Word: africanizing
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Historically, this stuff has often worked, even against white candidates considered too solicitous of African-American concerns. And yet this year, with a black man actually running for President, the old recipe has been shelved. John McCain hasn't run ads on crime, welfare or racial preferences. At the gop convention, the subjects barely came...
...difference, imagine if the Democrats had nominated Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Republicans would have slammed them as profligate, divisive and militant but not as foreign. Even racists couldn't deny that Jackson and Sharpton are fully American. In fact, because slavery ruptured ancestral ties of language and culture, African Americans often have fewer transnational connections than Americans whose forebears traveled voluntarily to these shores. Our national vernacular is filled with antiblack euphemisms, but cosmopolitan isn't one of them...
Partly, of course, this is a response to Obama's unusual biography: his African Muslim father, his foreign-sounding name, his childhood outside the continental U.S. But it's also a measure of the times. The racial wedge issues of the 1970s and '80s--busing, crime, welfare, affirmative action--have all but disappeared. When pollsters compile lists of Americans' top concerns, those barely register. What is on the rise is anxiety about globalization. Support for unregulated free trade has cratered on the Democratic left. Hostility to illegal immigration is red hot on the Republican right. And beyond the partisan divide...
...When Americans complain about school integration now, they're often referring to the children of immigrants, who are forcing their school boards to spend millions of dollars on English-as-a-second-language programs. Were Helms alive today and updating his notorious "white hands" ad, he might blame not African Americans receiving racial preferences but Salvadorans or Somalis working for minimum or below-minimum wage. Since 9/11, these fears have often fused--in not entirely rational ways--with fears of terrorism. Anti-illegal-immigration activists often cite the threat of jihadists creeping across the Rio Grande. Two years ago, when...
...recounting of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march is credible without listing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, Bernard LaFayette, John Lewis, James Foreman and Dick Gregory. All seven were jailed in Alabama fighting for African-American voter empowerment...