The Science of Racism and the 2012 Election

I am expecting to hear the common phrase, most often issuing from the right wing, of 'playing the race card'. I thought this definition summed up what that means:

Playing the race card is an idiomatic phrase that refers to exploitation of either racist or anti-racist attitudes by accusing others of racism.

There are multiple usages of the phrase "playing the race card" as noted in the entry that supplied the above definition.
I'm responding specifically to this one that characterizes conservatives:

George Dei, Karumanchery, et alia , in their book Playing the Race Card^[4] argue that the term itself is a rhetorical device used in an effort to devalue and minimize claims of racism.

We have seen where the job performance by the President has had a basis in attitudes about race as reflected in this University of Delaware study:

The hypothesis for Hehman's paper centered around the possibility that whites’ racial prejudices influenced "how American" they perceived Obama to be, which would in turn predict their evaluations of his presidential performance. Furthermore, Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would ultimately influence their evaluations of performance and that it would affect only their evaluations of the president. He predicted that when whites evaluated Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., or when African Americans evaluated either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would not affect their assessments.

In an election cycle which features the grand epic candidacy failure, Herman Cain criticizing Barak Obama for attending a black liberation theology church, because it represents an anti-American political ideology, while the church where Cain is himself a lay pastor is an older and much larger church with arguably a much more radical black liberation theology commitment is just one example of how bizarre the issue of race is in the 2012 presidential election which I wrote about here.
There is a spectrum of racism, from the form of racial animus, an unconscious racial prejudice that often incorporates racist stereotypical thinking, to the outright racism of white supremacists thinking embraced by the politics of the right, as reflected in tea partiers and other conservatives.  This is reflected in the politics of years of presentations and seminars at CPAC, to the prevalence and acceptance of birthers among the right wing extremists who have hijacked the GOP.  When white supremacists, racist tea partiers, and birthers are warmly and publicly embraced, but moderates are excluded and driven from the party that is otherwise intolerant of differences of opinion, and strongly anti-minorities, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-muslim, anti-women and anti-science.

the Joker is
R-money's Trump card,
his suit is birthers
and racism, the
game is racist
dirty politics

We see racism in the opposition to Barak Obama's campaign for a second term, and we can objectively see racism in the opinions on the issues as well.  It is NOT only a racial intolerance for one person, it is reflected in attitudes about political issues.  But because President Obama has focused that larger issue animus so strongly, it is not the whole basis for the support of political positions, but it is a major facet of them, ranging from unions to health care reform, to taxation and the social safety net.
The right is incapable of recognizing their bias, and they rabidly deny their racism.  I don't believe all of the conservatives who hold these extremist and racist views actually hate the people of color that they know.  But their thinking and their ideology is deeply formulated in racist stereotypical thinking that is fanned and given a sort of right wing legitimacy by the racism of right wing media -- for example, almost any statements and assumptions promoted by individuals like Rush Limbaugh, or the statements about slavery made by Tea Party Queen Michele Bachmann or the dunce Rick Santorum, two more shining stars of the right :

"Slavery had  a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," reads pledge.

That is a statement which is factually inaccurate, facts which can be verified.  But it represents the kind of racist animus in the assumptions that underlie Republican ideology and belief.

Another example of this right wing misogyny and racsim combining is in the antipathy towards specific public unions:

Much has been made of Walker’s decision to exempt from his plan firefighter, police and state trooper unions — conveniently, the only three public sector unions that endorsed him. But as Dana Goldstein points out, not only are the exempted unions largely Republican-leaning, they’re also overwhelmingly male — over 70 percent of law enforcement personnel are male, as are over 96 percent of firefighters. On the other hand, many of the non-exempt unions represent professions that are disproportionately female — approximately 80 percent of teachers are women, for example, as are 95 percent of nurses. 

African-Americans are also disproportionately employed in the public sector: According to a report by the nonprofit United for a Fair Economy, blacks are 30 percent more likely than the overall workforce to hold public sector jobs. Kai Wright reports that preliminary data from a study by Steven Pitts of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Labor Education and Research shows that 14.5 percent of all public sector workers in the nation are black, compared to 10 percent in most other sectors, and around a quarter of black workers are employed in public administration, as compared to under 17 percent of all white workers.

The right wing is incapable of recognizing, much less acknowledging their racism or misogyny; and in many instances that might reflect their lack of awareness of the stereotypical underpinnings of their assumptions that form their beliefs.  But they cannot be excused a complete failure to be factual, to conform their political positions to factual reality instead of their emotional ideology.  The right demonstrates all of the functions associated with the amygdala, the rejection of any data regardless of it being accurate if it does not conform to the world view they choose to embrace.  The amygdala is not associated with the rational thought processes, which is consistent with other scientific findings about the tendencies of conservative thought.
It would be simplistic, and inaccurate, to assert that all conservatives are of lower intelligence.  But it better explains the political polarization that we are experiencing, and which are emphasized and exacerbated, if we recognize that the right wing ideology that is driving the direction of the 2012 election, on issues and with candidates, are shaped on the right by strong cognitive bias that is largely impervious to reason because it is based on deeply held, even unconsciously held beliefs and stereotypes rather than deriving from fact and objective reality.

For the left and center to overcome that deeply held bias expressed in their politics, we need to not just call out racism and misogyny, we need to shine such a bright spotlight on it that it cannot survive unrecognized within the right themselves.  To succeed in re-uniting this nation, with any remote hope of surviving and making progress out of our current crises, we need to be rational but to recognize the emotion rather than reason of the right.  If we do not recognize the nature of the opposition, we cannot hope to change it or to prevail over it.  We need to understand it to fight it, and to condemn it but not to demonize it, which will drive the right to more deeply entrench themselves.  The right will continue to try to justify their bias with fact averse rhetoric pat phrases, like 'playing the race card'.