Progressives always deal from a deck full of race cards, and
possibly never more outrageously so than last week on Thursday’s
edition of MSNBC’s The Cycle. Its panel of pundits was discussing Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney‘s call for
President Obama to
“take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” A black co-host
read racial connotations underlying Romney’s phrasing which he claimed signaled
the “niggerization” of Romney’s campaign. You read that right.
The co-host, who
for some reason goes by the single name Touré (perhaps he fancies himself in the same league as Cher and
Madonna), said this of Romney’s speech:
That really bothered me. You notice
he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some
really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook
against Obama, the “otherization,” he’s not like us.
On the “otherization” point, I have to agree with Touré – Obama is definitely not like us, if by “us” he means
Americans who love their country, believe in its exceptionalism, and don’t want
to see it turned into a socialist, Muslim Brotherhood dystopia. By that
characterization, skin color is irrelevant. But of course, to race-mongers like
Touré, skin color is the alpha and omega of their political consciousness and
identity. They are incapable of perceiving anything except through the lens of
race. For them, there can be no other explanation apart from color for Romney
and his racist white Republican constituency to oppose the (half-)black Obama.
This is a useful perspective to hold when your candidate cannot run on his
record alone.
By “we,” Touré certainly isn’t including himself. He’s
referring to white America, which in the left’s view is inherently,
irredeemably racist and which in the post-civil rights era is forced to
communicate its racism to each other in impossibly subtle, fiendishly clever
ways – like racial coding.
“Racial coding,” as defined
by pundit Juan Williams, is a sort of winking between a white speaker and
audience that consists of “euphemisms allowing the speaker to deny any
responsibility for the racial content of his message.” As examples, Williams offers
phrases such as “entitlement society,” “poor work ethic,” and “food stamps,”
all of which are obviously code phrases for “black people” in the race-obsessed
minds of Williams and his ilk. Even “references to a lack of respect for the ‘Founding
Fathers’ and the ‘Constitution’” are coded racism, says Williams. This
ingenuous tactic allows the left to infuse racism into every word that issues
forth from the mouth of a white conservative (or a black one, for that matter,
since leftists don’t consider black conservatives to be truly black). Through this
patently false narrative they can maintain a perpetual accusation of racism
where it doesn't exist.
“Anger”? That’s racial coding to inspire fear of the angry
black man stereotype. Therefore conservatives aren’t allowed to accurately
identify the tone of Obama’s campaign. “Food stamps”? That’s racial coding for,
as Jimmy Carter put it, “welfare mammies.” Carter and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, who
couldn’t be more solidly in the tank for Obama, accused
Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail of racial coding when he accurately
labeled Obama “the food-stamp president” (O’Brien falsely
claimed that there were more food stamp recipients under Bush).
Meanwhile progressives turn a blind eye to the blatant racism of goofball Vice
President Joe Biden, who once praised Obama
for his light skin and lack of Negro dialect, and who recently told an audience
“Trust me, Obama has a big stick” (why isn’t that racial coding for
stereotypical black sexuality? Because he’s a Democrat, and the left never
charges its own with hate speech, racial coding, or any other politically incorrect
crime). Last week Biden made an even bigger laughingstock of himself by trying out
his very own “Negro dialect” on a largely black audience, telling them that
Romney was “gonna put y’all back in chains!” This is to say nothing of the divisive
racism of Obama himself, our “most-racial
president,” and others in his administration of racial payback like Eric
Holder.
While the left is busy pointing out imaginary racism, actual
serious racism goes uncondemned, such as the incendiary rhetoric of Holder’s
pets the New Black Panthers, who called
once again last week for the genocide of white Americans. Such black-on-white
racism gets a pass from not only the Obama administration but the media as well,
who are too busy scanning transcripts of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in a futile
search for racist remarks.
Back to last week’s episode of The Cycle. Its conservative co-host S.E. Cupp pounced on Touré’s outrageous accusation, taking him to
task for admitting that Joe Biden’s “chains” comments were divisive, but claiming
that Romney is racist for using the word “angry.”
“Do you see how dishonest that is?” she asked.
Touré denied calling anyone racist, to which Cupp responded,
“Certainly you were implying that Mitt Romney and the base will respond to this
dog-whistle, racially-charged coding, and hate Obama, the angry black man?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “This is a constituency all-white
party that rejects the black vote.”
“You have two white guys in Joe Biden and Mitt Romney,” Cupp
noted. “Joe Biden made the overtly racial comment and has a history of making
bigoted remarks. Mitt Romney was responding to the comment. Yet he is the one
responsible for the whole Republican history of racism in politics?”
“He’s using the playbook Republicans have been using for
decades now,” Touré stubbornly concluded.
He later apologized
for his use of the “N” word, but only because the controversy over it (which of
course he intended to create in the first place), “muddied the discussion… I
could’ve made the same point without using the word.” In other words, I
miscalculated the backlash but stand by my side’s own playbook of dealing from the race card deck.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/21/12)
