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(The brief overview below is largely drawn from two books, "The
Great Wells of Democracy," by Manning Marable, and "Nixon's Piano:
Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton," by
Kenneth O'Reilly. This is a modified version of a presentation I
made at a January 31st meeting in Atlanta, Ga. which developed plans
for a 2004 Racism Watch.)
Racism within U.S. institutions, law and culture is deeply imbedded in
the history and reality of the United States going back to the 17th
century, but in the 20th century, the deliberate and overt use of
racially-coded language and positions in Presidential campaigns was
begun in 1968 by the Richard Nixon campaign. Even Barry Goldwater,
conservative Republican that he was, made an agreement in 1964 with
Lyndon Johnson to keep race out of the Presidential contest between
them. "'If we attacked each other,'
Goldwater explained, 'the country would be divided into different camps
and we could witness bloodshed.' Sensitive to the charge hurled 'again
and again. . . that I was a racist,' he stuck to his word even in the
campaign's last desperate days when fringe advisor F. Clifton White
produced a documentary film intended to exacerbate white fears of black
urban violence. Goldwater condemned the film and ordered it suppressed."
(O' Reilly, p. 251) But by 1968, with the
dramatic spread of the black freedom movement all over the country and
uprisings in the cities, and with the emergence of George Wallace
running a racist third party American Independent Party campaign, the
Nixon crowd made a very conscious decision to completely abandon the
Republican Party's anti-slavery roots. (Abraham Lincoln won the
Presidency in 1860 in a three way race as the candidate of the
newly-formed, somewhat-anti-slavery Republican Party.) In the words of
Manning Marable, "(Dwight D.) Eisenhower had received the support of 39
percent of the African-American electorate in his 1956 successful
reelection campaign, and at the time the Republican Party had a strong
liberal wing that was pressuring the White House to take bolder steps on
racial policy." (p. 118) Twelve years later, that historical legacy was
deliberately jettisoned and, instead, "law and order," getting "welfare
bums" off welfare and opposition to busing became the major issues for
Nixon, Vice-Presidential candidate Spiro Agnew and their ilk. "'You can
forget about the Vietnam war as an issue,' an NBC pollster told a White
House aide [to Lyndon Johnson]. 'Race is the dominant issue without any
question. '" (O'Reilly, p. 274) Nixon barely
squeaked through with 43.4% of the popular vote in 1968, but by 1972 the
"remarkable racial realignment within the national Democratic Party [via
the influx of African American voters] unfortunately created the context
for the ideological and organizational transformation of the Republican
Party as well. The stage for the triumph of racial conservatism in the
Republican Party was set by Nixon, who successfully put together a
center-right coalition, the so-called 'Silent Majority,' winning a
little more than 60% of the popular vote against liberal Democratic
presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. The Watergate scandal
slowed, but did not stop, the acceleration of the Republicans to the Far
Right, especially on issues of race. The former Dixiecrats [of the
Democratic Party] and supporters of George Wallace gravitated to the
Republican Party and within a decade began to assume leadership
positions in Congress." (Marable, p. 72) The
1972 landslide victory of Nixon affected the Democrats. In 1976, Jimmy
Carter, southern evangelical Christian, won the Presidential race over
Gerald Ford. While more liberal than Ford, "Carter also sent mixed
messages during the 1976 push for the White House. The most
controversial were his remarks about busing and use of the phrase
'ethnic purity' to describe white-ethnic enclaves and neighborhood
schools. . . Follow-up questions . . . led to additional warnings from
the candidate about 'alien groups' and 'black intrusion.' 'Interjecting
into [a community] a member of another race' or 'a diametrically
opposite kind of family' or a 'different kind of person' threatened what
Carter called the admirable value of 'ethnic purity." (O'Reilly, p. 339)
The Reagan/Bush Era
Carter's statements,
however, were easily overtaken by the Nixon-like approach used by Ronald
Reagan in 1980. Reagan officially kicked off his campaign in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, in Neshoba County, at a fairgrounds used as a
meeting place by the KKK and other racist groups. This was also the part
of the state where, in 1964, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman,
Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed, about which Reagan said
nothing. As Marable explains, "Reagan never
used blatantly racist language, because he didn't have to. As
sociologist Howard Winant astutely observed, the New Right's approach to
the public discourse of race was characterized by an 'authoritarian
version of color-blindness,' an opposition to any government policies
designed to redress blacks' grievances or to compensate them for either
the historical or contemporary effects of discrimination, and the subtle
manipulation of white's racial fears. The New Right discourse strove to
protect white privilege and power by pretending that racial inequality
no longer existed." (p. 73) All through the
80's, with the dominance of the Reaganites and the emergence of the
center-right Democratic Leadership Council within the Democratic Party,
the powers-that-be within both parties followed similar scripts during
Presidential campaigns. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic standard-bearer
in 1988, followed Reagan's example and went to Neshoba County, Ms. in
early August, soon after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.
Like Reagan, he did not mention Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. He did
this despite the strength of Jesse Jackson's Presidential primary
campaign and the existence of the National Rainbow Coalition.
But it was George Bush's campaign manager in 1988, Lee Atwater, who came
up with probably the most infamous, modern use of racism during a
Presidential campaign, the outrageous linkage of Dukakis to Willie
Horton.
The Willie Horton Outrage
Ironically, it was DLC Democrat Al Gore, in April during Democratic
Party primary debate, who first mentioned the Horton case. William J.
Horton, Jr. was an African American man in prison for murder who, while
on his ninth furlough from prison in Massachusetts, jumped furlough. He
was eventually arrested in Maryland and charged with assault, kidnap and
rape of two Maryland citizens. "Atwater
called him 'Willie' (a name Horton never went by), hoping to get more
racial mileage. . . Atwater made sure that Dukakis, as governor of
Massachusetts, got the blame for Horton's latest crimes. . . 'Every
woman in this country,' a Bush strategist boasted to Elizabeth Drew,
'will know what Willie Horton looks like before this election is over.'
Atwater repeated that boast over and over. . . 'Willie Horton,' he told
a Republican Unity meeting, 'will [soon] be a household name.' A month
later, on July 9, he alerted Republican leaders in Atlanta to a Jesse
Jackson sighting 'in the driveway of his [Dukakis's] home' and then
offered this speculation: 'Maybe he will put this Willie Horton on the
ticket after all is said and done.' That same day Atwater told the press
about 'a fellow named Willie Horton who for all I know may end up being
Dukakis' running mate.' At the time, Bush was down eighteen points to
the Massachusetts governor in the polls. . .
"By the time the regular Bush campaign ran [a] television spot featuring
black and white cons heading to prison through a turnstile gate and then
heading back toward middle-America's living room, Willie Horton was
already firmly established in the public mind. The official ad did not
mention Horton. It merely emphasized 'revolving door' justice and
implied (falsely) that Dukakis had sent 268 first-degree murderers out
on 'weekend passes' to rape, kidnap and kill.
"Dukakis remained oddly silent through most of this. He responded
occasionally by citing dry statistics; more often not at all. . .
Dukakis remained silent for the three months it took Lee Atwater to make
Willie Horton his running mate for a variety of reasons. . . 'Whites
might be put off. . . if we 'whine' about racism' [some advisers
counseled]. In all probability, however, Dukakis remained silent because
he wanted to disassociate his candidacy from his party's [liberal]
reputation. He remained silent for the same reason that he failed to
mention Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman on August 4 when speaking at the
Neshoba County Fair-a silence that Marian Wright Edelman called the
campaign's most disgraceful moment." (O'Reilly, p. 381-388)
Bill Clinton and the DLC
When DLC'er Bill
Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee against Bush in 1992 he soon
demonstrated that he was a very different type of candidate than Michael
Dukakis. "By late May 1992 Bill Clinton had
all but sown up his party 's presidential nomination, but in national
polls he was running a poor third in the projected general election that
was only months away, behind the incumbent president, George Bush, and
independent candidate H. Ross Perot. What Clinton needed was an event to
distinguish himself as a 'different kind of Democrat.' Following
Reagan's model, he decided to manipulate the politics of race. . .
Clinton had been scheduled to speak before the national convention of
the Rainbow Coalition and, without informing Jackson in advance, decided
to distance himself from the black community. Although the speech was
designed to focus on issues such as urban enterprise zones and the
earned-income tax credit, Clinton unexpectedly attacked the Rainbow
Coalition's invitation to rap artist Sister Souljah to speak the
previous evening. 'You had a rap singer here last night named Sister
Souljah,' Clinton stated. 'Her comments before and after [the] Los
Angeles [civil disturbances following the not guilty Rodney King
verdicts] were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today
and tonight'. . . Clinton's rhetorical maneuver paralleled Ronald
Reagan's attack against 'welfare queens' and George Bush's 'Willie
Horton' advertisements. It was a strategically planned stunt, and it
worked. Clinton followed it up with national interviews, explaining that
'if you want to be president, you've got to stand up for what you think
is right.'" (Marable, pps. 79-80) But this
wasn't the only instance of racial pandering. In January Clinton left
New Hampshire prior to the primary vote to return to Arkansas to preside
over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a black man who had killed a
police officer 11 years earlier but who had shot himself in the head
afterwards, leaving him with the mental capacity of a child. In March he
posed with fellow DLC-er and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn for pictures in
front of forty mostly black prisoners in their prison uniforms. "Jesse
Jackson called it a moderately more civilized 'version of the Willie
Horton situation.' Two weeks later, on the day after the Illinois and
Michigan primaries, Clinton again showed he was a different type of
Democrat by golfing nine holes, accompanied by a television camera crew,
at a segregated Little Rock country club." (O'Reilly, p. 410)
"Bill Clinton calculated that he could not win in 1992 unless he used
Sister Souljah to bait Jesse Jackson, put a black chain gang in a crime
control ad, golfed at a segregated club with a TV camera crew in tow,
and allowed that search for a serviceable vein in Rickey Ray Rector's
arm." (O'Reilly, p. 420) Clinton had a much
easier opponent in 1996, Bob Dole, but he wasn't going to take any
chances, so he "decided to use the issue of welfare as the vehicle to
shore up his support among white male voters. Only days before the 1996
Democratic National Convention, Clinton signed the 'Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,' with the stated goal of
'ending welfare as we know it.' . . . Clinton repeatedly criticized the
lack of 'personal responsibility' of those on public assistance." (Marable,
p. 82)
Gush and Gore
2000 brought us Bush and Gore, or as some called it, Gush and Bore. The
most memorable thing about their three Presidential debates and their
campaigns in general was how similar they were on the issues, how little
Democrat Gore tried to draw out major areas of disagreement with
Republican Bush. "The greatest tragedy of the 2000 presidential race,
from the vantage point of the African-American electorate, was that the
black vote would have been substantially larger if the criminal-justice
policies put in place by the Clinton-Gore administration had been
different. . . more than 4.2 million Americans were prohibited from
voting in the 2000 presidential election because they were in prison or
had in the past been convicted of a felony. . . In effect, it was the
repressive policies of the Clinton-Gore administration that helped to
give the White House to the Republicans." (Marable, pps. 88-89)
Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court had much to do with the Bush victory,
building upon the deliberate removal from the voter roles of literally
tens of thousands of eligible black voters by Jeb Bush and Katherine
Harris in Florida. And, over three years later, the Democratic Party has
done virtually nothing to challenge that disenfranchisement or even to
make it an issue during this 2004 election year.
"Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party, as a political
organization, is interested in transforming the public discourse on
race, though for different reasons. The Republicans deliberately use
racial fears and white opposition to civil rights-related issues like
affirmative action to mobilize their conservative base. The national
Democratic Party mobilizes its black voter base, in order to win
elections, but in a way that limits the emergence of progressive and
Left leadership and independent actions by grassroots constituencies. .
. "What we need is to revive the vision of
what the Rainbow Coalition campaigns of 1984 and 1988 could have become.
A multiracial, multiclass political movement with strong participation
and leadership from racial minorities, labor, women's organization and
other left-of-center groups could effectively articulate important
interests and concerns of the most marginalized and oppressed sectors of
society. It would certainly push the boundaries of political discourse
to the left. . ." (Marable, pps. 89-91) 2004
Racism Watch is being established for the explicit purpose of helping
broad sectors of the progressive movement get organized and prepared to
speak up and take action in opposition to the use of racism during the
Presidential and other electoral campaigns this year, and to make issues
of racial justice a part of this year's political debate. We hope that
2004 can be the year that we make visible an explicitly multi-cultural
network of activists who understand the obligation to confront racism
whenever and wherever we find it. We can put those who use racism for
divisive and destructive ends on the defensive and help to get better
candidates elected, while building for the future.
For more information contact George Friday or Ted Glick at 973-338-5398,
racismwatch@earthlink.net or c/o P.O. Box 1041,
Bloomfield, N.J. 07003.
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