And I am not making this up. I am only encouraged by the fact that practically 100% of comments to the CSM piece said some variation on the theme of "This is a satire, right?"

E Hines said...

... all the people in the portions of the ad that are brightly colored instead of drab black-and-white are white people.

Does this mean that Obama is racist in his targeting exclusively white people for his jobless programs?

Unless Romney restricts his advertising to ethnic enclaves, he's going to be unfairly trapped by this standard....

No, this would seem to make the CSM racist, if in fact they are demanding he select his ad's audience on the basis of race.

However, the proof of CSM's racism is their last sentence: Thus, while airing an ad for a majority white audience does not guarantee voters will be seduced by a potentially racist message, their being white makes that more likely.

This is a blatant racist slur.

Eric Hines

bthun said...

Overheard on the way to the restroom in a restaurant recently was a conversation between two elderly black gentlemen in a booth... The conversation was loud and impossible not to overhear. Basing an assumption on their age, they might have been a bit hard of hearing.

Anyway, one gentleman says to the second that he hopes O does not win in November due to the damage he's done to blacks. The second replies that if he does, Farrakhan will off him!

Should these two gentlemen have been regaled as racists?

bthun said...

Ok, maybe I should not have used regaled, but the incessant spewage and hurling of the word racism as an attack to silence those who point out any and all differences, economic, moral, policy, etc., with a person, who just happens to be of a different hue, has become somewhat amusing.

Yeah, I'm bitterly clinging to a sense of humor, among other items...

Texan99 said...

The argument I see most often is that racism doesn't refer to an insistence on seeing people only within the stereotypes we hold of their race, but instead to a hostile attitude that harms an historically oppressed minority. That explains the cheerful willingness to engage in race-obsessed stereotyping against whites (or any other group perceived as privileged) without fear of recrimination for hatefulness or even hypocrisy.

Gringo said...

I have stopped trying to deconstruct the "You are a racist" charges. I roll my eyes at them.

It's all a play on the Chevy Chase intro on Saturday Night Live: "You're a racist, and I'm not."

["I'm Chevey Chase, and you're not."]