Opinion

Seeing the weight of race

Martin Dyckman
Published: September 6, 2012

The polls don't appear to make sense.

According to one that's recent and reliable — by the Pew Research Center — most Americans believe the rich pay too little in taxes and would harvest a windfall from Republican policies and a Mitt Romney presidency. These aren't close calls. Nearly six in 10 say the rich get off too lightly and more than seven in 10 think Romney's election would benefit the wealthy. Other polls reflect that Americans think President Barack Obama is much more sympathetic to the average Joe than Romney is.

Even so, there are also recent, reliable polls reflecting that the campaign is a dead heat. Roughly half the voters presently favor the candidate who would further reduce taxes on the rich in ways that would likely raise them on everyone else.

In other words, plenty of people who dislike Romney's policies are willing to vote for him. What explains this apparent paradox?

A partial answer is the familiar fact that many voters hold hard times against whoever happens to be president. It doesn't matter how much conditions may have improved on his watch or how much worse they might have been on someone else's. The president is the fall guy, no matter to which party he belongs. That's just part of it.

But there's something even more sinister in play than politics as usual.

That something is race.

Obama's historic victory four years ago, defying the belief that a black man could never be president, begged the question of how many votes his race cost him. One serious study, cited in the September Atlantic, put that at between 3 and 5 percent of the popular vote. Ever since, the signs of racism have been frequent and unmistakable. The lily-white composition of the Tea Party is one of them. Its icons Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck openly accused Obama himself of racism, although Beck recanted. Accusing someone of being what you are is one of the fundamental tricks of propaganda.

The Republican ads falsely accusing Obama of waiving welfare's work requirement are unsubtle appeals to the residual racism that some racists won't admit even to themselves.

Had the president been born to an American mother and a white South African, would anyone doubt his Hawaiian birth certificate? Would more than half of all Republicans disbelieve his American legitimacy? If Obama weren't black, would West Virginia Democrats have given 41 percent of their presidential primary votes this year to an incarcerated white felon?

The Atlantic article, by Ta-Nehisa Coates, a senior editor of the magazine, asserts that "in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961."

Coates defines the Obama era as "a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African-American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president."

That's a paradox, surely enough. If Obama loses, history will not ascribe Romney's victory to his policies and certainly not to his personality. It will record simply that the white man won and the black man lost.