A dude on the radio was talking about whether Republicans ever stood a chance of attracting minority voters. He said that, in the 2012 elections, exactly 0.00% of people with melanin voted for Mitt Romney. Sightings of black Republicans have been reported, but after expert investigation, they always turn out to be John Boehner coming out of a tanning salon. (Zing! I am Jay Leno. Except not funny. So, Jay Leno.)
In passing, the guy on the radio mentioned that part of the problem might be the whole “taking our country back” attitude of recent Republican rhetoric. I wish he’d delved further into how that attitude is perceived by members of racial minorities. Speaking as a black man, I will now try to do so.
Full disclosure: I am not a black man. I’m not even Asian, and how hard is that? There are literally billions of them. In fact, in the jury pool of life, I have been given the easiest possible assignment, the equivalent of a last-minute plea deal on the first case of the day that sends us all home before lunch -- I am a white man in the United States at the apex of its self-indulgence, after it obviates the need for any physical labor of any kind, but before it destroys its environment and devolves into a society in which mohawked thugs kill each other for gas and food. (That’s scheduled for next Tuesday, by the way. Check your email.)
But, like any good white man, I’m fascinated by African-American culture. It started in high school when I saw Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and started listening to Public Enemy. It became a bit more learned when I would skip gym class to sit in the library and read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which is perhaps the nerdiest teenage rebellion in history.
And through my various vicarious experiences then and since, I feel like I have gained some small measure of understanding of the perspective of minorities in America. And I can imagine that the “taking our country back” rhetoric is especially off-putting to anyone who isn’t white.
To be clear, I’m not accusing Republicans of having conscious racial motivations for their feelings. I don’t go in for the idea that conservatives hate Obama just because he’s black -- I remember the similarly irrational hatred they had for Clinton.
But I do think that when they talk about “our country” and “real Americans” and etc., they express a very distinct “us vs. them” dialectic, where there is “us,” the “normal” Americans, and there is the “other,” that is threatening “us” and pushing “our” country away from what we’re comfortable with.
Every political movement is always “us vs. them” to some extent. But when it takes this extreme cast, where no common ground is possible with the evil “other,” I think it reminds minorities of, well, most everything they have experienced in this country’s history. Racial relations have gotten better, but still, in small, subtle ways (and occasionally not so subtle), white is “normal” and black or Asian or Latino is “other” -- an “other” that threatens “us” by taking “our” jobs, by living in “our” communities, and in general, by changing the country that “we” feel comfortable with.
I think that when you’re a member of a racial minority, you become especially sensitive to this attitude. You get very attuned to signals that you might be unwelcome or generally seen as strange because of your facial features, because of the incredible emotional pain that that causes. I think this "us vs. them" conservative attitude qualifies as a warning sign, regardless of whether it is intended to.
I know conservatives would react vociferously to this idea, partially because they tend to react vociferously to everything, but also because there is no more weighted accusation nowadays than racism. They’d argue that their enemy is liberals, not minorities. And they’d be right. Again, I don’t think the racial exclusion is intentional.
But my point is that that’s just a shift in the focus of the same lens. It’s still that irrational fear of change, regardless of whether that change materially affects them in any way, that has characterized conservatism in this country since the days of civil rights. It’s an unfounded feeling of victimization, which is especially incomprehensible when it comes from the people with every advantage and almost all the wealth and power.
Now, on the heels of defeat, Republicans are trying to mend their ways, by, for example, getting less insane about immigration. But that's like a husband who has been abusing you for forty years suddenly buying you flowers and expecting it to smooth everything over. There needs to be some radical change, and it needs to be sustained over a long period of time.
There are other issues of course, such as the fact that members of racial minorities might not have the same paranoia about the federal government that conservatives do. But again, even that might be a reminder of the "state's rights" and "nullification" arguments that Southerners have used against the federal government's intervention first in slavery and then in civil rights.
It may be a post-racial society in some ways. Overt discrimination is rarer, and it is thoroughly socially unacceptable to express prejudice publicly. But the same mindsets linger from the days when race was the central issue in American life. Republicans will need to undergo a more fundamental change in the way they view this country before they'll ever win over minority votes.
No comments:
Post a Comment