When Is Condemning Race-Baiting Race-Baiting?

Richard Ford, the Stanford law professor and author of the new book The Race Card (discussed recently here), had an interesting article in the Washington Post’s Outlook section Sunday. You should read the whole thing, since I’m not summarizing it.

Briefly, Ford argues that race-baiting by politicians doesn’t so much reflect or play to the racist concerns of voters as magnify or even create them.

It’s conventional wisdom that American racism is an inexhaustible well that cynical politicians can always dip into if they want to sink their opponents in a campaign. That’s what Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Hispanic pollster, Sergio Bendixen, seemed to be doing when he told a reporter last month that Latino voters haven’t generally “shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”

But modern racism isn’t like the water in a well. It’s more like the scum in a pond: It might settle to the bottom if left alone, but it can also be whipped up into a froth. And that’s what Bendixen was really doing…. [b]y insisting that Hispanics are anti-black bigots and insinuating that black politicians won’t serve the interests of Hispanic constituents, Bendixen may well have helped inspire the racial tensions he purported to describe. [NOTE: Discussed here]

….

To some, the success of such racial provocations simply reflects the underlying attitudes of the general population. People know better than to announce their prejudices publicly, the argument goes, but in the privacy of the voting booth, they are free to act on their true beliefs. But political campaigns don’t just take public attitudes as a given, they also shape them….

….

The violent reaction against civil rights [and the Brown decision] was in part the result of such political tactics — not the root of them. Segregationists didn’t just pander to racist sentiment, they deliberately provoked it, nurtured it and intensified it. They made racism worse.

Ford is even-handed in his criticisms, skewering both the current Clinton and Obama camps and the Republican Party as a whole for its “Southern strategy” under Nixon and Reagan.

Ford’s argument is both subtle and sensible, but I wonder if it doesn’t suffer from some internal contradictions, or at least unresolved tensions. First, note that he doesn’t deny the accuracy of Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen’s observation that many Hispanics are reluctant to vote for black candidates — or, presumably, of the almost identical recent remark by Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, another Clinton supporter, that “there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African American candidate.” What Ford criticizes is not the truth of these remarks but their intent, purpose, and effect of stirring up racial antagonism for partisan gain. Billary tried to marginalize Obama as a black candidate; the Obamanauts tried to incite black and liberal anger against Billary for “dissing” Dr. King; the Republicans tried to lure whites away from Democrats with racist appeals; etc. They weren’t so much appealing to pre-existing racial concerns as magnifying and exacerbating (and occasionally even creating) them. This sort of behavior is what Ford decries as “playing the race card,” and he denounces it both in his book and in this article as dangerous.

But wait a minute. Aren’t versions of Ford’s own argument, in less capable hands than his, guilty of the same offense? For example, just as Republicans waved the “bloody shirt” for a generation after the Civil War in an attempt to keep the Democrats branded as the party of slaveholders and rebellion, it is a staple of liberal and Democratic argument today to refer almost continuously to the Nixon/Reagan “Southern Strategy” in an attempt to reinforce black, liberal, and independent rejection of current Republicans.

Ford himself is a serious analyst, but according to his argument — which, recall, is not concerned with the truth of the race card arguments he decries but with their intent and effect — when Democratic partisans and their zealous fellow traveling flacks and pundits in the press harp on the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” (see here for a prototypical recent example; see the “Bloody Shirt” cites above for older ones), they are as guilty of “playing the race card” as Clinton Inc. has been in this campaign and indeed as guilty as the Republicans they are so fond of calling racist.