In order to take the edge off of my poll watching withdrawal, I’ve gone back to one of my favorite poll-meth (I would be dating myself to call it crack?) dealers… Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog has a nice breakdown of Obama’s performance among a range of demographic groups compared to Kerry in 2004.

Obama outperformed Kerry in every demographic except seniors, gays and lesbians and “other” religions. What’s most astounding is the breadth of his gains. He made gains among liberals, moderates and conservatives. Which begs a question we discussed in our thick culture podcast today (coming soon!) — do campaigns even matter? Did the lousy economy and unpopularity of President Bush preordain a Republican victory this year? If you’re making gains in groups all along the ideological spectrum, does it really matter what you’re saying?

Matt Bai wrote this piece a few months back where he makes the argument that Obama’s candidacy signals the end of black politics. he references a new ethos among post civil-rights era African-American politicians that resist being pigeonholed as “simply” black. These younger African-American politicians, like Artur Davis (U.S. Rep. Alabama), Harold Ford (former U.S. Rep. Tennessee), Corey Booker (Mayor Newark, NJ), Deval patrick (Governor – Massachusetts), tend to be Ivy League educated and, to use the language of diversity, effective at “cultural switching” – the ability to be conversant in a diverse number of cultural settings.

This “vanguard” of Black politician doesn’t see their rise to power as uniquely tied to the black community so they don’t feel obligated to serve that community’s interests exclusively. As Corey Booker explains in the Bai piece:

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” he said. “I don’t want people to expect me to speak about those issues.” By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. “I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.” Since the mayor of Newark is rarely called upon to discuss such topics, I got the feeling that Booker does not see himself staying in his current job for anything close to 20 years. “I don’t want to be the person that’s turned to when CNN talks about black leaders,” he said.

Politicians like Booker aren’t intending to deny their race. Rather they are challenging what it means to be “raced” in fundamental ways. In this passage, he seems to suggest that “blackness,” at least for middle-class blacks, is becoming what Mary Waters famously called an “optional ethnicity”

Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn’t really to “transcend race.” Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn’t have to obscure his racial identity.

In Booker’s first run for Newark mayor against Sharpe James, his “in between-ness” for lack of a better term was a major obstacle in his election. This excerpt from Streetfight, a wonderful film chronicling the first Booker-James mayor’s race highlights the contradistinction between “old” and “new” politics.

It does say something revealing that Booker lost this bid to be mayor of Newark (although he won his second). Similarly, is says something that Obama lost his first Congressional race in Chicago to Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. In both cases, the “new politics” candidate was painted as an ivy-league outsider who didn’t understand the predominantly African-American community they were running to represent.

I don’t agree with Bai that we’re at an end in identity politics. What I think it means is that identity politics will have to be employed in more sophisticated, less transparent ways to be effective. Bill Clinton serves as an object lesson in how not to play identity politics.

This ham-handed effort to racialize Obama only allowed him to portray himself as “above” the old politics of racial division. If you recall, his gauzy South Carolina primary victory speech, the subject of the celebratory Wil-I-Am song, is what sling-shot him into Super Tuesday. This here’s good identity politics.

This “new” identity politics is defined by pivoting from identity to talk about transcending identity. “We are one America” only has resonance if you’re speaking from the experience of someone who has historically been viewed as part of the “other” America. This speech wouldn’t work very well if it was John McCain making it.

What do you think about Bai’s argument?

TechPresident posts on change.gov, a website the Obama campaign has created to encourage a more open, participatory governing process. The site contains the standard fare, like a “share your vision” site where you can post your vision for the country. The site, of course, also has a blog where I’m sure the president-elect will comment on the latest spat on The View or who Miley Cyrus is dating.

What concerns me about this site is that it is set up to provide the appearance of a participatory culture without much of an infrastructure to deliver on that promise. How do you go from collecting “visions for America” from random posters to leveraging the “wisdom of the crowds” to produce better policy outcomes? There are innovative ways to get citizens directly involved. One exciting example of this is publicmarkup.org, a wiki site that allows users to markup legislation as if they were committee members. This process of self-aggregating public input is more likely to lead to direct citizen input. Another interesting experiment is the Future Melbourne project (HT: TechPresident). Where citizens were asked to contribute input to the Australian city’s master plan directly by making changes to it on a wiki.

These projects do not guarantee direct citizen input, but if the campaign is serious about being more collaborative in its governance, and there’s no reason to suggest that they aren’t, there are more sophisticated tools they could be using to leverage the power of citizen input.

Click here to join our foray into the wide world of pod. In this podcast, four of our regular contributors here at California Lutheran University (Jose Marichal – Political Science, Ken Kambara – Marketing, Don Waisenan – Communication/Rhetoric, Russell Stockard – Communication/Cultural Studies) elaborate on some of our earlier posts. Below is a link to the three blog posts we reference in the podcast. I hope you find it a pleasant and intellectually stimulating auditory companion.

Palin’s Persuasion by Don Waisenan

Unlucky in Love, Lucky (in)Justice by Russell Stockard

Where did Race Go by Jose Marichal (unfortunately the recording cuts out in this middle of our discussion of this post)

We’d love to hear what you think.

As we move closer to what may very well be a milestone in America’s Racial History, it’s instructive to look back on where we came. I’m having my race and politics class look through a brilliant interactive site on racial expulsions put together by the Austin American Statesman newspaper in 2006. The investigative journalists working on the series found, along with numerous instances of town expulsions:

14 countywide expulsions in eight states between 1864 and 1923, in which more than 4,000 blacks were driven out. These are only the most extreme examples of a widespread pattern.

These expulsions were not pretty sights. Here’s an account from the intro to the Austin American Statesman series of an expulsion in Marshall County, Kentucky:

vigilantes led by a local doctor posted notices in 1908 telling blacks to leave. When that failed, more than 100 armed and hooded men raided the town of Birmingham, picked about a dozen people at random and tortured them. Nearly two-thirds of the blacks left, and the most recent census showed only 37 blacks among the 30,125 people living in Marshall County.

The series coincided with Elliot Jasper’s 2007 book on racial expulsion entitled Buried in the Bitter Waters which details the story of countywide racial expulsions throughout the United States. Here’s an NPR piece on racial expulsion in Corbin, Kentucky. the site includes an excerpt from Jasper’s book.

How do we make sense of this history today? it’s particularly poignant to me to see an African-American candidate for president with a reasonable chance of winning the majority vote in three of the four states featured in the Austin American Statesman piece (Georgia, Indiana, Missouri).

Which aspect of the interactive series was the most interesting to you and why?

I’m putting together my syllabus for a course in California Politics and I want to avoid the bland, conventional approach to teaching what amounts to an upper division intro class. I’m beginning to play with a theme of Cyberfornia that draws parallels between the development of California and the emergence of Web 2.0. Yochai Benkler claims that the web’s revolutionary turn is that it turns the task of production into something that is granular and modular so that vast numbers of people can engage in peer production.

California, at least Southern California — my primary frame of reference, seems to have that same amount of modularity and granularity. Los Angeles is often referred to as a network of neighborhoods without a center. An entire Los Angeles school of urban studies has been built around the city’s postmodern, de-centered, elements. But I don’t think anyone has made the connection between California’s open-source, peer production driven nature (think of our initiative process) and Web 2.0.

What do you all think of the relationship? Am I off base?

A Friday treat for late 20 and 30 something domestic beer drinkers 🙂

More convergence culture, Don 🙂 I wonder what impact all this has on the campaign.

Is it me, or are there a lot of article trying to tie political orientation to personal habits or consumption choices? Apparently the messiness of my desk is a marker of my progressive politics. A recent New York Times article tries to make a link between maternal weight and political ideology arguing that heavy mothers produce more conservative offspring. A month ago I read about a connection between an individual’s startle reflex and their orientation towards more hawkish national defense policies.

This is all driven by the recent resurgence in genetic explanations for political behavior. While advances is DNA mapping explain part of the resurgence, It seems to me that our scholarship is also being driven by our increasingly polarizing politics. As we move into left and right tribes socially, we seem to be resurrecting essentialist arguments to explain the phenomenon. I suspect we’re asking the question “are liberals wired differently than conservatives” because we’ve had “Red America vs. Blue America” beaten into our heads for almost a decade. I hope this academic fad passes quickly into the night so I can go back to keeping a messy desk!

A bit off track for the blog, but I thought I’d share Ta’ Neishi Coates’ post on the date/fiancee rape seen in the AMC show Mad Men last night. It was an incredibly disturbing “look away” moment for me, but one that had the desired effect of jarring me back into the reality of patriarchal, hegemonic America in the 1960’s. The show is so lush and stylish at times that you lose that core message in the series: under the contented veneer of traditional roles lies raw, potentially damaging and explosive, power. My mind then wandered to whether we’ve come all that far in 40 years as far as date rape is concerned.

I’m having my students read excerpts of The Race Card by Richard Thompson Ford a Law professor at Harvard. Good read, but here’s an exceptionally thought provoking passage. He’s describing the notion of a “post-racist” society.

Like “postmodern” or “postcolonial,” the prefix in post-racist doesn’t suggest the demise of what it modifies—in this case racism. Instead, post” suggests a sort of supernova late stage of racism in which its contradictions and excesses both cancel out and amplify its original intent.

Although we can quibble with the “late stage” characterization, I find it an accurate way to think of how racism is practiced in today. Post-racism indulges in racist stereotypes while at the same time not engaging the moral dimensions of racism. In practice, you can engage in all the racism you want as long as you are being ironic about it.

Here’s Thompson articulation of a post-racist worldview:

she doesn’t really think of her black friends as “black,” and she means it. She also freely indulges in the black stereotypes our culture has on offer: hip-hop’s image of the black thug, the black pimp, the black drug dealer, the black crack whore, the black hustler. The post-racist is free to be explicitly and crudely bigoted because he does so with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Thompson’s work makes me think of Dave Chappelle. I have to admit to being one of the legions of admirers of Chapelle’s “Rick James” impression despite it’s racist and sexist subtext. But at the same time, I understand that I’m complicit in perpetuating racist stereotypes by watching the show. I can justify it by saying we’re having a collective national laugh at the absurdity of race, but at the same time, we lack the outrage that contemporary racism should instill in us.