Let me share three race-related anecdotes with you.
First, just a few minutes ago, when I was at the pharmacy by my house, two black women entered the store, both of whom looked lower class. The clerk who was helping me watched their every move until they turned a corner out of sight.
Second, the other night I was watching the NBA finals at a bar. During the commercials, there was a trailer for the new "Planet of the Apes" movie. Upon seeing a few scenes of angry apes, a guy down the bar from me said, "What...are they showing highlights from the NBA season?"
Third, not long ago, one of my Dallas acquaintances unashamedly referred to a black co-worker as a "nigger."
So what? So, racial prejudice isn't that hard to find.
Now a quick quiz for you: Since Barack Obama has been president, can you name three incidents in which any public figure of note--including the president himself--has made the president's race an issue?
I can't.
The closest I can come is the birth certificate stuff, which a couple of prominent Republicans (and I'm not counting Donald Trump here) have embraced.
To me, though, the whole birth certificate thing is more about "otherness" than race. Sure, race has something to do with it. But Obama also has an Arab-sounding name. He spent a good bit of his youth abroad. His dad was African, and a Marxist, and a Muslim. At least one document from Obama's youth lists his religion as "Islam."
I think people are reacting to ALL of this, and Obama's race, when they talk about the birth certificate stuff. There's a general reaction of, "He is not the same as us."
Apart from the birth certificate, though--which, from what I can tell, is taken seriously by a tiny minority of nationally prominent Republicans--I can't think of anything any Republican has done to exploit racial fears/prejudices to the disadvantage of the president, or anything the president has done to try to leverage his race for political support (accusing opponents of racism, for example). In fact, Obama's race generally seems to have been an afterthought over the past 2.5 years, if even a thought at all.
That's prettty good news.
Footnote: There are people who insist that Republicans and conservatives speak in "code," that they're too smart to come out and play directly on Obama's race, so they utter certain phrases with a wink, and everybody gets the idea.
I've always found that argument to be intellectually lazy and empirically suspect, but if you want to play that card, I can play it too. Here you go: Barack Obama says he's only willing to raise taxes on people whose incomes are above $250k. The overwhelming majority of these people are white. Of course, Obama never says they're white, but he doesn't have to. His core constituencies--African-Americans in particular--know EXACTLY who the president is talking about, and know how they're supposed to feel when he talks about them. Obama nurtures racial resentment in this way because if he's going to win another term, he'll need every minority vote he can get.
Anklenote: There were some reminders of Obama's race during the campaign (as opposed to the Obama presidency), but the most noteworthy ones came from Democrats. It was Hillary's camp that started the citizenship stuff. Joe Biden was the one who referred to Obama as the first black candidate who was "bright," "articulate," and "clean." And Harry Reid dropped that gem of a line about Obama having "no Negro dialect."
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