McCain, Obama, & White Privilege

Saw something interesting on the AP wire today, apparently Obama has decided to be more overt in opposing identity-based smear tactics against him and has explicitly called out the RNC for fear mongering. Here’s his exact words:

“What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me… You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills” [from the Associated Press]

McCain, of course, reacted with indignation and accused Obama of playing the Race card by accusing McCain of playing it.

Thing is there are plenty of other folks on the right wing of American politics who are more then happy to use identity politics to paint Obama as “other” and not to be trusted, whether their anointed candidate approves or not. So while McCain himself has preferred to go light on the fear mongering and instead to portray Obama as inexperienced and lacking substance, he still very much benefits from all the work that others are doing on his behalf to drive white america away from the big scary black man with the muslim-sounding name. That’s who Obama’s comment was directed towards, and if he was really honest McCain would recognize that.

The concept of “White Privilege” is a tricky one, and over the years I’ve had a fair share of beef with how that concept is frequently mis-used to whip up people’s feelings of white guilt and get them to shut up and follow orders (needless to say, I am NOT a fan of the authoritarian left). But if you can get past the bullshit, it’s an important concept. In a nutshell, the theory behind White Privilege posits that (relative to people of color) White people in America gain certain social benefits, strictly because of their skin color and irregardless of class, that are systematically denied to others. These privileges include basic things like the fact that a white person who is arrested is statistically less likely to do serious prison time then a black person picked up for the same crime with the same evidence. At the more abstract level, white people are consistently portrayed as the default in our media and mass culture. A white guys is just a guy, but a black guy is always a black guy.

Obama’s candidacy is the perfect example of this phenomenon. In the year or so that the campaign has been running I don’t think I’ve read a single article on him that didn’t mention, usually repeatedly, that he’s black. By contrast, articles describing the campaigns of his white opponents rarely if ever mention their race – unless they do so with reference to Obama. McCain doesn’t NEED to bring up Obama’s race and make it an issue, the press does it for him whether he wants them too or not. Same goes for his supposedly “muslim” background. Despite the fact that the man’s mother and father were both Athiests and that he was raised secular before converting to christianity as an adult, the internet is full to the gills with chain letters and innuendo about how he’s a “closet” Muslim – some kind of Manchurian Candidate who’s keeping his true religious affiliation a secret until he can get into office and invoke Sharia Law by executive order. Anybody who takes that shit seriously can go join the tinfoil hat brigade as far as I’m concerned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t influential. Unlike Clinton, McCain can honestly say that he hasn’t encouraged that type of thing and has even actively discouraged it on occasion, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t benefit from it.

And that, dear friends, is White Privilege in a nutshell.

To be clear, I’m not calling McCain a racist, except in the general sense that we live in a racist sexist classist homophobic society and it’s virtually impossible to avoid unconsciously absorbing some of those attitudes. All I’m saying is that McCain stands to benefit from prejudice against his opponent in a very direct way. And for people seeking to understand how the more subtle racism of modern America works, this is a perfect object lesson. Despite his working-class origins, the fact is Obama is a member of the ruling class
and by every indication throughly enjoys the enormous power and privilege that goes along with that. If racial and cultural prejudice can have such a dramatic effect on him, consider how much more dramatically that same background prejudice affects poor and working class folks who share his skin tone but lack his Ivy league credentials and gifts for oration.

So what’s a candidate to do? McCain can’t very well change his skin color and opt out of white privilege, any more then I can. But he can denounce it. He can get up and say to all the people that are saying they’ll vote for him because they just don’t feel “comfortable” with Obama because they think he’s secretly a Muslim (and that that’s apparently a bad thing) and is thus not a “Real American” – or who just straight up don’t want to vote for a black man – that he doesn’t want their votes and he has no intention of winning the election because of unfounded prejudice against his opponent.

Not that I expect that to happen, this is politics after all and winning is the most important thing to any politician. The fact is that in a year when barely 1 in 10 Americans approves of the incumbent republican president, McCain’s only hope for winning as a republican is to pull in all the conservative democrats and independents who’ve been scared away from the Obama camp by identity politics. Without the racist vote McCain loses. And he knows it. And for a guy like McCain who’s big on doing things his own way that’s got to suck. If he wasn’t an uber-rich member of the ruling class and a willing poster boy for our oppressors, I could almost feel sorry for the poor bastard.

PS: Frankly, I suspect the difficulty of carrying the general election as a republican this year is why McCain won the nomination – to the centrists he was the only one with the cross-party pull to bring in enough conservative democrats and independents to win the general election in a year when Republicans as a whole are deeply unpopular, and to the hard-right wing of the party that’s hated him for years, nominating him in a year where it’s practically impossible for him to win was a good way to get him and his presidential aspirations out of the way.

PPS: Please keep in mind that I am not voting for Obama or McCain and hope none of you do either. This election – like every election – I’ll go in, vote on ballot initiatives, and when it comes to candidates check “other” and write “none” for all offices because “none” is the number of candidates on the ballot who can offer real change.

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Sept. 20th edit – check out the data from the new AP poll on attitudes of white people toward black folks and it’s possible impacts on the presidential race for some good solid data on this:

Posted: August 1st, 2008 under politrix, race & racism.
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