Over the course of the past few months I have been repeatedly stunned by white discomfort with Jena.  The inability to understand why African Americans are outraged by the hanging of nooses; the lack of sensitivity to context; the lack of feel for proportion; the fact that so many white people were intimidated, or even disgusted, by the appearance of 20,000 black people on the streets of Jena–taken together, these factors sketch the contours of a new kind of Jim Crow regime

And then we stumble across Raquel Christie’s rambling and unfocused essay in the American Journalism Review.  Why did Christie give so much credence to bumbling blowhards like Craig Franklin and Jason Whitlock while heaping scorn on established professionals like Howard Witt and Darryl Fears?  Why was she so desperate to believe that “Jena” wasn’t worth the oceans of ink and miles of celuloid that have been devoted to it?

White America wants to believe that, apart from a few weirdos like Richard Barnett, racism is dead.  And if bigotry is dead and buried, why are all these black people (and a few self-loathing African American-lovers like Alan Bean) intent on digging up the corpse? 

Barack Obama has been running away from the race issue from the moment he announced his candidacy.  Obama knows that if he is seen as the champion of black America he is doomed.  So, whenever the race card appears on the table, Mr. Obama quietly slips it back in the deck.  He doesn’t want to share a sentence with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson–given the current state of the white electorate, that would be a death sentence.

Remember Dick Morris, the cynical Clinton spinmeister of yesteryear? 

He’s back!  And if he’s right about the dynamics of the Democratic primary my caustic evaluation of white America is seriously understated.

Morris asserts that Hillary and Bill Clinton want to lose in South Carolina.  Why? Because half the voters in tomorrow’s primary will be African American.  If Obama wins in South Carolina due the overwhelming support of the black electorate, he becomes a youthful incarnation of Jesse Jackson.

Is that a bad thing?  Well, if you need the support of white America (even the progressive side of white spectrum), yes, being construed as a black chamption is a very bad thing.  It isn’t that white progressives are uncomfortable with black professionals like Barack Obama.  As an isolated individual, Obama’s blackness isn’t problematic–it might even work to his advantage. 

But when Obama is seen as a black champion he hooks white anxiety.  At least, that’s what Morris suggests

Generally, the New Jim Crow is invisible.  Three things bring it to the surface: religion (our churches are as segregated as they were in 1962), the criminal justice system (black males are incarcerated at seven times the rate of white males), and electoral politics (even white progressives are intimidated by the assertion of unified black purpose

Are Bill and Hillary Clinton responsible for this lamentable state of affairs?  Not really.  Like her major opponent, Hillary Clinton wants to win.  It is in Mr. Obama’s best interest to de-emphasize his blackness and to Ms. Clinton’s advantage to characterize her opponent as a classy incarnation of Al Sharpton

Like Mayor Daley said, politics ain’t beanbag.

How Clinton Will Win The Nomination by Losing South Carolina

Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination.

The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.

By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama’s, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.

Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose?

Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.

Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses.

Because they have such plans for South Carolina, the Clintons were desperate to win in Nevada. They dared not lose two primaries in a row leading up to Florida. But now they can lose South Carolina with impunity, having won in Nevada.

But don’t look for them to walk away from South Carolina. Their love needs to appear to have been unrequited by the black community for their rejection to seem so unfair that it triggers a white backlash. In this kind of ricochet politics, you have to lose openly and publicly in order to win the next round. And since the next round consists of all the important and big states, polarizing the contest into whites versus blacks will work just fine for Hillary.

Of course, this begs the question of how she will be able to attract blacks after beating Obama. Here the South Carolina strategy also serves its purpose. If she loses blacks and wins whites by attacking Obama, it will look dirty and underhanded to blacks. She’ll develop a real problem in the minority community. But if she is seen as being rejected by minority voters in favor of Obama after going hat in hand to them and trying to out-civil rights Obama, blacks will even likely feel guilty about rejecting Hillary and will be more than willing to support her in the general election.