{"id":55,"date":"2008-08-14T16:41:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-14T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/08\/14\/racial-code-words\/"},"modified":"2008-08-14T16:41:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-14T21:41:00","slug":"racial-code-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/08\/14\/racial-code-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Racial Code Words"},"content":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m confident this article<\/a> from Reuters by Matthew Bigg on “racial code words<\/a>” is going to have the right-o-sphere up in arms. I have to say I am sympathetic to their plight. How do you attack a relatively young, relatively inexperienced, African-American presidential candidate without being tagged with the racist label? Even for academics who think about this stuff for a paycheck, finding a “bright line” definition of what is “code” and what isn’t is challenging. For instance, Was this “code” or a slip of the tongue?<\/p>\n

In May, Hillary Clinton said Obama’s support was weakening “among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.” Her comments were read by some as implying that blacks were lazy but also as a subtle appeal to white racial solidarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What about this?<\/p>\n

An advertisement run by McCain’s campaign this month, which portrayed Obama as a celebrity who was not ready to lead, sent a subtle racial message by flashing images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, according to Ronald Walters, professor of politics at the University of Maryland.<\/p>\n

Walters said the ad played on deep cultural fears about inter-racial dating and marriage, which was illegal until the 1960s in some U.S. states.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One obvious difference was that Clinton’s statements were in response to an interview. The words were uttered in the moment and thus probably the result of a really bad juxtapositioning of words.<\/p>\n

The McCain ad, on the other hand, wasn’t an impromptu response to a reporter’s question. The ad might be trying to tap into these fears of miscegination<\/a>. But that doesn’t pass the logic test. Polling suggests that very few people are against interracial marraige<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Those for whom that message would be salient are concentrated in the 65+ demographic. In 2007, 75% of people over 50 years of age approved of interracial marriage as opposed to 90% of people under 50. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Personally, I think that anyone with qualms about voting for a black presidential candidate has already made up their minds to vote for McCain. So if there is an appel to miscegination going on, it’s probably a wasted effort to convert people who are already on your side.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m confident this article from Reuters by Matthew Bigg on “racial code words” is going to have the right-o-sphere up in arms. I have to say I am sympathetic to their plight. How do you attack a relatively young, relatively inexperienced, African-American presidential candidate without being tagged with the racist label? Even for academics who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}