Obama and Racism: Making the Implicit Overt

In The Race Card, political scientist Tali Mendelberg (who I knew somewhat when she was a grad student at Michigan) argued that implicit and indirect appeals to racial stereotypes were more effective at rousing racial resentment than overt kinds of racist messages.

Mendelberg's most controversial claim is that these ads work best when the appeal is implicit. If the appeal is explicit, she argues--that is, if politicians actually say that blacks are undeserving--then they lose support because they have violated the norm against racism. Although voters will respond unconsciously to an implicit appeal that they don't perceive as racist, they will recoil for reasons of conscience or social disapproval to an appeal that either is, or is seen as, racist. Mendelberg asserts that Bush actually lost support to Dukakis in the closing weeks of the 1988 campaign because, on October 21, Jesse Jackson denounced the Horton ad as racist and Dukakis's running mate Lloyd Bentsen followed suit two days later. That made explicit what had previously been implicit.

One possibility with Obama is that the success of his presidential campaign to date is inducing an unknown number of whites to be more explicit about their racial bigotry. That's certainly the case with my mother in upstate New York. She hadn't discussed race with me in any kind of extended way for twenty years or more, but became obsessed with black people after Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses. Before Obama became a serious contender, my mother's attitudes toward race were characterized by good will toward the few black people she knew and a concern for fairness mixed with racial stereotypes and fond memories of growing up in a Pennsylvania town (Sayre) that (she said) had a law against blacks living there. When Obama emerged, my mother's dormant racism emerged quickly as the source of her animosity toward Obama.

One consequence of the Obama campaign is that it's making people think more seriously about race. But that's not always a positive thing.