Race cast big shadow over last week’s elections

by Mikel Kwaku Osei Holt
Some people view politics solely through partisan political lens.

The glasses of many others are tinted by an economic hue--the haves versus the have nots, the rich versus the poor, the powerful versus the powerless.

For a growing number of us, however, politics are viewed through a racial prism.

We see issues and outcomes through lens tinted by the only fundamental reality that has not changed in America since the founding of this country. For a significant number of observers the political paradigm that impacts our lives is more often than not shadowed in realities that are sharply Black and White, with an occasional shade of gray.

From our perspective, policies and platforms are defined by race. And in the rare instance when it is not, the outcomes generally have some racial overtones.

If you think race doesn’t matter, or influences--in some cases supercedes--policy, explain why in each of the last two gubernatorial campaigns, Governor Jim Doyle’s campaign advisors decided to run ads featuring his two adopted Black sons in the waning weeks leading up to the election. What was the message? Who was the ad directed toward? Was it effective in motivating Black voters?

Which is not to say it was a disingenuous political ploy. It was effective, well timed and strategically sound. But let’s not forget or ignore the racial implications.

The same can be said of the governor’s decision to announce the formation of an advisory committee (yeah, another one) to study the effectiveness of the minority business enterprise program weeks before the election. And the Republicans created a committee to study affirmative action. Both were transparent messages to different racial groups, masked under the banner of partisan politics.

Forget issues or policies. Race has been and will continue to be the defining obstacle in state and national elections. Learn to navigate and manipulate that course and you can pop the champagne corks on election night, and lead your respective electoral office for two or four years.

Not convinced?

Newspaper headlines screamed out that Minnesota elected its first "Black’ congressman. Massachusetts made history by putting its first "Black" governor in the state house. The blogs were full of stories suggesting the Democratic Party congressional victories meant that Black representatives would be taking over the reins of power in the House. (Read between the lines. The subliminal message is that America will witness the second Reconstruction, that’s when all of those former slaves were elected to Congress and the smell of chicken and chitterlings filled the halls and the chambers.)

In each case, race defined newsworthiness, trumping qualifications, character and platforms.

Even the suggestion that Barack Obama is considering a run for president is tainted by race, and not just from the perspective of giddy African Americans. What most magazine and newspaper article tend to point out is that he’s "only" half Black, which in non-Ebonics means "more acceptable."

You’d have to be totally naive to have not noticed that the shadow of race cast a thick cloud over numerous races, referendums and policies during last week’s national elections.

To deny it is to ignore tactics, outcomes and the political paradigm that is the American body politic, and has been so since the Whigs and the Democratic Republican Party (yes, the two were once one), caved in to White supremacy and excluded Africans from the Constitution, subjecting them to subhuman status, effectively sanctioning the most inhuman form of slavery known to mankind.

Thus, despite so-called progress made in the last two centuries, race was on the ballot again in 2006, superceding political affiliation, economic status and moral/religious convictions:

o Voters in Michigan overwhelmingly voted to end affirmative action in that so-called progressive state. White voters crossed political lines, with even the liberals voting to end the public policy. In many of their minds, the referendum wasn’t about partisan politics, but instead about White privilege.

Democrats forgot they were supposedly members of the progressive party, one that cast itself as a friend of Black Americans and the downtrodden. Republicans voted as most Republicans do, forgetting they were the party of Lincoln, and the deciding voting bloc that advanced the Civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

As Malcolm once said, when the issue is race, there’s only one political party.

* Tennessee Representative Harold Ford was obviously the best candidate in that state’s senatorial race, as long as race was not a factor. So how do you overcome sound bites, impressive track records and political accomplishments? You paint the campaign on a racial canvas. In Ford’s case, that means running commercials of the Black congressman with a White woman, suggesting he had had a relationship with an attractive Playboy bunny. Whites were outraged, and even many Democrats crossed over.

* A week after the election, Reverend Al Sharpton was leading a national lobbying effort to undermine an attempt by Democratic Party leadership to reject Representative Alcee Hastings as the new chair of the powerful House Intelligence Committee. Representatives John Conyers and Charles Rangel, by virtue of their seniority, are to ascend to the chairmanship of two powerful House committees (Rangel is reportedly in line to head the Ways and Means Committee.) Based on seniority, Hastings was to follow a similar path.

But as Sharpton noted on the ‘Tom Joyner Show," there are those who think having three Black representatives in such prestigious positions is "a little too much Blackness."

* Closer to home, theres the case of newly elected Congressman Steve Kagen, who showed his true colors when he uttered a racist slur about Native Americans a few weeks before the elections.
Fortunately for him, Native Americans bit their lips, swallowing the epithet after weighting the possibility of the open seat going to a Republican, John Gard.
But it was not lost on many in the Black community that Kagen, a self-proclaimed liberal, could harbor some of the same prejudices and insensitivities as those on the so-called far Right.

* The passage of the marriage amendment represents two political realities that bear note for the future: the theory that Black Americans are politically liberal and socially conservative holds true.

* Secondly, the White coordinators of the multimillion dollar campaign to stop the amendment took Black voters for granted, and insultingly showed their prejudice through their campaign tactics.

They started with the assumption that they "knew" Black people, our culture and attitudes, and as such believed they could manipulate the Black vote with a few token visits to the community.

They put their money in the White media, and found less than a receptive audience when they stared in awe at the images of Black Jesus when they visited Black churches.

It was not surprising to anyone but to the White activists that most Black ministers are in fact socially and culturally conservative, and linking the gay rights movement to the Civil Rights Movement would backfire, big time.

* The death penalty referendum was also tainted by race. I would venture a guess that if a survey were taken, most of the White supporters of the referendum saw Black prisoners on death row when they cast their votes. That’s an easy conclusion to reach since most criminals are Black, or so they believe.

Conversely, most Black folks voted against the referendum for the same reason, along with the knowledge that the death penalty has been discriminately applied to people of color, some of whom it has been learned later were victims of a biased criminal justice system and were innocent of their "crimes."

Say what you will, you can’t escape race in the political process. It consumes American life, so why would the political process be different.

Keep that thought in mind as a legislative committee ponders the fate of affirmative action in Wisconsin.

Truth is, affirmative action is not what it used to be, thanks to the policies of the so-called "Black President," Bill Clinton, who appeased his White moderate base by taking the teeth out of the programs, making it race neutral, which is an insult of the penultimate kind.

But what’s left of it is being challenged here in Wisconsin, in part because some White folks think a provision that allows race to be given minute consideration in the UW system admission policies is unfair to them.

Maybe I’m overstating the influence of race in politics. Some would say my conclusions are consistent with my penchant for conspiracy theories, or my tainted worldview that is a manifestation of my years working in the civil rights trenches.

Maybe so, I still avoid riding on elevators with homey White women if I’m alone, and I never wear a hoody if I’m shopping on the Southside.

Race may not determine political outcomes, but you can’t say it does not rear its ugly head in far too many cases.

And if you don’t believe me, ask that White woman from Kenosha who campaigned for Jesse Jackson back in 1988. She called him the only true candidate for the presidency who championed the cause of the middle class.

One of the local television stations interviewed her as she was leaving the voting booth following the primary, and asked how she had cast her vote. I’ll never forget her answer: ‘I was voting for Jesse all the way up until I saw his name on the ballot. Then images of a Black man in the White House came to mind, and I couldn’t do it.’

I guess she’ll feel the same way about Obama.

Hotep.