Bigoted
Anti-Obama Attacks Divert Attention From Pervasive Institutional
Racism
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
The
mainstream corporate news media, upon whom we can always count to
help us know what's really important and why, have recently
discovered that campaign workers for Barack Obama are sometimes
greeted with anything from snide racist asides to full-blown hateful
screeds. When a Republican governor makes jokes about Obama ducking
a bullet, and a Georgia restaurant owner sells T-shirts depicting
Obama as a monkey, these occurrences dominate the news cycle for more
than a week.
Corporate
media's breathless focus on manifestations of individual racism feed
a narrative long popular in white America, a narrative central to the
Obama campaign. This narrative holds that racism is nothing more nor
less than an anti-social habit practiced by backward individuals,
like bad table manners or public flatulence. This narrative is of
course, false and misleading.
In
the real world, American racism diminishes the quality of millions of
lives every day, not through up close, personal slights and
bigotry, but via the impersonal everyday functioning of society's
core institutions. Black mothers and babies in the US sicken and die
at third world rates not because of racist insults, but as an outcome
of the “normal” way that insurance and health care markets
function. Black children still get inferior educations in large part
due to the dependence of public education funding on local property
taxes, and No Child Left Behind, both of which are race-neutral.
From employment and underemployment to credit and housing markets to
policing and sentencing practices, to the siting of toxic waste
dumps, our nation's ostensibly color-blind laws and institutions
consistently bring forth racially stratified results.
The
real racism which degrades millions of nonwhite American lives,
including many who seldom encounter a white person bigoted or
otherwise is institutional racism, as it was first named by Charles
Hamilton and Kwame Toure more than 40 years ago. Institutional
racism is something quite apart from the individual words and acts of
bigots. But drawing attention to, let alone ending institutional
racism has seldom been on the agenda of corporate media. Likewise
the Obama campaign's strategy on race toward whites is to carefully
avoid telling white people anything other than what they imagine they
already know. With frank discussions of race, power and privilege
off the table, talk on the subject is limited to the terrain of
racism as bad manners.
The
toxic eruptions of bigots have also been extremely useful to the
Obama campaign in rallying support among African Americans.
Constantly recirculated in the black community, these racist attacks
convey to Obama's candidacy a kind of black “authenticity” on the
cheap, without the bother of his having to do, say or promise to do
anything that might challenge pervasive institutional racism. The
racist attacks then, enable black and brown voters to hunker down in
solidarity around a substance-free black candidate, while they allow
Obama's white supporters to wag their fingers disapprovingly at
ignorant white bigots, and congratulate themselves, celebrate the
evidence that their nation --- most of it anyway – has risen above
and transcended race.
For
Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon.
The Ukraine project is an obsession of the "collective west" but global south nations are resisting intimidation and making their own decisions in regard to the conflict.
This week we learn about an effort in Mississippi to undo Black political power, and we’ll hear some of my commentary on the U.S. role in the Ukraine conflict, and support for Mumia Abu Jamal among…
Maurice Carney is Executive Director of Friends of the Congo. He joins us to discuss cobalt, one of Congo’s mineral resources and one that plays a large role in green energy projects. But Congo’s…
Nsombi Lambright is Executive Director of One Voice, a statewide non-profit located in Jackson, Mississippi. She joins us to discuss a legislative proposal to create a new court system within the…
Margaret Kimberley participated in a February 21 webinar sponsored by the United National Anti-War Coalition, Ukraine One Year On. These are excerpts of her remarks.
