Playing the Race Game in South Carolina
by Kevin Alexander Gray
As the “Black primary” in South Carolina approaches, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “talk as if” John Edwards, “the more populist Southern white man in the race were invisible.” Heretofore, this strange campaign has seen the Black candidate “ignoring what should be his natural base - black voters. That is, until he needed them.” His white female opponent, meanwhile, relies on her husband’s supposed special relationship with Blacks, who are expected to forget facts such as that “Black incarceration rates during the Clinton years surpassed those during Ronald Reagan’s eight years.” Unless some issues can be injected into this substance-less campaign, it will amount to “a family spat that soon will pass” - a conversation between Black and female corporate Democrats, with a white man on the side.
“Neither Clinton nor Obama is taking on the weighty substance of our issues.”
I hesitantly step into the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama family scuffle over South Carolina’s black vote. Both candidates are products of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton is a DLC star, chair of its American Dream Initiative touting free markets, balanced budgets and middle-class know-how, while Obama’s political action committee, the Hope Fund, has raised money for half of the DLC’s representatives in the Senate. This is how America measures progress: the DLC, founded as a vehicle for pro-business Southern white men, is now the arena advancing a black man and a white woman who talk as if the more populist Southern white man in the race were invisible.
The “controversy” over Clinton’s Martin Luther King comment (”it took a president to make the dream a reality”) was, if anything, a set up to push Obama to talk race, something he has taken pains to avoid beyond the occasional King quote he tosses into the mix. Talking race in a white media echo chamber works to Clinton’s advantage. First, it is a subtle nod to subconscious and not so subconscious racism. Secondly, it gives her the chance to expound upon the Clintons’ fictional race history with blacks.
“Talking race in a white media echo chamber works to Clinton’s advantage.”
What Bill knows, Hill knows. And Southern politician Bill Clinton has always played race politics to perfection. Many have perhaps forgotten about Bill, speaking in the last pulpit King stood in, telling blacks in 1993 how disappointed “Dr. King would be [in them] if he were alive today,” because of black on black crime. “Crime” has long been a white politician’s code to signal, “I can stick it to blacks.” In his first presidential race Governor Clinton supported the death penalty at a time when the country was split almost down the middle on the issue. For good measure, he made sure to oversee the execution of convicted killer Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man, in the heat of the primaries. Then right in time for the Southern primaries in 1992 he posed with Georgia Senator Sam Nunn in front of a phalanx of black inmates in white prison suits at Stone Mountain, Georgia, second home of the Ku Klux Klan. That picture appeared in newspapers across the South the day people went to the polls. It was Clinton’s way to reassure racists. [more]