A Dissent: McCain And Obama's Otherness

Reader J.D.:

I also think the supposed dogwhistle white-woman stuff has been overblown, BUT... McCain seems to have been following Penn's advice on running a campaign that portrays McCain as the "American president Americans have been waiting for," which is really the same old thing, and arguably more insidious in today's culture, which has harsh taboos against anti-black racism but openly tolerates racism toward anyone vaguely Muslim or Arabic.  it's ironic, because in today's culture, Obama basically has to answer for TWO '"races" (if you consider "Muslim" a race, which i'm sure a working majority of Americans does).

 

It's dangerous and extremely frustrating to many of us who think this sort of talk has real-world impact on how other Americans who appear foreign (or worse, Muslim) are treated by their fellow citizens, just as Reagan and Nixon gave Presidential permission to many white Americans to go ahead and look at poor blacks as though they're all a bunch of lazy criminals who wouldn't be so poor if only they worked. In short, these kinds of politics are terribly harmful to our national culture, and impede progress for many people on a number of levels, all for the sake of squeezing out a few extra votes.  Obviously Barack Obama is going to be fine, as is his family. I think that the passion inspired by many of the dissents you're receiving on this charge is that these types of presidential campaigns have an impact on our culture that's hard to quantify but is certainly real. Politics is politics, and everyone knows it's a tough racket and all that. But for a president or a presidential nominee to signal that Barack Obama is somehow less than American because of his name or his dad's religion or because his mom moved around a lot as a kid...well, it gives a whole lot of people a whole lot of justification to treat their fellow Americans like they don't belong here, sometimes to the point of violence.

 

So, while the black-white racial politics of McCain's ad imagery is debatable, I don't think there's any question that he's running hard on xenophobia and anti-"terror" anxiety, knowing people already are suspicious of Obama's supposed Muslim ancestry. We should have a taboo in the press and in our politics against demonizing any one race or religion to get votes, but we don't, really. It's sort of looked at as a big game sometimes, with no thought to the 300 million Americans who are paying attention to the cues coming from the people in charge.