Discriminations

I always get a kick out of the columns, and now talking head (on MSNBC) commentary, of Washington Post Obamanut Eugene Robinson. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here for some representative examples.) I would say that he’s such a perfect affirmative action columnist (by which I mean, mainly, that he writes often about affirmative action) that if he didn’t exist we’d need to invent him, but that’s not really true since so many other affirmative action columnists say pretty much the same things.

In his column yesterday he weighs in on the “Who’s Raising Race” debate, predictably blaming the McCain campaign for purposefully, and hence nastily, injecting race. Since many voters may be too dumb to see what McCain et. al. have been up to, Robinson generously steps forward to explain it, much in the manner of a college literature professor deconstructing texts. In fact, exactly in that manner:

I’m confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain’s front-line surrogates know full well what messages they’re sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they — or, more likely, some of the white voters they’re trying to reach — don’t know text from subtext from context, here’s a deconstruction.

The “deconstruction” that follows is entirely predictable — in effect, when the McCain campaign complains about Obama playing the race card by always referring to his looks and what the Republicans are going to do, it is playing the race card. As Robinson put it here,

On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama’s throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday” that “there’s no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest — that he’s a victim of something.” Graham later added: “We’re not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, ‘You’re a racist.’ That’s not going to happen in this campaign.”

The key words are “victim” and “racist” — which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama’s mouth because of their power to alienate.

With the first loaded word, Graham is trying to tie Obama to a stereotype: the Great African American Victim. He’s playing to the annoyance some whites feel at being reminded of racial sins committed long before they were born or even long before their families came to this country.

I don’t want to reprise the whole “playing the race card” debate here. Instead, I’d like you to consider the odd view of affirmative action that is implicit — actually, maybe explicit — in Robinson’s curious, confused piece. First, note that, while emphasizing that he did not and does not call Geraldine Ferraro a racist (because he is not privy to her “most private thoughts”), he regards her claim back during the primaries that Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he weren’t black as “insulting and wrong.” I’ve discussed that claim and the response to it, here, and I don’t want to rehash it. I mention Robinson’s comment only by way of preface to his conclusion to yesterday’s column:

This battle over Obama’s image as a black man is arguably the central front of the presidential campaign right now. Once-sharp lines between the candidates on issues such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq or allowing new offshore oil drilling are becoming blurred. The Democratic Party’s structural advantages going into the election are formidable. It’s hard to imagine how McCain could possibly win unless he generates doubt in voters’ minds about Obama.

One way to do that would be to fabricate the impression that Obama is demanding special treatment and privilege because he is black — in other words, turn a self-made man into a stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action.

Re-read Robinson’s concluding paragraph and ponder it for a minute. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama has not been implying that any criticism of him is racist, that he is not “demanding special treatment and privilege because he is black.” The first question that comes to my mind is, Why not? He clearly demands “special treatment and privilege” for all other blacks (except, arguably, a very few “advantaged” ones, with “advantage” left undefined). In his appearance before minority journalists last week (where, as I showed here, he actually said he supports quotas as part of affirmative action so long as they are “properly structured”) he repeated, as quoted here in the New York Times, that

We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more.

All other blacks, that is, should continue to receive “more favorable treatment.” Since he, or his campaign, clearly believes that he has been the victim of race-based criticism from the Clintons in the primaries and that he will be the victim of it from the Republicans in the future (and maybe even now, with the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton ad from what New York Times Obamanut Bob Herbert calls the “increasingly venomous McCain campaign”), it would not be surprising — in fact, it would be consistent with his stated views — to use his race to his advantage in his campaign.

Now, even though you’ve re-read it once, go back and read Robinson’s concluding paragraph one more time. What Robinson says here is that to portray Obama, or presumably anyone, as “demanding special treatment and privilege” based on race is to fabricate “a stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action.” But what is “stereotypical” about such a portrayal?

Has not every beneficiary of what Robinson regards as affirmative action received precisely that sort of special treatment? Can Robinson point to any beneficiaries of affirmative action who have not received special treatment based on their race? Would he be willing to support Ward Connerly’s effort to bar states from dispensing special treatment based on race, leaving in place all affirmative action programs that do not employ race preferences?

I don’t think so.