We look for good news where we can find it, and one glad tiding is that long-time Hot Screen fave Jamelle Bouie, formerly a writer for Slate, has moved on to become an opinion writer for The New York Times. That a much larger audience will now be exposed to his incisive writing on U.S. politics feels like a win for the good guys.
His column today makes a couple essential observations around the blackface/KKK getup scandal that has, for all practical purposes, brought an end to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s political career. First, Bouie reviews why blackface is such a horrifically racist and unacceptable practice; it not only works to dehumanize African-Americans, but also to suggest their unfitness for participation in a democratic society.
But as awful as the latter-day indulgence of a discredited racist minstrelsy may be, Bouie goes on to make a point that has lurked within the whole sordid Northam story: that there is a basic problem when public opprobrium “treats expressions of racist contempt or mockery as the most egregious forms of racism, when that distinction should belong to the promotion of racist policies and ideas.” If signaling hate toward African-Americans by choice of attire is inexcusable, then how much worse is political action that directly seeks to denigrate African-Americans, or other minorities more generally?
Bouie nails the logical consequence of this situation:
If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.
Bouie’s analysis has helped me to understand my visceral disorientation and disgust at the stream of Republican politicians calling for Northam’s resignation, and chiding him for his racism. A party that has placed white nationalism and the suppression of minority voters at the center of its political identity simply has no leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing the racism of an opposing politician, however merited that critique may be in abstract terms. Not surprisingly, the greatest nausea was induced by the president himself tweeting about Northam’s unfitness for office, as there can be no question, given that terrible man’s long history of enmity toward African-Americans and current enactment of racist policies, that the president’s racial offenses are orders of magnitude graver than the Virginia governor’s.
It is no surprise, of course, that the president and other Republicans would seize on photographic documentation of racial animus (whether or not Northam appeared in the photo, it was on his yearbook page) as the worst racial offense imaginable. Not only is it a tactical embrace of anti-racism to take down a Democratic politician, it suggests that racism is solely a matter of dressing up in a KKK outfit or in blackface; it is the same mentality that would say you aren’t racist if you don’t use the “N” word. The reality, though, is that the GOP is guilty of far worse than Northam; and yet we are left with the dizzying reality that the proponents of actual, state-sponsored racism are not forced to give up their seats, as Bouie suggests they should; are not subject to public repudiation and disdain.
The fact that Donald Trump felt free to weigh in is not simply a measure of the man’s poor impulse control, although there’s that. In addition to sticking another shiv in Northam’s governorship, I think he was also seeking to reassure his supporters that neither he, nor any of them, can be considered real racists; it’s those freaky Democrats who think they’re Al Jolson and put shoe polish on their faces to enhance their Michael Jackson routines who are. This may be the underlying strategy of other Republicans as well.
But the president’s tweets highlight how this sort of strategy really does depend on the media accepting the president’s terms of debate; that he somehow has standing to criticize another politician on grounds of racism without inviting a closer look at his own offenses. This strikes me as not a completely sound assumption at this point. By making bad-faith arguments based on the unassailable idea that racism is bad, the president invites the obvious question of why, then, would he himself propagate policies, and deploy rhetoric, that says quite the opposite: that racism is the health of the white nationalist state? I am not so sure that the GOP as a whole has really thought through the long-term damage they may be doing to the party by not sitting this one out, trading short-term gain for long-term, and well-merited, pain.