by Charles D. Ellison
There’s been a lot of talk about the dog whistle lately.
What is that? As you know, dog whistles are silent to humans, but breaking-sound-barrier piercing to the ear drums of lovable canines. In the context of the election, dog whistles are also great racial signal tools and red flags that bigots use to get the word out about specific candidates of color.
We’ve been seeing a lot of that lately: dog whistling. Some of it very hard to hear or detect. Some of it a bit louder, like when you put your fingers in your mouth and whistle your pit bull “Killa” back from digging for bones in your neighbor’s yard. Those we can hear.
As this virtual Civil War of an election rages on, the racial dog whistles have become much more intense. Once it’s all said and done, the text books will collectively agree that it beat the 2008 election. Back then, we couldn’t imagine an election as brazenly bigot blow-harding as that one. But, of course, it was the first time we could actually see a Black president being elected. This was uncharted territory; who knew? Even White people were caught up in it, adding to the historically low polling numbers that were George Bush. It presented a sign of just how bad things were, recession looming. That’s how bad it was. Symbolically, bring the “negro” in to do the hard work. To shovel our national ish, so to speak. Better he get dirty – plus, he just looked more fit (mentally and physically) than the senior citizen Republican nominee at the time.
With many making that leap and feeling confident enough to make a cheery “post-racial” assessment, 2012 is an easier blow on the dog whistle.
We see it in the way President Obama has affected the sensibilities of old White men.
Something about him just makes them, especially the richer ones, fly over the cuckoo’s nest. From Donald Trump’s incessant and purely obsessive birther quest to former Gov. John Sunnunu’s constant play with racial fire. Even General Electric founder and Big Business Oz Jack Welch couldn’t resist – the sight of a nearly 80 year old man going tea party ballistic about on Twitter was classic. Others, from bored billionaires like Sheldon Adelson to obscure Hungarian-born investment magnate Thomas Peterffy paying for his own national television ads where he narrates that Obama is “tak[ing] away the wealth that helps us take care of the needy.”
There’s a fantastical, amazingly comical Rudyard Kipling from-the-dead quality to all of this. But, what’s more striking is how White Republicans have suddenly become much more comfortable in embracing a certain “Blackness.” They’ve made it fashionable to appear victimized by racism. Talking about race these days, in fact, comes easier to White Republican and conservative partisans than even our Black President, who avoids the conversation like a plague. In another universe, you’d think it would be the other way around given how much the topic has preoccupied every waking minute of our existence.
Instead, White Republicans, from elected officials to prominent Tea Party activists, seem perfectly comfortable with waxing whiny records about race, racism and bigotry. Foul calls over “reverse racism” are plenty to the point where they don’t even call it “reverse racism” – which is now very ‘90s. Instead, it’s just plain “racism”: Don’t let Common, Maya Angelou or Rev. Al Sharpton show up at the White House because, according to many White Republicans looking to crack the racial fault line, that’s the President digging into his inner-“racist.” When Black Republican and former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the Black President a second time around (clearly looking to distance himself further from the Iraq debacle he helped engineer), Gov. Sununnu felt it was a moment of “race” chumming. The President had graduated from “paling around with terrorists” to “shucking and jiving” with his nuckas on the corner – at the expense of about three quarters of the U.S. population.
It wasn’t so much the comment, it was the very effortless way in which he and others said it. As if the GOP, faced with a slow-crawl descent into demographic irrelevance, is casting itself for feature roles in a remake of the 1995 Harry Belafonte meets John Travolta flick “White Man’s Burden” in which the planet plunges into a mysterious world of Black Supremacy and oppressed White people. Perhaps it was a wishful thinking Rush Limbaugh who took Executive Production credits; or maybe just a weed-smoking Hollywood geek who one day did a “What If?” when he wound up in South Central Los Angeles with a flat tire.
What is happening is this weird push to crash through the boundaries of the “post-racial” narrative the White-privilege social construct wants – so badly – to pimp. Like when Kathy Tavoularis, the Executive Director of the California Delegation to the GOP Convention, slammed Democratic Congressional candidate Alan Lowenthal for making a “racist” statement when he said at a recent campaign rally that Orange County was “no longer just White people.” Tavoularis took offense and blasted Lowenthal, fuming with faux outrage.
But, in all honesty, the OC isn’t just White people. Last time I was there, it was a lot of other folk – including me (who was born there) – walking around. That’s just fact. So, how did it get “racist?”
There’s quite a few examples running about of official Republican mouthpieces with foot-in-racial-mouth-disease. Take Nevada GOP Congressional candidate Danny Tarkanian who went off on Black Democratic candidate Steven Horsford, the state’s Senate Majority Leader, and accused him of “pretend[ing] we’re black and maybe try to get some votes if that’s where it is.” This was Tarkanian’s rebound from earlier comments about knowing Black voters better because he was point guard and captain for the UNLV basketball team. Go figure.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who’s backing Horsford hard as one of their “rising stars,” has been eager to put the tell-all out there about Tarkanian’s tea party foible. “After getting results for working families in the Nevada State Legislature, Steven Horsford can now fight for them in Washington as Nevada’s first African American Congressman,” was the official response from DCCC spokesperson Krystal Glass to UPTOWN. But, other observers – even a few Republican strategists – off-record, were showering Tarkanian with unprintable, un-family-friendly slanders and a consensus-driven “WTF, dude?”
Race and the racial conversation is getting blurred by the white noise of White Republicans staking claim to victimhood and Fear of a Black Planet. Mouthy Black Republicans looking for a TV camera hit, such as Rep. Allen West (FL) and soon-to-be-elected Mia Love in Utah, give them lots of room to have at it. Ultimately, it confuses the discussion and makes it gimmicked rather than fruitful. But, even more distressing is that it ruins the very definition of what true racism is as idiocy creates the impression that it’s all words, insults and jokes when it’s really a 400-year old institution that ruined many lives and still presents real challenges for millions more today. And it’s not funny.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a political strategist and widely known expert on politics, campaigns, crisis communications and media based in Washington, D.C. He is a Washington Correspondent for The Philadelphia Tribune and Host of “Showdown 2012” on SiriusXM satellite radio POTUS Channel 124 every Thursday 7-9pm ET. He can be reached on Twitter @charlesdellison.
