Political "Racial Code Words" Color Arousal At Work In The American Body Politic

AAPP: Racial Code Words or Color Aroused Code Words are making a big come back due to Hillary and Bill Clinton.


Hillary, "I will do anything to be president" Clinton

As one blogger, Take back the Times, recently noted in the post, Has Hillary Found Racial Code Words? "Perhaps When Dodger baseball executive Al Campanis said that blacks "may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, field managers, or perhaps, a general manager," and that blacks are often poor swimmers "because they don't have the buoyancy," he was fired for making racist remarks.

When Sam Yorty called Tom Bradley a militant and said he was trying to benefit from a black bloc vote, he got himself reelected in 1969, but most people understood he was using racial code words. The same thing with George Wallace when he defeated Albert Brewer in Alabama in 1970 after calling him a "sissy" for appealing to black voters.



George "segregation today, segregation tommorow, segregation forever" Wallace

This was not exactly as blatant as, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," but Alabama voters understood the racial pitch and narrowly reelected Wallace. And I believe that when Hillary Clinton advertises that Barack Obama is not "ready" to confront a terrorist attack, she too is making a racial argument. Will Texans be taken in? We'll find out today. The Clintons, determined to take back power, have been searching for some time for some argument that will take Obama down. One way or another, it was going to be racial. Read More HERE



Hillary Color Aroused Clinton

Bloggers are not the only ones noticing What Politicians Say When They Talk About Race Codes.


Trent Lott, "white citizen Council" Lott

Janny Scott at the NY times is also reviewing What Politicians Say When They Talk About Race, Janny Scott writes, "Americans and their political leaders have been tongue-tied on the subject of race. We were reminded of that last week when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race means to blacks and whites. He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity and at length. Whether the speech helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and major-party candidates addressing the American people."



Janny Scott continues, The dynamic had been different once — when African-Americans had begun to vote Democratic as well as Republican and presidential candidates of both parties competed for their votes; in 1948, Harry Truman, courting swing voters in a close election, became the first presidential candidate from a major party to campaign in Harlem (and ordered an end to segregation in the armed services right after he won the Democratic nomination). In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country. And President Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights march from Selma, Ala.: “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Yet it was President Johnson, too, who foresaw the end of what Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian and author of “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” described last week as a 20-year “national conversation on race” in the 1950s and 1960s. After signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, the president is said to have observed that he had just handed over the South to the Republicans for at least a generation. The Republicans seized the opportunity to peel off Democratic states. They studied the campaigns of George Wallace, the Alabama governor who ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968, to see how he appealed to whites. They developed the “Southern strategy” that helped Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. With blacks voting overwhelmingly Democratic by now, and their party struggling to hold onto white working-class ethnic voters in the North, there was little incentive for presidential candidates of either party to bring up race in a serious way.

Politicians were not alone in dropping the issue. The Watts riots broke out within days of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Vietnam War increasingly supplanted civil rights in the public’s attention.

AAPP: The whole article is a powerful must read. HERE is a link to the article.