More on the politics of Racism in the 2012 election

I've written here about incipient racism in this country for some time now.  It is not as blatant, it is not as accepted, it is not as overt as it once was, but it is still there.  It is present in the views of those, primarily in the south, who oppose marriage based on race.  It is present in the views of George Zimmerman when he made false and inaccurate assumptions about drugs, alcohol and criminal intent, as well as the right to be where he was, not only about Trayvon Martin but about all the other black men and boys on whom he called 911, when they did nothing wrong.

It was present when Romney Campaign Co-Chair and former governor Sununu dismissed the endorsement of Gen. and former Sec. of State, Republican Colin Powell as being race-based.  Powell was very specific about why he did not endorse former governor Romney, he cited the advisers, he cited the domestic policy and foreign policy.  I was surprised that Colin Powell did not even more emphatically underline how much of a repeat of the past mistakes of Dubya the new 'Dubya' disaster aka Romney has in his policies.

As one pundit noted this morning, the idea that black Americans will only vote for Obama on the basis of race is ludicrous; they've voted in every election where they were ALLOWED to vote in the past for exclusively white candidates. They still voted.  No one is asserting that white candidates can't see beyond race when THEY vote, although there have been a few Romney supporters who have made it clear that was their motivation, as in those who wore t-shirts or carried signs proclaiming "It's the WHITE House" or similar sentiments.

There are clearly 'dog whistles', statements which carry a loaded message with wording designed to appeal to certain prejudices, biases, or other strong sentiments.  That seems to be the case with the Sununu statement, which plays to the support from specifically white voters for Romney.

This issue will affect not only the national election, but our state election for Congress with Rep. Ellison, who has been wrongly attacked by the nut job Rep. Bachmann with farcial claims of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as any other candidates who are black, bi or multi-racial, or hispanic running 'down ballot' from the elections to federal office.

CNN this past August had this about the growth of the more extreme racism in the United States; (writing on this topic here has resulted in an increase in traffic on Penigma from white supremacists, openly avowed racists.)

The rise of white supremacy in America

There are hard numbers on the rise of hate in America. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups have increased 69 percent since 2000.

A "hate" group is defined as a group or movement that practices hate, hostility or violence towards another race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. There are hate groups in almost every state in the country - 84 of them in California, 65 in Georgia. Florida, New Jersey, and Texas round out the top 5 states with hate groups. What's fueling this resurgence of hate? OutFront tonight: J.M. Berger, who has been tracking these groups as a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine and Heidi Buy-Rick, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'Swimming upstream,' white supremacist groups still strong Hundreds of white supremacist groups are active in the United States today and are experiencing a kind of resurgence, experts say. They are in the spotlight this week in the wake of a deadly shooting at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee. Authorities have said they are looking into whether the gunman, who was killed, had ties to such a group. "I know they're out there. I try not to alarm the public too much, but it's something that really needs to be taken a hold of now because more and more we see facts coming out that this is happening more often and more often, and it's not going to stop anytime soon," said David Gletty, who worked as an undercover informant on extremist groups for the FBI. (read the full article at the link) What makes the article below interesting is that it does specifically address political affiliation and racial attitudes; however it seems a safe and reasonable extrapolation to assert that racism is more accepted and more overt on the right than in the center or on the left. And more recently, from the AP at MSN news: Poll: Slim US majority has prejudice against blacks 9 hr ago By Jennifer Agiesta

A new Associated Press poll finds that, four years after the US elected its first black president, racial attitudes have not improved. A slight majority of Americans now express prejudice towards blacks.

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not. Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some Americans' more favorable views of blacks. Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly. In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell. " As much as we'd hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago," said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey. Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison. The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago. Experts on race said they were not surprised by the findings. "We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked," said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. "When we've seen progress, we've also seen backlash." Obama himself has tread cautiously on the subject of race, but many African-Americans have talked openly about perceived antagonism toward them since Obama took office. As evidence, they point to events involving police brutality or cite bumper stickers, cartoons and protest posters that mock the president as a lion or a monkey, or lynch him in effigy. "Part of it is growing polarization within American society," said Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. "The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a national discussion about race. There's been total silence around issues of race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings." Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. However, Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes. The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent). Obama faced a similar situation in 2008, the survey then found.
The Associated Press developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012. The explicit racism measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how well respondents thought certain words, such as "friendly," ''hardworking," ''violent" and "lazy," described blacks, whites and Hispanics. The same respondents were also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not acknowledge them. Results from those questions were analyzed with poll takers' ages, partisan beliefs, views on Obama and Romney and other factors, which allowed researchers to predict the likelihood that people would vote for either Obama or Romney. Those models were then used to estimate the net impact of each factor on the candidates' support. All the surveys were conducted online. Other research has shown that poll takers are more likely to share unpopular attitudes when they are filling out a survey using a computer rather than speaking with an interviewer. Respondents were randomly selected from a nationally representative panel maintained by GfK Custom Research. Overall results from each survey have a margin of sampling error of approximately plus or minus 4 percentage points. The most recent poll, measuring anti-black views, was conducted Aug. 30 to Sept. 11. Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist who studies race-neutrality among black politicians, contrasted the situation to that faced by the first black mayors elected in major U.S. cities, the closest parallel to Obama's first-black situation. Those mayors, she said, typically won about 20 percent of the white vote in their first races, but when seeking re-election they enjoyed greater white support presumably because "the whites who stayed in the cities ... became more comfortable with a black executive." "President Obama's election clearly didn't change those who appear to be sort of hard-wired folks with racial resentment," she said. Negative racial attitudes can manifest in policy, noted Alan Jenkins, an assistant solicitor general during the Clinton administration and now executive director of the Opportunity Agenda think tank. "That has very real circumstances in the way people are treated by police, the way kids are treated by teachers, the way home seekers are treated by landlords and real estate agents," Jenkins said. Hakeem Jeffries, a New York state assemblyman and candidate for a congressional seat being vacated by a fellow black Democrat, called it troubling that more progress on racial attitudes had not been made. Jeffries has fought a New York City police program of "stop and frisk" that has affected mostly blacks and Latinos but which supporters contend is not racially focused. "I do remain cautiously optimistic that the future of America bends toward the side of increased racial tolerance," Jeffries said. "We've come a long way, but clearly these results demonstrate there's a long way to go."

(AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.)