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

Photo: Doug Benc / Getty Images.

As a lifelong Mississippian, I've tried for years to understand why white people in my home state--people who were, by all accounts, decent people in most respects--were complicit for so long in the evil system of mandatory racial segregation.

What I've come to believe is that the old race politics weren't about competing philosophies of race; they were about whites exploiting institutional racism in order to make sure they had food on their table and toys for their children in a poor state with scarce resources. They were about whites feeling safe. They were about whites pursuing personal happiness at the expense of total strangers--and accepting fairy tales of racial supremacy that helped them sleep at night. It wasn't personal. Whites just wanted things to turn out as well as possible for themselves, their families, and the ethnically homogenous people with whom they socialized.

I believe the segregationist politicians probably blocked black voter participation because they wanted to win elections, and because they knew they couldn't do that if they offended white constituents or allowed black constituents to vote them out of office. I believe most segregationist pastors ran all-white churches not because they were fanatically committed to a theology of racial division, regardless of what they might have claimed from the pulpit, but rather because they knew their pledges would go up if they played the segregationist game, and that their pledges would go down if they didn't.

And any whites who woke up to what was going on around them only had to look around at the sheer ubiquitousness of Southern segregation to realize that it was beyond their power to transform. "Lord," the old prayer goes, "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." And they could find that serenity in the white families, white churches, white politicians, and other white institutions with which they were surrounded. It's no wonder, really, that Southern whites supported segregation. Sure, we can ask ourselves why millions allowed this to happen--but for the individual whites who comprised those millions, segregation must have seemed as inevitable as it was convenient.

I believe that institutional racism, like all institutional evils, is rooted in banality. My experience has been that black folks generally understand this and white folks generally don't. White folks are more likely to look back on the Klan and other hate groups and see that we've moved beyond the philosophy expressed by these groups. When white folks occasionally say something that suggests they still buy into the old philosophies, people of all racial backgrounds are offended--but the more comfortable approach, the more white approach, is to assume that as long as we're not one of those philosophical racists, we're fine.

The truth is that racism is about what happens to people of color, not about what white people say or think. It isn't about us. If white people didn't already live at the top of a racist caste system in America, they could impotently rant in favor of white supremacist ideology all day long and it wouldn't hurt a soul. The reason it hurts--the reason we should be condemning it--is because the lies whites tell each other about non-whites are little excuses that whites use to feel more comfortable about the material benefits that institutional racism has given them. The cure for racism, in other words, is not the unachievable goal of white ideological perfection. It's the very achievable but inconvenient goal of social justice.

That's what I believe, anyway.

So having said that--having explained what the most insidious form of racism is, as far as I'm concerned--let me explain why the recent tone of Hillary Clinton's campaign has made this white Southerner's blood boil. Since there has been too much commentary on this matter to summarize, let's begin with what the Clinton campaign itself has admitted. First, in early January 2008, came the Clinton campaign's first significant use of the race card:

... Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton pollster and Latino expert, publicly articulated what campaign officials appear to have been whispering for months. In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, Bendixen explained that "the Hispanic voter -- and I want to say this very carefully -- has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."

This theory is completely at odds with historical voting trends (see "Is There a Black-Brown Divide?"), but it dovetailed nicely with the Clinton campaign's overall strategy. According to Roland S. Martin of CNN (see "Commentary: Voters not swayed by racial politics"):

[A] top adviser to the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton admitted to Ron Fournier of The Associated Press in a report published Friday that it was the campaign's intent to turn Obama, who has deftly avoided the race issue, into "the black candidate."

The Friday to which Martin refers is January 26th, 2008.

The very next day, January 27th, Bill Clinton was asked at a press conference about the South Carolina primary. What he said seemed a little strange:

ABC’s David Wright asked President Bill Clinton on Saturday in Columbia, S.C., about it taking two Clintons to beat Obama.

Bill Clinton replied: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign, and Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere."

A bit of a non sequitur until one remembers that Jesse Jackson, who won 11 state primaries in 1988, ultimately lost in large part because he had been successfully pigeonholed as "the black candidate."

Clinton was not unaware of this dynamic. Only several days earlier, on January 24th, he had made a bizarre statement regarding the role of race in the campaign:

Scolding a reporter, Mr. Clinton said the Obama campaign was "feeding" the news media to keep issues of race alive, obscuring positive coverage of the presidential campaign here of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

"They know this is what you want to cover," Mr. Clinton told a CNN reporter in Charleston, in an apparent reference to the Obama campaign.

"Shame on you," the former president added ...

Mr. Clinton also suggested in public remarks that his wife might lose here because of race. Referring to her and Mr. Obama, he said, "They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender, and that’s why people tell me that Hillary doesn’t have a chance to win here."

So we have a scenario where Bill Clinton states that he doesn't expect his wife to carry South Carolina due to its high black population, then implies after the primary that Obama's win was due to race. Bookending these statements are comments by at least two Clinton campaign officials boasting that Obama, because of his race, would find it hard to get enough white and Latino support to carry the nomination.

I'm not suggesting that voters would have otherwise forgotten that Barack Obama is black, had the Clinton campaign not brought it up.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with looking at, or commenting on, racial voting patterns.

I'm not even suggesting that the Clintons are racists, at least not in the sense that we ordinarily use the term.

I'm just suggesting that they badly want to win--competing, like so many whites of Southern origin who preceded them, for scarce resources. In this case, those scarce resources are votes--and they have determined that if Barack Obama is pigeonholed as a black candidate, like Jesse Jackson was, then his chances of achieving the necessary number of white and Latino votes will be reduced.

In 1998, no less an authority than Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "the first Black president ... Blacker than any actual Black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime." This year, she endorsed Barack Obama.

And the Clintons, who have historically relied on black votes for support, are now citing those same black votes as a means of marginalizing their opponent.

Are they using these new strategies because deep down they're committed philosophical racists, and they've been hiding it all this time? No, I don't think so. They just want to win. They're not encouraging racist sentiment; they're just positioning themselves to benefit from it.

But there's a corresponding question that has been rolling around in my head over the past week: If Bill Clinton didn't rely on black support to win elections during his own career in politics, what sort of candidate would he have been? What sort of ideology would he have promoted? I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm beginning to wonder.

See also:

• Racism and Electability