This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
The Democratic Party doesn’t have a great record of addressing race. Dialogue on the topic, including in recent presidential debates, has not emerged as a genuine focus. That’s unfortunate for everyone, especially as millions of Democratic voters will be selecting their nominee in the next days and weeks.
“Race” and “people of color” have effectively been used as synonyms for “black people” and occasionally also for “brown people” or Latin’s Americans.
Errare humanum est.
The Democratic Party doesn’t have a great record of addressing race.
Except when you compare it to all the other parties.
I’m a 65 year old white guy, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. But ISTM that Sen. Warren has been addressing racial issues in a more comprehensive way than any of the other remaining Presidential candidates. Pegoda didn’t mention her, which seems like a notable omission.
Also not mentioned: Sanders, who appears to be leading the field and thus deserves some scrutiny.
More from Pegoda:
To begin talking about race in genuine ways, Democratic politicians must talk about whiteness and white privilege (that is, when white people benefit from racism, often unknown to white individuals). Presidential candidates should use their national platforms to foster the white voter’s knowledge about the pervasiveness of racism.
This is true enough, and important, but to really “begin talking about race in genuine ways,” one should teach people that “race” is not an actual well-defined biological thing: it is a social construct, and an extremely pernicious one at that. The sooner we get rid of it the better – although at the rate we’re going, climate change will probably kill us all first.
Pure bunk.
Given the current electorate and the current climate, I’d posit that talking about white privilege is a guaranteed failing strategy. It shouldn’t be that way, of course, but rallying around cries of “You’re white and get more stuff because of it, and you should be aware of that and try not to” sounds like a GOP landslide.
Word.
And to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the Democratic Party has done enough; only that it has done more than any other party.
And at some cost to itself, as LBJ knew in advance.
I keep going back to this Rosenberg article and the studies he describes. The broad American consensus is ideological and symbolic conservatism, combined with economic liberalism far to the left of most elected Democrats. So I’m at a loss how talking about race fits in. The winning combo seems to be some sort of mashup between Bernie Sanders and Claire McKaskill.
and… here’s the article. Probably too late now. “Get up and go to work” alarm went off in the middle of it.
Not talking about race is embedded in how our institutions operate. That includes our government. Government can legislate, regulate and enforce laws that protect certain rights and freedoms, but it can’t alter the institutional fabric without tearing it.
“I have just handed the South to the GOP for the next fifty years.” LBJ underestimated.
New NBC/WSJ poll shows Bernie now only 2 points behind Biden with black voters, a statistical tie. (Caveat: small sample, large margin of error.)
And numerous polls showing Bernie well ahead with Hispanic voters and among non-whites overall.
one of the things I found remarkable about Warren’s various debate performances is her insistence on on including racial justice issues in the discussion of various topics. For instance, while the other candidates were arguing how much money would have to be spent on the climate crisis, Warren brought the issue back to environmental justice, and how communities of color often bore the brunt of bad environmental policies.
I’m glad someone else noticed that. After reading it and moving on this morning, I found myself thinking about Warren.
While people are rightly focusing on her eviscerating of Bloomberg at the debate, it shouldn’t be overlooked that she specifically addressed the passiveness of his response, and in doing so highlighted a larger issue of racial policies. She made it clear that things didn’t “just happen” incidentally to stop-and-frisk, but were a specific consequence of the decisions made in conceiving and implementing the practice.
Perhaps she didn’t dwell on it in this specific instance, perhaps not to blunt her direct confrontation of him as an individual. But the message to me watching at home was clear as day. And she came to it naturally because she talks about the consequences to individuals in many of her policies. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad she’s part of the conversation.
That’s even more interesting.
I guess by not having a person of color on the stage is a SCREAM about the Dems and race.
" one should teach people that “race” is not an actual well-defined biological thing : it is a social construct, and an extremely pernicious one at that. The sooner we get rid of it the better –"
Very true! What we today call Race is nothing more than an effort to determine what differences exist in people from Europe, Asia, and Africa and were established by appearances. But Black skin was caused when people lived in South Africa where the sun was strong, and the black protected from skin cancer. White skin was from North Europe where the sun was much less powerful and greater ability to convert sunlight to Vitamin D was needed.
But somehow between about 200,000 years ago and 80,000 years ago African Homo Sapiens developed a unique language based on syntactic grammar. The Darwinian theory or evolution says this is impossible since it was a sudden massive change, not slowly evolved. It did not evolve in any way that left evidence, but about 80,000 years ago an event called by anthropologists “Out of Africa” led Homo Sapiens to cross the Med to Europe and move east to Asia. The physical traits mistaken for Race developed after that. Today, every healthy child born anywhere in the world starts babbling at about 6 months, moves to making every sound in every known human language, and by age five is attaching meaning and making sentences to whatever language they were born into.
A book called “Why Only Us: Language and Evolution” by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky advises how language probably developed and how it works. It is unique to homo sapiens and is the reason we can think, imagine, and control our environment. It is a difficult book if you do not understand the science of evolution and how it has applied to primates and human beings. [Why so many languages exist, all learned through the same process by children first exposed to the local language starting about age six months?]
Language has not evolved in the 80,000 years since the Out of Africa event. But any normal child born anywhere in the world WILL learn the language he or she is born into and lives in during the first years of life. That is common to Human Beings worldwide and race cannot be distinguished as a factor.
Genetic evolution of groups living in different parts of the world explain skin color, etc., but not language. All humans speak complex sentences and adopt the local language(s) they are born into, not matter what tribe they come from or what part of the world their family comes from. What people call “Race” is no more than the measure of where their family came from, and as of 80,000 years ago, we all came “OUT OF AFRICA”
The rest of the story is up to each of you to tease out, but you are looking for evidence that does not leave bones to explain brain changes. Behavior will never be definitive - see Berwick and Chomsky.
Well put!
I heartily recommend the book you cited … and thanks much for all the elaboration.
I’m having some trouble with this study. If you watch the Saturday morning shows race is all they talk about…and it seems only Democrats are on the panels. Occasionally a Republican will venture on but not regularly. This ‘the Democrats don’t talk about race’ seems another thing to blame the party FOR while everyone else skates because no one expects them to talk about it?