^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: Lawrence Lucier / Getty Images

Last Friday, Geraldine Ferraro answered exit poll data suggesting that racial resentment was a factor in several key Clinton victories (see "Did Racism Win West Virginia, Kentucky for Clinton?") by suggesting that racial resentment is not necessarily racist, and that it may be justified.

Yes, she really did write that. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

I don't mean to focus on Ferraro. Her remarks in March, in which she essentially described Barack Obama as a quota hire, were offensive but should not have surprised us, considering her history of making similar remarks in the past. I'm also not interested in discussing the Clinton campaign's own history on race issues, since I've already discussed this at length (see "Hillary Clinton vs. The Black Candidate"). I'm more interested in the logic of Ferraro's views on racial resentment, which are shared (I suspect) by many whites.

First, the term "racial resentment" does have a history that precedes Ferraro and the Racial Resentment Index used by Newsweek to assess the role of race in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries. And most political scientists could have predicted that it would be a factor in the campaign of the first African-American presidential candidate. As a team of seven authors wrote in Whitewashing Race (University of California Press, 2003, p. 210):

Racially polarized voting is due in part to white voters' fear and mistrust of black candidates. In an imaginative study, Keith Reeves showed that despite white voters' reluctance to reveal their racial prejudices to pollsters, their views of blacks are directly linked to their feelings about black candidates. In an experimental survey Reeves devised, he presented white voters with descriptions of two candidates who differed only in their positions regarding two issues, environmental policy and affirmative action. For one group of white voters, both candidates were white; for the other group, one candidate was black. When faced with the black candidate, whom Reeves called Hammond, many whites changed their vote to the undecided category rather than saying they would vote against the black candidate. Reeves showed that these voters were quite hostile to blacks and expressed common negative racial stereotypes ...

Racially polarized elections persist for two reasons. The most obvious one is that white candidates often play the race card. Reeves's study, as well as other data, shows that simply identifying an opponent as black easily sways white voters, as will racially coded campaign appeals to stir up racial resentment among white voters.

Racial resentment has historically been understood as a bad thing--reflecting white disaffection with civil rights programs and the slowly diminishing opportunity gap between whites and people of color. The sense many whites have is that resources are finite, if not scarce, and that any gains made by people of color will negatively affect the livelihoods of whites. For voters who feel that Hillary Clinton is more qualified, the victories of the younger Barack Obama might feel like affirmative action at work. White Democrats who might never have voted for Hillary Clinton before the campaign, but harbor a high level of racial resentment, might see themselves in her. They might wonder why the younger, allegedly less qualified black candidate is getting a position that had been previously all but reserved for an older, allegedly more qualified white candidate.

It's no surprise, from this vantage point, that some of these white Democrats--many of whom generally vote Republican in national elections--might turn to John McCain. Like Hillary Clinton, he's older and he's white.

But is this really racism? That depends on how you define racism. If you define racism as a philosophical belief in the biological superiority of whites, then no, it probably wouldn't qualify as racism. But that has seldom been anything more than a fig leaf for the practical concerns of racial resentment--the attempt by insular whites to make sure that they were able to claim resources and opportunities for their families and their communities at the expense of other families and other communities. Racist policy may be motivated by pseudoscientific race theory, but simple greed is enough--especially in impoverished regions such as the South and Appalachia, where resources are scarce. And any time there is de facto racial segregation in regions where resources are scarce, there is likely to be some degree of racial resentment.

Ferraro takes the view that one of Obama's primary goals over the next six months should be to somehow appeal to these racial resentment voters:

Hope, change, and inspiration don't do it. A speech on racism might persuade editorial boards, but to these voters it's "just words." Obama has less than six months to make the case.

The implicit message of Ferraro's editorial is that Hillary Clinton wouldn't have to make such a case in the general election, but historical evidence strongly suggests that she would. As political historians Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes write (Moral Controversies in American Politics: Cases in Social Regulatory Policy, p. 64):

Affirmative action has been used by Republicans for three decades to try to splinter the Democratic base of women, minorities, and working-class white males. The Nixon administration sought to pit white workers against black recipients of affirmative action, and peel off the angry white males from the Democratic Party and encourage them to vote Republican. The strategy was successful in the 1972 presidential election, and much more so in appealing to the "Reagan Democrats." By the 1980s Republicans could run against the programs they had created in order to appeal to the white working class.

This is not to say that McCain would use white racial resentment as a campaign strategy--he may, in fact, take this opportunity to choose a non-white running mate and guarantee that the next White House will be racially diverse--but Ferraro's suggestion that the Democratic nominee find some way to overcome certain voters' racial resentment seems ill advised. White Democratic nominees have been trying to do that, unsuccessfully, for decades; expecting Barack Obama, or even Hillary Clinton, to somehow pull it off seems unrealistic.

See also:

• Racism and Electability