Surely, No One Should Be Surprised that Palin Plays the Race Card

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The advance PR flacks for HarperCollins knew exactly what they were doing when they calculatedly leaked a provocative passage from Sara Palin’s newest ego stroke book, America by Heart. The passage incited race. This time the target is not President Obama, at least not directly. It is First Lady Michelle Obama. Palin dredged up the worn, tired, and patently false charge claiming that Michelle sullied America when she allegedly said at a stop during the 2008 campaign she was not proud of America until Obama became a viable presidential candidate.

The quote was deliberately hacked up out of context. The oft, well-documented cite of the full quote, its context, and Michelle’s expansive clarification mean nothing to Palin. In her twist and bend of Michelle’s words, it becomes a statement of fact to show that Obama as she put it learned to hate white folks listening to the racial “rants” of their former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Palin’s silly, and ignorant distortion makes perfectly good sense when you consider her and the political calculus she’s using.

First there’s her. Palin’s track record in acknowledging, let alone promoting diversity during her short tenure as Alaska governor was abominable. She’s on record with only a terse utterance on hate crimes legislation and on cultural diversity. According to the 2000 Census figures, blacks made up officially about 4 percent of the state population. But those who self-identify as at least part African-American bump up the percentage much higher. When American Indians, Aleuts, Eskimos, and Asians are taken together, minorities make up about one quarter of Alaska’s population. This makes the state one of the most ethnically diverse in the nation. Palin didn’t even bother to pay the customary lip service to hiring and promoting a diverse staff. She had no problem making that clear in a heated and contentious meeting with black leaders in Alaska, including prominent ministers, NAACP officials, and community activists. They met with Palin to voice their complaint over minority hiring and job opportunities. During the meeting she allegedly said that she didn’t have to hire any blacks. Even more damning, she purportedly said that she didn’t intend to hire any. Her press secretary disputed the charge, but revealingly added that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill.

But even if Palin had taken a stab at diversity it wouldn’t alter her political calculus one bit. Race is and has been the sometimes sneaky and coded, and other times open hammer that packs of bloggers, websites, talk radio jocks, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and gaffe prone GOP operatives have used to fan their institutionalized Obama hatred. They know that a racial tweak here and there will always touch a raw among many bigots who have made it amply plain that they loathe Obama’s policies and by extension him and will stop at nothing to get him out of the White House.
Michelle fits into the Palin plan to use her as a racial foil to smear the president. Michelle is gracious, charming, photogenic, smart, and most importantly from a political view, popular. That makes her a ripe target to go after. By playing race and trying to discredit her Palin does two things in addition to taking a backdoor swipe at the president. She tears down someone who can actually pose as a counterweight to the ugliness and mountainous negatives that polls show that Palin has piles of. Her other devious motive in going after the First Lady for her mythical sin is that is it serves as a convenient reminder that Michelle and Obama ala Bill and Hillary Clinton are a tandem team and that the alleged failing or missteps of the president can just as easily be attributed to Michelle as well. That’s why Palin picked on Wright to remind her cheerleading crowd that Obama ad Michelle as she put it “spent two decades in the pews of Wright.”

Palin double downed on the race beat by rapping Attorney General Eric Holder for his quip that Americans are cowards for not talking about race. Palin of course, conveniently neglects to mention that Obama quickly disassociated himself from the Holder knock, and nothing more was heard about that from Holder or Obama. It was the same though tactic as with Michelle; dredge up and distort an old off the cuff quote on race and stand it on its head to make a grand case that Obama, his wife, and his administration are closet bigots and America loathers.

Race as always is the tried and true vehicle that the GOP hit team repeatedly uses to make that dumb case. Palin in her crude, ignorant, but calculating way, has jumped on that too. Considering the source, surely, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk shows on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

GOP’s Invitation to Breibart Shows they are Lying About Race

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele has repeatedly snapped back at the charge and the notion that the GOP is racist, harbors racist elements, and plays the race card. Steele on occasion has loudly said that the RNC must embrace diversity, and be a big tent that includes minorities. Every time he opens his mouth to say these things he’s called a liar. Those that call Steele a liar rattle off the litany of racist gaffes, slurs, and acts by GOP officials, politicians, and assorted GOP connected tea party leaders and activists to prove their point.

Now they have one more thing they can add to the litany. That’s RNC Steele’s invite to rightwing smear machine engineman, Andrew Breitbart to appear at the RNC’s three day confab in Los Angeles, August 12 to 14. It’s billed as a rev up the troops, fundraiser, and called “Election Countdown.” Brietbart’s name is not buried among the GOP assorted luminaries scheduled to participate at the event. His name not only headlines the event, he and Steele will host the first night welcoming reception. His name even appears ahead of Steele’s on the opening night reception announcement.

So why is that? Is it Breitbart’s name, fame, money, the controversy and curiosity he invariably arouses, the media attention he draws, his staunch GOP troublemaking credentials, and the fact that might be good for a few more bucks in the till that compels Steele and the RNC to make him the star of their show. It’s all of the above. And this makes Breitbart an even more disgusting choice to headline a major event, by a major party, that claims it’s poised to make major gains in the midterm elections, and chatters incessantly about even taking back the House. GOP Senators and House members and mainstream party officials have put up a hard front that even with its pile of no’s to the Obama administration’s initiatives and legislation it has still managed to maintain some degree of respectability among a wide body of conservative, and moderate GOP voters. It has even grabbed votes and support from centrist independents that question or oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care, stimulus, and tax proposals. Plopping Breitbart at the top of a major GOP event blows the party’s façade of respectability to smithereens.

Even before Breitbart’s vile hatchet job on Shirley Sherrod, he had managed to parlay a name and turn his mini-on line empire, biggovernment.com, into the bible of muckraking and old fashioned dirty tricks cheerleading and agitation against Democrats, liberal and progressive activists and minorities. Despite full exposure of the Sherrod tape as a fraud and fabrication, Breitbart still kept the lying, doctored tape on his website. This is much more than the usual standard, garden variety GOP shouts and rants at Obama and Democrats on legitimate policy issues.
Breitbart is a direct throwback to the Nixon, dirty tricks operatives and escapades of the early 1970s who brought shame and disgrace on the White House and the GOP. The party spent the next decade trying to rid itself of the stigma of being a party that condones dirt digging, rumor mongering, and even lawlessness as long as the target smeared was a Democrat.

That’s a history that Steele and the RNC will embrace and revel in if Breitbart headlines their show. Steele can prove that’s not the case by rescinding the invitation. Will he?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

NAACP Still Hasn’t Atoned for Sherrod Blunder

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

NAACP president Ben Jealous caught holy hell from black bloggers for his astoundingly embarrassing rush to judgment applauding the curb toss of Shirley Sherrod. Jealous, of course, quickly reversed gear and admitted that he and the organization had been snookered by the rightwing attack hack Andrew Breitbart and Fox News.

But that begs the larger question, really two questions. Why was the NAACP snookered? And even after it realized it was conned, has it done enough to atone for its colossal blunder? The answers to both questions aren’t pretty. The group clearly had the tea party on its mind when it made the quick call on Sherrod. It did not want to be yelled at by tea party activists and the rightwing smear machine as hypocrites, for double dealing the race card, and for being soft on alleged black racism.

The NAACP’s knee jerk overreaction and appeasement had everything to do with timing, as it turned out bad timing. It came on the heels of the blowback that the NAACP got for its convention resolution a week earlier blasting racist elements in the tea party. Breitbart made no bones about why he trotted out the lying tape when he did. He said that he wanted to hit back at the NAACP. The NAACP could have easily ignored it, or taken a few moments to check it out, and found it to be the fraud that the world now knows it be. It didn’t and for that it took the deserved heat. The NAACP, though, has done too much, and is till to valued an organization to be endlessly beat up on for its act. Just don’t let it happen again. But the second question is still crucial and that’s has it really made up for its flub to the person hurt the most by its rash action, and that’s Sherrod.

The answer is no. Start with the retraction. The statement it issued was weak, tepid and non-committal. It did not call for an apology. It did not issue a ringing call to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to immediately and fully reinstate her to her position. It did not criticize Vilsack for making his bonehead decision to fire her. It did not promise to do an internal review and soul search within the organization to find out why it rushed to hail Sherrod’s firing and to insure that hasty decisions won’t be made again. It did not pound the tea party and the right wing attack machine. It covered itself by again repeating the patently unnecessary mea culpa that the NAACP has zero tolerance for discrimination. This is exactly the reason the organization gave for praising the swift kick to the curb of Sherrod. Unlike Vilsack and President Obama, it did not formally apologize to Sherrod for its act. It referred to the Sherrod debacle as the worn cliché teachable moment, but gave no hint that it learned the lesson, and that is to hit back and hit back hard against the right, and not just with a paper resolution. Finally, the NAACP has not even demanded that Breitbart remove the offending video (it’s still on his site) calling Sherrod a racist. The NAACP, Instead, has clamped a wall of silence on the sorry episode preferring to simply move on.

Unfortuately, Sherrod can’t. The NAACP hasn’t done much to see that she can.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Black Tea Party Activists Say Don’t Call Us Traitors

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

There was mild surprise when a small contingent of black tea party bloggers and writers screamed loudly that Georgia Congressman John Lewis made up that he was spit on and called the N word as he left the Cannon office building across from the Capitol in the hours before the final vote on the health care reform bill. The black tea party activists demanded that Democrats produce the tapes to prove that Lewis was attacked.

The black tea partiers were lambasted as Uncle Toms, Oreos and worst of all, traitors. They’ve heard all this before, many times before. Some of them have turned the smears into a badge of pride, and say that more blacks should, and even quietly do, back the tea party’s avowed goal of tax cuts, small government, and defense of individual rights. Their claim is a tough sell, mostly because tea party leaders have shot themselves in the foot repeatedly by saying and doing nothing about the Confederate flags, Texas Lone Star flags, and the borderline racist signs and slogans that are waved and brandished at tea party rallies. This further feeds the deep suspicion that the tea party movement is chock full of unreconstructed bigots driven to hysteria by the mere thought of a black man in the White House.

Then there’s the GOP. Its relentless, take no prisoners, four decade war with civil rights leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, and now Obama has further deepened fear and loathing among blacks of anyone and anything that carries the Republican stamp. The black tea party activists in almost all cases mark themselves with that stamp. But blacks and the GOP and now the tea party is not a total oxymoron.
Blacks have always been either in or on the fringe within the GOP during its metamorphosis over the last half century from the multi-racial party of Lincoln, champion of federal protections, and civil rights to a white man’s party that touts states rights, promotes racial division, and that uses championing small government, defense of constitutional freedoms and individual rights as hidden racial code words.

The motives of the blacks that have stayed loyal to the GOP are varied. Some have found the GOP a good hustle. They’ve been showered with political favors, money, and PR promotion. For others the GOP is a contrarian fad to boast that aren’t part of the nation of sheep pack that pay blind allegiance to the Democrats and President Obama. Then others sincerely buy the tea party claim that taxes and big government hurt blacks too.

The seed of their attraction to the tea party movement was planted six years ago during the presidential campaign of 2004. Bush through an adroit mix of emotional appeals, political messaging, and faith based largesse to a select few high profile black evangelicals stirred the hard feeling of many blacks toward abortion, gay rights, and their defense of family values. This paid big political dividends in the must win states of Florida and Ohio. The double-digit bump up he got in the black vote padded his comfort vote margin to bag both states and the White House.

It didn’t last. Bush’s colossal Katrina flub turned the grumbles from those blacks who defected to him during the election into a stampede away from him and the GOP. The still strong current of religious evangelicalism, and anti-gay, anti-abortion, sentiment and the targeting of government as the villain behind them, coupled with mounting economic insecurity, still struck a small chord among some blacks. The off the chart black vote for Obama didn’t entirely change that. Their vote was in part a general contempt and loathe of Bush policies, repulsion at the marginal thinly veiled race tinged appeals, and Sarah Palin, and in part a rally round the brother.
Republican National Chair Michael Steele paid some initial lip service to the need for greater diversity in the GOP but that didn’t last either. He was quickly regarded as a comic mouthpiece for the GOP’s non-stop pound of Obama. This insured that any black that uttered even a faint word of sympathy for the GOP would earn the tag of traitor.

The tea party, though, seems to be another story. It’s loose, disjointed, populist pitch with seemingly no direct tie to the GOP mainstream seems a safe haven for some blacks to vent their opposition to big government and high taxes while declaring disdain for Democrats. The record 37 blacks running as Republicans in the fall elections in majority or heavily white vote districts bank that they can rally tea party activists to their banner. That may be delusionary thinking. But the fact that they’re willing to try is their way of saying don’t call us traitors for our political beliefs. They have a point.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Recycling the Angry White Male

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

A recent New York Time/CBS poll confirmed the obvious. Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, lower income, and GOP leaning. Nearly all passionately believe that President Obama is shoving the country to socialism. All lambaste the federal government for giving the company store away to the poor. The poor in this case are blacks. That race lurks perilously just beneath the surface with Tea Party activists is beyond dispute. To many the equation is government programs equal hand outs to undeserving blacks and the poor and that in turn equals money snatched from the pockets of hard working whites.

This is nothing new. It’s just a recycle of the media buzz depiction of the angry white male. The term was coined by political analyst and then GOP strategist Kevin Phillips during Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968. Nixon stoked the fury of blue collar, white ethnics, rural voters with his slam of the Democrats for coddling criminals, welfare cheats, and fostering a culture of anything goes permissiveness, and of course, big government Great Society pandering to the poor. The crude thinly disguised code words and racial cues worked. Nixon eked out a narrow victory over Democratic presidential opponent Hubert Humphrey. The tag of law and order and permissiveness became a staple in the GOP attack play book for the next four decades. With tweaks and refinements, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush used it to ease their path to the White House. In the mid 1990s, Newt Gingrich and ultra conservatives recycled the strategy to seize Congress, and pound out an agenda that made big government, tax and spend Democrats, and soft on crime liberals the fall guys for everything wrong with America. It touched the familiar nerve with white males.

The volatile mix of big government and economics that can whip frustrated, rebellious, angry whites (and more than a few non-whites) into a tizzy far better than crude race baiting, magnificently for a reason that goes beyond race alone. Many blue-collar white males were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation became more evident in the early 1980s when nearly 10 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls, more than half from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty has continued to expand.
Hate groups, anti-Obama Web sites and bloggers, and radio talk jocks can craft this as the prime reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and, by extension, Obama while convincing themselves and the public that this has nothing to do with race. This translates to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government. The vintage blends of anti-government politics and calls defending personal freedom were the neo-libertarian war cries heard at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the tea party convention. Protests over big government dwarfed the subtle and overt race-baiting appeals that were seen and heard at both conventions.

Tea party activists hammer Obama, the Democrats, big government, the elites, and Wall Street. Yet, they also grouse about abortion, family values, gay rights, and tax cuts -- not race.

Rightwing populism, with its mix of xenophobia, loath of government as too liberal, too tax-and-spend, and too permissive, and a killer of personal freedom has been the engine that powered Reagan and Bush White House wins. Scores of GOP governors, senators and members of congress have used wedge issues to win office and maintain political dominance. The GOP grassroots brand of populism has stirred millions operating outside the confines of the mainstream Republican Party. In 2008, many of these voters stayed home. Even Sarah Palin wasn't enough to budge them. Their defection was more a personal and visceral reaction to the bumbles of George W. Bush than a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment. They were ripe for the tea party movement -- or any movement that keyed their anger and frustration into action.

The supposed proof that the tea party movement is loaded with bigots and driven by race frenzy is that tea party leaders won't denounce the racists in their ranks. That won’t happen. One the movement would have to be structured, layered, and regimented with a unitary agenda and program for that to be the case. It's the disparate, disjointed and scrambled headless amoeba that makes the tea party movement potent, appealing and dangerous. But it won’t happen because the for more than foru decade history of politics the dangerous blend of big government, undeserving, crime prone, poor and minorities, and put upon whites has been so deeply encoded in the political thinking of millions of whites, that it’s the government not race that matters, true or not.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).

The Jackie Robinson Baseball Won’t Remember

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was effusive when for the second year he called on the baseball world to remember Jackie Robinson and his achievements. To honor Robinson, Selig required every player, coach and umpire to wear Robinson’s old Number 42 for one game as tribute. Selig’s gesture and the player’s compliance were genuine and heartfelt and again recognized that Robinson’s smash of the color bar in 1947 was a tipping moment for race relations in America. The irony is that Robinson then and in the years after he left baseball didn’t see the game and America quite the way Selig nostalgically remembers it and him.

When Robinson nervously stood at second base in his first game in the majors he later said that he was "uneasy" and far less hopeful that his feat would change American attitudes toward Blacks. Twenty-five years after that historic day in 1947 Robinson's unease became bitter doubts. In his autobiography, I Never had it Made he unapologetically declared: "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a Black man in a white world. I never had it made." This is the other story Robinson repeatedly told in his autobiography, letters, and columns in the New York Post and the Amsterdam News.

In 1949 Black singer/activist Paul Robeson made an ill-timed, and much distorted statement that Blacks were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Robinson was pressured to testify before the witch-hunting House Un- American Activities Committee to refute Robeson. Robinson did not want to be used as a Black pawn to attack Robeson.
In his testimony he opposed Communism, criticized the Committee for its "partisan politics" and fiercely attacked racial discrimination: "We're not going to stop fighting race discrimination in this country until we've got it licked." Years later he did not regret his testimony but he told why he "would reject such an invitation" today: "In those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today."

For more than a decade Robinson gave speeches, helped raise funds, and made generous contributions to the NAACP and the SCLC. But in 1967, he resigned from the NAACP's board of directors accusing it of being "insensitive to the trends of our times, unresponsive to the needs and aims of the Black masses—especially the young—and more and more they seem to reflect a refined, sophisticated, 'Yassuh-Mr. Charlie' point of view." His criticism foreshadowed the identical charges made by dissidents that would nearly wreck the NAACP almost two decades later.

Many Blacks called Robinson an "Uncle Tom and "sell-out" for supporting the Republican presidential bid of Richard Nixon over Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. Robinson did not receive any money or political favors for supporting Nixon. His sole litmus test was how strongly a candidate supported civil rights: "I was not beholden to any political party. I was Black first."

But the Nixon of 1960 wasn't the Nixon of 1968 who inflamed law-and- order sentiment, and pandered to racist white Southerners. As Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon vigorously fought for the civil rights bills of 1957 and 1960 and for stronger action against racially- motivated violence. The Kennedy of 1960 wasn't the Kennedy of 1963 who took forceful civil rights action. As a senator, he voted to water down a section of the Civil Rights bills of 1957, and actively courted racist Southern Democrats. Robinson promised that if his candidate betrayed him on civil rights, "I'll be right back to give him hell." He did. He denounced the political mean-spiritedness of Nixon and the Republicans. "Every chance I got I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing."
Like many then, Robinson at first regarded Malcolm X as an anti-Semitic, race-bailing demagogue and criticized his approach to racial problems. But in time he came to respect and admire Malcolm: "Many of the statements he made about the problems faced by our people and the immorality of the white power structure were the naked truth."

He staked his career and reputation on making black economic empowerment a reality. He believed; "There were two keys to the advancement of Blacks in America—the ballot and the buck. If we organized our political and economic strength, we would have a much easier fight on our hands."

Robinson got the break of the century when he was chosen to crack the color bar in baseball. He was courted by politicians, showered with persona] honors, and attained a measure of financial success. Yet at the end of his life he realized that many Blacks had continued to lose ground: "I can't believe that I have it made while so many of my Black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity, live in slums or barely exist on welfare." Robinson until the end insisted, he never had it made. He’d likely say the same today. That’s the Robinson baseball won’t remember.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.

Torrance California Police Stop Again Casts Ugly Glare on Racial Profiling

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The throng of angry whites jeered, catcalled, and spat out borderline racial insults at the small group of mostly black protestors. This wasn’t a march against Jim Crow in Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson, Mississippi, or Cicero, The year wasn’t 1963. The charged racial confrontation happened on March 14, 2010 in the self-billed All-American, mostly white Los Angeles suburban bedroom city of Torrance, California. The march was called to protest the unwarranted stop, search and harassment of Robert Taylor, a prominent Los Angeles African-American minister and civic leader by two white Torrance police officers on March 4. Following the stop, there were hundreds of outraged letters many filled with vile, crude, and profane racist pot shots at blacks, in local newspapers blasting Taylor and civil rights supporters.
The Taylor stop fit the all too familiar pattern of many unwarranted stops of black and Latino motorists. Torrance police officials claimed that he and the car he drove allegedly fit the description of a suspect and car involved in a robbery and assault a day earlier.

The problem is Taylor is not even remotely close in appearance to the description of the suspect. The picture circulated was of a short, stocky dark complexioned 30ish black male. Taylor is tall, in his 60s, and light complexioned.
Predictably, as in most racial profiling allegations, Torrance police and city officials hotly denied the profiling charge. They justified it with the stock story that crime is on the rise in the city, but offered no compelling stats to back up that claim. Taylor’s stop would have likely ignited the usual finger pointing, charge swapping, and then faded fast except for one thing. Torrance has been slapped with a Justice Department lawsuit, civil rights lawsuits, court settlements, and hundreds of verbal complaints over the years by black and Latino motorists, shoppers, African-American mail carriers some in full uniform that work at postal stations in Torrance, and residents such as Taylor who allege they were racially profiled.

Torrance is hardly unique. The past decade, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and other big and small cities have repeatedly been called on the carpet for alleged racial profiling. In an address to a joint session of Congress in 2001, then President Bush blasted racial profiling, "It’s wrong and we will end it in America." It hasn’t

The refusal to admit that racial profiling exists by many public officials and many in law enforcement has done much to torpedo nearly every effort by local and national civil rights and civil liberties groups to get law enforcement and federal agencies not only to admit that racial profiling happens but to do something about it. The throng of white protestors that harangued the blacks and other supporters who protested the Taylor stop in Torrance was ample proof of that.

A perennial federal bill served up by House Democrat John Conyers to get federal agencies to collect stats and do reports on racial profiling hasn't gotten to first base. A similar racial profiling bill met a similar fate in California in 1999. The bill passed by the state legislature mandated that law enforcement agencies compile racial stats on traffic stops. It was promptly vetoed by then Democratic governor Gray Davis.
Despite Davis’s veto, nearly 60 California city and county police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and University of California police agencies either through mandatory federal consent decrees or voluntarily collect date on unwarranted traffic stops of motorist and contacts civilian to determine if there is a racial bent to the stops. Torrance is not one of those cities.

Nationally, 46 states collect data either voluntarily or compelled by state law on unwarranted pedestrian contacts and traffic stops. Most police officials, as in Torrance, loudly contend that good police work is about the business of catching criminals and reducing crime, not about profiling blacks and Latinos. If more black and Latino men are stopped it's not because they're black or Latino but because they commit more crimes. The other even more problematic tact used to debunk racial profiling is the few statistics that have been compiled on unwarranted stops. In this case not by police agencies but based on citizen responses. In two surveys, the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics took a hard, long quantified look at racial profiling using information that it got from citizens. Both times, the agency found that while whites are stopped, searched and arrested far less than blacks or Latinos, there was no hard proof that the stops had anything to do with race.
This has done even more to damp down a public outcry to get police agencies and legislators to admit that racial profiling is a fact on many city streets and highways and then to take firm action to eliminate it.

The arrest last July of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gate's touched off a brief furor over racial profiling. Taylor’s stop and search has done the same in a bedroom Southern California city. It has again cast the ugly glare on the always troubling problem of racial profiling.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard public issues talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles Friday 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles Saturday Noon PST.

The Vile Fascination with the Monkey Image of the Obama’s (and African-Americans)

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The worst thing about the CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association Walt Baker’s silly, sick, demeaning depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama as a chimp ironically is not the depiction. It’s Baker’s clueless defense. The instant the storm broke, and Nashville’s mayor, the state’s GOP leaders denounced him, and the contract was summarily yanked from his marketing firm, Mercatus Communications, to help promote the city's new convention center, Baker predictably wailed that he’s not a bigot, racially insensitive, and the cartoon was nothing but political humor.
He fervently believes that. He just as fervently believes that lampooning Michelle Obama, and President Obama as a monkey, ape, gorilla is just can’t you take a joke fun and games. He and the pack of race baiting websites, chat rooms, and of late, college frat parties, and student websites that ridicule the Obama’s (and African-Americans) in assorted off beat, crude, vile cartoons and always with the vile depiction as monkeys or apes is by now standard fare. It’s no accident that it is.

The long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans has been the stock in trade of race baiting and racial ridicule and for more than century. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day; that day?
In the movie version of Rudyard Kipling children’s classic, The Jungle Book, the Disney Studios in 1967 graduated from the other standard animal depiction of African-Americans as black crows to depicting African-Americans as the Monkey like jive, gibberish blathering King Louie. The film was remade in 1994.

Fifteen years later, New York Post Cartoonist Sean Delonas ignited a firestorm with his casual depiction of President Obama as a monkey. He did it precisely because that image didn’t die a century, half century, a decade, or even a year ago. In 2007 Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences,” in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.

The overwhelming majority of the participants in the studies bristled at the faintest hint that they had any racial bias. But the animal savagery image and blacks was very much on their minds. The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.

This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. In hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as “barbaric,” “beast,” “brute,” “savage” and “wild.” And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.

First Lady Michelle Obama is a woman, a black woman, and a soft target for the frustrations and even scorn of the Obama loathers. During the campaign Obama opponents eagerly latched onto out-of-context statement she made at a campaign rally in which she allegedly questioned her faith in America, and made a supposedly less than reverential reference to the flag. They brutally tarred her as a closet anti-American, race-obsessed, black radical. That made her an instant campaign liability. For weeks she virtually disappeared from the campaign trail.

She has played a relatively low key role in the White House, and has succeeded in pretty much staying out of harm’s way from the hits of hubby Obama’s avowed enemies. That is all except when it comes to the image assault from the eternal animal mockery of blacks, an image that Baker and legions of other see nothing wrong with. It’s an image that the First Lady and the President haven’t seen the last of it. It’s just too juicy, vile and hurtful to die. It’s been that way for a century.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles Friday 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles Saturday Noon PST.

Obama Again Reminds He’s Not Black President Obama

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


The Congressional Black Caucus got another painful reminder that President Obama is not black President Obama. In a press interview Obama bluntly said that he would not propose any special initiatives for blacks. Obama’s sharp retort was in direct response to questions about how he’d solve a glaring problem and a glaring demand from the Caucus. The problem is the astronomical high unemployment rate for blacks, especially young black males. Latest job figures show joblessness for young black males matches and in some parts of the country tops the unemployment rate at the height of the 1930s Great Depression.

The Congressional Black Caucus demanded that Obama specifically shell out more money and formulate more programs to help the black jobless and to aid cash strapped minority broadcasters and minority businesses. The Caucus lightly saber rattled Obama with the threat of delaying or even opposing his financial regulation plan if he didn’t play ball. The Caucus is about as likely to buck Obama on the financial legislation when the final House vote is taken as the American Bankers Association is to back it. But the Caucus made its point. And so did Obama when he reiterated that he won’t propose any new programs for blacks.

Obama set that in stone from the first day of his presidential campaign. In his candidate declaration speech in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007, he made only the barest mention of race. The focus was on change, change for everyone. He had little choice. The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped. Obama would have had no hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, let alone the presidency, if there had been any hint that he embraced the race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism. The month after he got in the White House he mildly chided Attorney General Eric Holder for calling Americans cowards for not candidly talking about race.

Obama got a bitter taste of the misery that race can cause a president him when in an unscripted moment he spoke his mind and blasted a Cambridge cop for cuffing and manhandling Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates. The loud squeals that he was a bigot, racist and anti police for siding with Gates bounced off the Oval Office walls. A chagrined Obama back pedaled fast and asked all for forgiveness. There would no White House repeat of the Gates fiasco.

Obama has clung tightly to the centrist blueprint Bill Clinton laid out for a Democratic presidential candidate to win elections, and to govern after he won. The blueprint required that the Democratic presidential candidate tout a strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, tepid proposals to control greenhouse emissions, mild tax reform for the middle class, a cautious plan for affordable health care, pro business solutions to joblessness, and make only the most genteel reproach of Wall Street.

The Clinton blueprint also required a Democratic presidential candidate to formulate a moderate agenda on civil rights, poverty, failing inner city public schools, the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the racially skewed criminal justice system in written policy statements. And then say virtually nothing about any of these things on the campaign trail. Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry followed the Clinton blueprint to the letter during their campaign and if either had won, the likelihood is they would not made these problems priority items in their White House.

Obama is tugged hard by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, environmental watchdog groups, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders. They all have their priorities and agendas and all vie hard to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests. The health care reform battle and the decision to escalate in Afghanistan or near textbook examples of this. The two dozen back door meetings Obama had with the major pharmaceuticals and private insurers at the White House in February virtually guaranteed that a big chunk of the health care reform package would reflect the interests and the wishes of the health care industry. This is the price to be paid to get their backing.

It’s the same with Afghanistan. The Pentagon wanted and demanded a huge ramp up in American ground forces in the country. Given the pressure to win the war, and the power of the military and the defense industry, Obama was in no real position to say no.

Obama’s no to the Congressional Black Caucus on black joblessness and a beef up of minority businesses has everything to do with the price of White House governance. That price is a cautious, conciliatory, and above all, a race neutral presidency.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Obama Does and Doesn’t Fulfill King’s Dream

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


The unchallenged article of faith is that the election of President Barack Obama fulfills Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that the content of character should trump skin color. King uttered the words in his March on Washington speech in 1963. We’ll hear that said time and again in the march up to the King national holiday January 19 and Obama’s inauguration the next day.
Obama’s election did show that millions of whites could strap racial blinders around their eyes and punch the ticket for an African-American for the world’s most powerful political post. King would almost certainly glow with approval at that. But there are a couple of troubling caveats that mar America’s great racial leap forward. Obama won in large part because he did what no other Democratic presidential candidate did, and that includes Bill Clinton. He turned his presidential campaign into a virtual holy crusade by African-Americans voters to get him in the White House. The staggering 96 percent of the black vote he got made the crucial difference in the key Democratic primaries and later in nailing down the victory over Republican rival John McCain in the must win states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
At the same time, Obama’s allure to white college educated young, business and professionals was overstated. McCain got 53 percent of their vote. He trounced Obama among North and South rural, and blue collar whites. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of more than 400 counties from New York to Mississippi. Overall, he got less than a third of Southern white votes. The racial fault lines are still tightly drawn within a wide segment of the electorate.

A mid-September 2008 survey also found that a significant percentage of whites who said they’d vote for Obama also said that blacks were more crime prone and less industrious than whites. There were several ways to look at this seeming racial paradox. One is that these Obama backers were so fed up with Bush policies and a battered economy that Obama offered a change and a lifeline. Another was that he presented a race neutral soothing departure from the perceived race baiting antics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And yet another was that he simply was sufficiently racially ambiguous enough not to pose any real racial threat.
In other words, he was seen as a racial exception. That's the penchant for some whites to make artificial distinctions between supposedly good and bad blacks.
These explanations don’t point to a profound and benign sea change in racial attitudes let alone tell why negative racial notions could still be rife among many white Obama supporters. The reports that Obama has received more taunts and physical threats than any other president-elect is another troubling indication that an untold number of Americans still can’t stomach the thought of an African-American in the White House.

The hoisting of Obama to a rarified political or non racial pedestal is the exact opposite of what King had in mind. In that same March on Washington speech what’s forgotten or deliberately distorted is that King talked much about the legacy of segregation, bigotry and discrimination that trapped thousands of poor blacks and that offered no easy resolution. Nearly a half century after King’s I Have a Dream words the black poor are still just as tightly trapped in the grip of poverty and discrimination that King warned about.

On the eve of the King national holiday and Obama’s inauguration, the Boston based research and economic justice advocacy group, United for a Fair Economy, released its sixth annual King Day report. It found that the gaping disparities in income, wealth, employment, quality and availability of housing, decent schools, and health care between blacks, minorities and whites has grown even wider. Countless government reports and studies, and the National Urban League’s 2007 State of Black America report also found that discrimination and poverty are still major barriers for millions. And it’s not just the black poor that bear the brunt of discrimination. President Bush even wondered out loud recently why there were so few black reporters covering his press conferences.
Obama has publicly bristled at the notion that the civil rights movement is outdated, or worse that he somehow supplants the ongoing work of civil rights leaders. He has repeatedly praised past civil rights leaders for their heroic battle against racial injustice.
It was not simply showy campaign symbolism when Obama pegged his Democratic presidential nomination acceptance speech to the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington last August. This was a fitting tribute to the civil rights movement that challenged the nation to make King's dream of justice and equality a reality. Obama faced that challenge as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, during his stints in the Illinois legislature and in the Senate. He faces that same challenge in the White House. There’s still much to overcome.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

Why Race Won’t Hurt Obama on November 4th

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Republican presidential contender John McCain got one thing right about Democratic rival Barack Obama. He told Larry King that he didn’t think race would be much of an issue in the final vote. As McCain put it only “a tiny, tiny, minority” will vote against Obama because he’s black. McCain was not just campaign bloviating to puff up his oft touted credential as a play it straight on race guy. The notion that because millions of whites passionately back Obama race is permanently off America’s table is more hope and prayer than reality.

Still despite endless and obsessive speculation that race could derail Obama in his slog to the White House it won’t and it probably never would have. Start with McCain and Obama; McCain made the personal and pragmatic choice not to make race an issue either directly or indirectly through code words, snide hints, and racial guilt by association attacks. When the Jeremiah Wright flap cropped up, he could have hammered Obama as a stealth race baiter. He turned thumbs down on that. Later when VP mate Sarah Palin and some others in his campaign were etching to unload on Obama-Wright again, he still said no.

That decision was not totally due to honor and noble intent. A too frontal racial attack would have brought instant screams of foul from Democrats, and millions of voters who demanded that the campaign be a clean, issues focused campaign. McCain read the political leaves correctly and saw the political peril in flipping the race card. The occasions that he slipped and rapped Obama as a socialist and a terrorist fellow traveler brought universal condemnation that he was going negative or worse running a dirty campaign.
Obama helped things even more. The firm message in his signature slogan of hope and change, campaign literature, TV ads, rallies, in pitches to contributors, his core of advisors, and major endorsers was that the Obama presidential campaign and an Obama presidency would be broad, non-racial and issues driven. Anything else would have instantly stirred horrifying visions to many of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. His candidacy would have been DOA.

But McCain and Obama’s best efforts to make race a non issue in the campaign would have fallen short without the sea change shift in public attitudes. The decade since the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the urban riots, has been a period of relative racial peace in America. During that time polls consistently showed that more whites than ever are genuinely convinced that America is a color-blind society, equal opportunity is a reality, and blacks and whites if not exactly attaining complete social and economic equality, are closer than ever to that goal. Though the figures on income, education and health care still show a colossal gap between poor blacks and whites, the perception nonetheless is that racism is an ugly and nasty byproduct of a long by-gone past.

The passage by huge margins of anti-affirmative action measures in California, Michigan, and Washington, was not simply a case of whites engaging in racial denial or a cover for hidden bias. Many white voters backed the initiatives because they honestly believed that color should never be in the equation in hiring and education, and that race is divisive.
It’s is easy to see why they believe that. "Whites only" signs and redneck Southern cops unleashing police dogs, turning fire hoses on and beating hapless black demonstrators have long been forgotten. Americans turn on their TVs and see legions of black newscasters and talk show hosts, topped by TV's richest and most popular celebrity, Oprah Winfrey.

They see mega-rich black entertainers and athletes pampered and fawned over by a doting media and an adoring public. They see TV commercials that picture blacks living in trendy integrated suburban homes, sending their kids to integrated schools and driving expensive cars. They see blacks such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor Condoleezza Rice in high-profile policy-making positions in the Bush administration. They see dozens of blacks in Congress, many more in state legislatures and city halls. They see blacks heading corporations and universities. And those blacks who incessantly scream racism about their plight are roundly reviled for feeding racial paranoia.
There is even some talk that the so-called Bradley Effect, the penchant for whites to lie to pollsters about their true racial feelings and vote against a black candidate, may actually turn into a reverse Bradley Effect this election. That’s that many whites will vote for Obama because he’s black. That notion is just as dubious as the Bradley Effect. But to even raise the possibility tells much about changing times and attitudes.

If Obama wins and that seems likely, race will be, as McCain says, only a tiny, tiny factor. That’s a tribute to him, Obama and the millions of America voters that were determined to make sure that race did not hurt Obama on November 4th

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Why Some Racists like Obama

Earl Ofari Hutchinson




Not long after Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama tossed his hat in the presidential rink back in February 2007, an odd, even bizarre thing happened. A hodgepodge of avowedly racist groups burned up internet sites not with rage, but glee. They were giddy at the thought that Obama might win.

Their rationale was that an African-American in the White House would prove their point that blacks were out to dominate whites and that whites would be so disgusted that they would unite in righteous and very racist anger. That in turn would trigger their long swooned over racist fantasy of a race war. This was dismissed for what it was, namely the ranting of the racist lunatic fringe. But that doesn’t mean that many whites who harbor hidden or even conscious racial animus won’t also back Obama albeit for their own reasons. A mid-September survey found about one quarter of whites hold negative views of blacks that are top heavy with the old shop worn stereotypes. The respondents said that blacks use race as a crutch, are not as industrious as whites, oppose interracial marriage, and are terrified of black crime (Obama mildly chided his white grandmother in his so-called race speech back in March for saying she feared black men). Yet nearly a quarter of them claim they’ll vote for Obama.

The standard explanation for this seeming racial schizoid view is that whites are so hammered by financial hardship that the economy trumps race and that Obama can do more to help them out of their financial hole than Republican rival John McCain. Others like him because his race neutral campaign is a soothing departure from the perceived race baiting antics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Still others like him because his racially exotic background supposedly doesn’t fit that of the typical African American.

There is truth in these reasons cited to explain Obama’s appeal to some racial bigots. But there’s another reason that hasn’t been cited. That’s the long, checkered, and tortured history of racial exceptionalism. That’s the penchant for some whites to make artificial distinctions between supposedly good and bad blacks. That’s apparent in the unthinking offensive, insulting, and just plain dumb crack made to some articulate, well-educated blacks in business and the professions that they are “different than other blacks or not like other blacks.”

Racial exceptionalism also stems from the ingrained, but terribly misplaced, belief that blacks are perennially disgruntled, hostile, and rebellious, and are always on the lookout for any real or perceived racial slight, and etch to pick a fight over it.

An African-American who doesn’t fit that type is touted, praised, even anointed by some as the reasoned voice of black America. A century ago the mantle of the reasoned, exceptional African-American was bestowed on famed educator, Booker T. Washington. He was showered with foundation and corporate largesse. In the 1920s and 30s, NAACP leaders always found a ready welcome at the White House. They were praised in the press and bankrolled by some industrialists. In the 1960s Urban League President Whitney Young, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King Jr. before he fell out of favor with the Lyndon Johnson White House after his too vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and turn to economic radicalism, were lionized for their reason and racial moderation.

In the 1980s, Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. actively cultivated and promoted a bevy of younger GOP friendly academics, black business leaders, and black conservatives. Reagan and Bush Sr. plainly saw them as a leadership alternative to the black Democrats and the old guard civil rights leaders. The black conservatives were appointed to government posts, bagged foundation grants, were feted by conservative think tanks, and their columns were routinely published in major newspapers. They were continually cited by writers and reporters as a breath of fresh air among African-Americans mostly for their willingness to break ranks with and to blister Jackson, Sharpton, and the civil rights establishment.

Obama hardly fits the mold of a black conservative, but neither is he the ultra-liberal Democrat that some conservative opponents routinely paint him as. Even before his rocket launch to the threshold of the presidency, he was considered a moderate, centrist Democrat, a consummate party insider, and a rising Beltway establishment politician. Without that stamp of mainstream approval, his White House bid would have never got to political first base.

Obama bristles publicly at the notion that he’s in competition with or a critic of civil rights leaders, or that he is immune from racial jabs. He has repeatedly praised past civil rights leaders for their heroic battle against racial injustice. That’s good, but that doesn’t erase the nagging penchant to elevate some blacks above the racial fray, and declare them the exception. That includes some white bigots who say they’ll back Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).