Racist behavior however can be determined more easily, though it too can be complicated. Racist policy is easier to determine objectively: results and consequences count, not intention. That's why under certain sections of the Voting Rights Act, it is the effect of laws and policies on racial minorities, not the intentions of the lawmakers and rule makers, that is the determining factor.
The current attempts by the Romney campaign to appeal to racial stereotypes in their lying ads about welfare, among other overt and covert tactics, is racist by definition, for it is designed to exploit conscious and unconscious racism in white voters; moreover it is doing so by attempting to link racist implications with the intentions of a black President.
Unconscious racism, by the way, can be really unconscious. It is very often supported by an apparently rational, allegedly fact-based allegation or theory about what's really happening in the real world. And suggestions or allegations of unconscious racism typically are met with outraged denial. That's why some political observers suggest that part of the intent of the current Romney strategy is to get "liberals" to charge white working class voters with racism, which will motivate them to repudiate it by voting against "liberals," and President Obama.
Class on the other hand is working against the multimillionaire Romney, with his multiple homes and dancing horse, Swiss bank account and Cayman Island tax shelters. It's a problem not only of image and unconscious bias but of fairness. All the taxes that rich businessman Romney avoids are paid by the rest of us and our descendants.
The class divide is immense, and voters are only starting to learn how immense. For example, Think Progress visualized a fact about the wealth of GOPer moneyman Sheldon Adelson, who recently pledged half a million bucks to a congressional campaign. With a fortune estimated at $25 billion, Adelson could give half a million to each and every GOPer running for Congress-for the next 128 years.
The Romney-Ryan program is transparently a huge power grab for the very wealthy, at the expense of everyone else, first and foremost the poor and the sick. Unless you are very wealthy, being sick for very long still leads to being poor, and with Ryan hacks to Medicaid, to being poor and without medical treatment.
The only way to get this program enacted, the only way to get elected for the GOPer ticket, is to get a high proportion of the white vote. The estimate being bandied about today was 61%. Combine that with a fact that even I found startling. I've been calling the GOP the White People's Party for awhile, because that's the effect of their policies and their pronouncements, and the majority of their membership. I figured it would be as high as 75% of the party. But I was wrong. According to Pew, the proportion of GOPers who are white is 89%. In 2012 we have one of two major political parties that is composed of almost 90% white people.
The GOPer combination of race and class was exposed in a heated response to GOP chair Reince Priebus by MSNBC's Chris Matthews. By my lights, Matthews can be way off base at times, but this time he's not only nailed it but did so with electrifying eloquence:
“I have to call you on this, Mr. Chairman,” Matthews said in an appearance with Priebus on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” as he responded to Republicans’ criticism that Obama is running a very negative campaign. “But they’ve both negative. That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful. It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card.”
“You can play your games and giggle about it but the fact is your side playing that card. When you start talking about work requirements, you know what game you’re playing and everybody knows what game you’re playing. It’s a race card and yeah, if your name’s Romney, yeah you were well born, you went to prep school, yeah, brag about it. This guy has an African name and he’s got to live with it. Look who’s gone further in their life. Who was born on third base? Making fun of the guy’s birth certificate issue when it was never a real issue except for the right wing.”
Matthews exposed the sense of class privilege that lurks behind the coded racism of the Romney campaign. When Romney and Ryan say they didn't need government help to succeed (which by the way is a lie to begin with) it may sound good to lower middle class people for whom applying for welfare would mean a devastating loss of self-status, but only if they forget that Romney and Ryan came from wealthy families, and could buy their way into the best schools and the networks of class success.
The Obamas freely admit that their success depended not only on their own hard work and determination, not only on their parents' dedication and sacrifice, but on help from government and other institutions in the form of school scholarships and loans, etc. They celebrate this as an American thing, and see it as a key to expanding the middle class. They want it for others. They want it for all others. Without that kind of help, lower middle class white kids like me never would have gone to college. I don't think that's changed. We're still all in this together. And that the definition of "all" has expanded is really to the greater good of us all, and the future.
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