Academic

Hillary Plays the Race Card

By Robert Justin Lipkin

Race continues to play a role in American society, but there exist different ways to include it in political campaigns. Some ways are clearly benign and important while other ways are clearly suspect. Senator Clinton use of race is the latter. She is precariously flirting with racial innuendo. Her insistence that she is more electable than Senator Obama derives from an opportunistic cynicism that American voters will be unable to vote for a black man.  She again thrusts race into the campaign by crowing that she alone will be able to appeal to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans." This trumpets the legacy of clearly racist candidates in the past.  Here's one take on her problem: "As long as Hillary Clinton is willing to spend the money and energy needed to continue her campaign, she certainly can ignore the pundits who insist that the Democratic nominating contest is over. What she should not ignore, however, is the damage that her increasingly reckless behavior is inflicting on her reputation and that of her husband -- especially when she starts to sound like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace.  . . .  When Clinton blathered on about "totally obliterating" Iran in the event it made a nuclear strike against Israel, and then reiterated that same statement last weekend, she made what was, until then, the single most ill-considered comment of the campaign. But now USA Today has published an interview in which she explained again why she regards herself as a more viable general-election candidate than Barack Obama -- except that this time, she crossed a bright white line."  Continue reading here.

Racism, intentional or not, has radically marred America's constitutional ideals. From the barbarism of slavery to the oppression of Jim Crow segregation, to the socially predictable emergence of institutional and de facto segregation, no other factor has shaped American constitutionalism as race. The Senate, the Electoral College, as well as other elements in the Constitution were designed to protect, nurture, and entrench slavery. Abandoning Reconstruction, insisting that only government action, not obvious inaction, is constitutionally suspect, Plessy, Korematsu, Washington v. Davis, and the recent Seattle and Louisville school integration cases preventing school districts from using race as one factor among others to maintain integrated schools, and rejecting the transparent distinction between invidious and benign segregation continue to prevent the complete dismantling of American apartheid. Indeed, the new Chief Justice uttered the following effete words which will certainly live in constitutional infamy "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." This elitist view, so unhinged from American racial reality, constitutes additional evidence of the insidious role judicial supremacy plays in American society. The above is, of course, old news.  What's so troubling in that the Clintons, who have been rightly praised for their anti-racist views, will stoop to racial innuendo when necessary for their own political cravings. Senator Clinton's supporters need to seriously address why Senator Clinton would cling to opportunistic maneuvers over matters of principle.

Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).