It’s Not Just MSNBC Making Flip Assumptions About Non-Liberal Racism

Last night, the official Twitter feed of MSNBC used a Cheerios
Super Bowl commercial to make a crack about non-lefties being
uncomfortable with race-mixing:

After an eruption of outrage on Twitter, including a volley of
colorful family snapshots under the hashtag
#MyRightWingBiracialFamily, MSNBC online chief Richard Wolffe
withdrew
the Tweet:  

The Cheerios tweet from @msnbc was dumb, offensive and
we’ve taken it down. That’s not who we are at msnbc.

The “that’s not who we are” claim generated a
flurry of
LOLs, and not just from conservatives. New York
magazine put the issue succinctly in a headline: “MSNBC
Is Very Sorry for Suggesting Conservatives Are Racist
(Again).“

But making broad and essentially pejorative generalizations
about giant swaths of non-Democrats is hardly the exclusive domain
of the racist-chasers at MSNBC and
Salon.com. Journalistic outlets at the highest levels have been
making non-jokey versions of the same accusation throughout the
Obama presidency, ever since the twin ascension in 2009
of the Tea Party and opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

For an example, check out this passage in New Yorker
Editor David Remnick’s extraordinarily long and often insightful
recent
profile of the president.

In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more
racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among
white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in
American history. The popular opposition to the Administration
comes largely from older whites who feel threatened,
underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy
and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the
polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters.

Italics mine, to underscore what one of the
nation’s most decorated journalists felt zero need to substantiate
in a 16,000-word article. Do older white voters really feel more
“threatened” and “disdained” by a “globalized economy” and
“increasingly diverse country” than other age and
ethnic/pigmentation cohorts? I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting

poll data out there, but Remnick (a 55-year-old white guy,
FWIW) doesn’t need to cite any: He knows it’s true, his readers
know it’s true, and the only real question is how much you can
respectably
pin opposition to this twice-elected
black president on racism.

This isn’t just bad journalism, it’s bad tolerance. Attributing
a single set of personality traits to scores of millions of people
whose only commonality is age and race is the opposite of judging
people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their
character. It’s also a cheap way to wave off the substance of
anti-Obama criticism—why bother figuring out why a majority of
Americans have
consistently disliked the flawed
Affordable Care Act when you can just roll your eyes and assert
that the real reason is
white anxiety and worse? There is nothing tolerant about
assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the
size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic
tribalism.

MSNBC, on whose shows I have
happily participated, engages daily in the othering
business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes
libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a
disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this
is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive
stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age.

To his credit, Barack Obama himself seems to have a more nuanced
understanding of race and his own popularity than many of his
supporters and interlocutors. Here he is in the Remnick piece:

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really
dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,”
Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks
and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the
benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.”
[…]

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments
that we have politically and the history of race in our country,
and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on.
“You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries
about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that
it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence
you think that more power should reside in the hands of state
governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is
wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the
civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a
pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for
progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my
Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just
because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the
criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were
trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The
flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize
and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so
that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to
states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am
this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’
rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is
going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor
folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.”

There is plenty to disagree with here—not least of which is
Obama’s asymmetrical desire to have federalists answer for racism
while
Progressivism’s nasty history of same gets a pass, and also his
inability to process the substance of anti-Medicaid complaints. But
the president’s broad framing offers the modern left a useful
alternative for talking about race in 2014 America. Namely, that
it’s complicated, and that reducing entire population
blocs to caricatures does not necessarily improve the
conversation.