Cornell Belcher, who worked as a pollster for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, has done a deep investigation of racial and political attitudes during Obama’s presidency and he has a new book coming out: A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Triggering of America’s Racial-Aversion Crisis.
Jenée Desmond-Harris of Vox sat down with him to talk about his findings. It’s an interesting, if depressing, conversation. I found this exchange the most daunting.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Given what your research indicates, is there a world in which diversity can continue to increase and people of color can continue to make demands for inclusion and equality — in politics and elsewhere — without triggering racial aversion or animosity that in turn shapes political outcomes to favor Republicans? Is there a scenario where that could happen? Or is it that you simply wait for demographics to change and for people of color to make up a higher percentage of voters for this phenomenon to stop playing such a big role in politics?
Cornell Belcher: The point I try to make is that America is a unique democracy in that no other democracy in the world has our level of diversity and our history of racism, so we are challenged in a way that other democracies simply are not. So you have in this country, in a way you don’t have in other countries — at least in the industrialized West — a real transfer of power from one group to another.
The truth of the matter is if in fact we are a democracy, minorities here in the next 20 years are going to be the dominant political voice in our country. So there is a transfer of power that’s going to happen, and the question is, is it going to be peaceful or is it going to be one that destroys us? And look at what’s happening in our country: the [reported hate attacks] in the news every day, and how, quite frankly, we’re beginning to defy our democratic values when in North Carolina you have — this is not my opinion, the court said it — the state legislature put in laws to in keep black people from voting. Specific laws! That’s not democratic. We’re even violating our own values.
And our Congress, which has historically been a magnificent body, which has found a way to push forward and act through natural disasters, war, corruption, has been able to move and be functioning — up until the point where they elected a black man president. All of a sudden, that body is completely dysfunctional.
If this were really just about Barack Obama’s skin pigmentation, the problem would dissipate rather quickly after he leaves office on January 20th, but the real key is that transfer of power from one group to another. Elsewhere in the interview, Belcher warns “that people become more conservative or nationalistic with the increases in diversity” and “particularly [in] more diverse states, the percentage of white people voting Democrat decreases significantly as that population gets more diverse.”
I’ve called this the Southification of the North, where Northern whites begin to vote like their Southern brethren with much more race consciousness and solidarity and much less open-mindedness or commitment to pluralism.
It takes (bad, negative) leadership for this to happen. If the Republicans simply refused to exploit this natural human weakness, it wouldn’t be the kind of problem that we have today with a white nationalist movement taking over our country. In fairness, many parts of the Republican Party resisted this, but they had humored it and benefited from it for too long, and they made promises that will now be kept.
Call me a hopeless optimist but the way this plays out cannot be predicted. Trump may destroy the Republican party and everything for which it stands. That’s what I’m praying for. I just hope he doesn’t take down the United States and/or all of humanity with him.
I disagree that it takes bad leadership for this to happen. It is human nature. Different is potentially dangerous so we are hard wired to become hyper-aware and wary of it. As the quote points out, there is a real transfer of power, a zero-sum transfer. It takes good leadership to overcome it, to not see a particular group as out-group but rather in-group. And it also takes people not trying to kneecap good leadership.
The republicans certainly stoked this fire as hard as they could for 50 years and you’re right that we presumably wouldn’t (typo in your post there) have a problem of this magnitude absent that.
Bad leadership often manifests itself as a failure to transcend human nature.
After all, it is human nature to poop in our pants. Only the leadership of good parents get us beyond that.
Incorrect. It’s not in human nature to wear pants. That has to be taught.
California.
But of course they have a decent economy, by and large.
That was because the whites lost, not because they chose cooperation.
Saw this this morning…
Why do California’s whites vote so differently than whites elsewhere?
“…The decline in California’s white population has accompanied sharply falling rates of crime, violence, rape, gun deaths, school failure and related ills. Doubtless there’s no connection, but the ironies are staggering.
The biggest improvements are among younger and nonwhite populations, the ones most shaped by immigration. The worst social trends, especially for crime, gun deaths and drug overdoses, plague older, less educated whites – the population most likely to support Trump.
Other than this stressed fraction, the large majority of California whites are doing very well. Becoming another minority has not brought Euro-American apocalypse. Whites are not being banished, impoverished or victimized by outsiders. Crime and violence are at historic lows. California whites’ median family incomes have risen to a record $96,000, among the highest anywhere. White employment has jumped by 150,000 since 2010. White kids display healthier statistics than ever.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article120468038.html#storylink=cpy
Oh, but how easy it is for the North to be Southified!
What this line of thought misses is that this sort of racism recedes in more prosperous times in which employers need workers and are willing to break down the price discrimination of racial discrimination in employment. The 1960s happened to be one of those prosperous times.
But the Powers That Be have for the past 40 years made sure that that sort of prosperity never reappears. White people in the North have been Southernified since they started fleeing to the suburbs in the 1950s and enjoying the benefits of redlined federal housing programs. Even the police in Cambridge, MA are Bull Connors and Sheriff Clarks.
We have suffered under bad white leadership of the Democratic Party ever since 1968 that did not move when they could to make diversity less of a zero-sum game.
It’s very interesting that one form that white guilt over their knowledge of the moral stain of slavery on the US is (1) denial of the fact that they are better off than they would have been because of it, and (2) projection of motives of vengeance and discrimination on minorities who have been very restrained toward equality. The more President Obama sought reconciliation and justice, the more both of those tendencies were intensified. And skittish white Democratic elected officials ducked and covered instead of standing up for diversity, allowing the bigots to win on boldness.
People also become more conservative or nationalistic with decreases in economic prospects and position.
As for bad leadership, I remember how Bill Clinton lost the 2008 South Carolina Democratic Primary for Hilary Clinton by trying to use racial dogwhistles to whip up white support for Hillary. It backfired then. It also says that white Democrats cannot be trusted on issues of race. That lesson likely resonated more with white voters than with minority voters.
There have been so many evasions of dealing with race as an issue in American society that undoing all of the convolutions will be very difficult indeed. Especially now that looking down on the South has been taken out of the currently legitimate collection of Northern political tactics.
Reality will reassert itself very soon.
While agreeing that racism is exposed most at low economic tide, which was probably foreseeable, not sure that racism itself is the lever for everything we’re seeing this year.
Is this the Southern Strategy writ large, a political strategy to shift the ominous demographic future facing social conservatives? Or is the resurgence of latent racism a coincident but arresting warning of the break-out stage of domestic fascism? In other words racism used as a corrosive tool to gain support for, say, repressive law and order policy or authoritarian leadership.
Do you notice the Trump administration selectively antagonising and threatening individual corporations? This completely unrelated phenomenon suggests to me it’s the latter. Racism, and anti-Semitism, sadly, are perhaps performing the same duty as for other post-industrial, post-republican demagogues and tyrants.
Consider two fundamental tenets of fascism; that liberal democracy is inherently hesitant, dysfunctional and corrupt, firstly, and that the bold authoritarian, the great man, will always prevail in interactions with such debilitated states, both domestically, during his rise, and internationally once in power. This was Hitler’s shtick and, in simplest form, it’s Putin’s and, so far, Trump’s. It’s was also Plato’s so this is nothing new.
Is racism the issue here? Sure it is at the core of our vulnerability to a GOP and all their imbeciles selling us out to a foreign power. But they’re just as eager to be traitors for Christ, the unborn and their whole homophobic and medieval Fox News platform. I’m suggesting their impenetrable, militant stupidity and incessant greed seem to create a national vulnerability to foreign and domestic disruption greater than that from their racism and xenophobia alone. Racism gets you George Wallace, fascism, well, we’ll see…
I’m not talking about racial prejudice or even the hate hysteria that the Trump campaign ginned up when I talk about racism. I’m talking about politically defending the economic, political, and cultural institutions that among other things support racial and ethnic discrimination in wages and prices, discrimination in access to jobs, housing, healthcare, eduction, and dignity, and reinforces the segregation of cultural institutions that briefly in the 1960s-1980s worked counter to racist narratives. Punching those buttons is what holds most of the Trump voters together. Not the offense that political correctness suppresses the ability to sling racial slurs, but the notion that minorities will have equal access to neighborhoods, schools, educational opportunities, dignity, and might be hanging out with daughters and bringing home grandchildren that look like Barack Obama. Not each and all of those fears, but enough of them to cause local social consensuses that the “others’ are the problem.
Of course, this diverts from the real class issues that Occupy Wall Street highlighted. That’s what they were meant to do. But when Trump holds up a corporation for ridicule, there is a personal and not a political issue going on there.
Which brings us to the other side of the equation. The Trump voters voted in an authoritarian tyrant in the classic populist tribune tradition. But opposition to that tyrant is diverted by the division that traditional US racism, anti-immigration xenophobia, and anti-Muslim hysteria adds to the emotional appeal.
In 1979, the unity of the segregationist pastors and the parochial school advocates of school vouchers found a common diversion against what was essentially an immoral position of segregation by refocusing on a “moral” campaign against Roe v. Wade and abortion. This same diversion into a “moral’ crusade intensified with the guarantee of equal legal rights to homosexuals and the extension of equal rights to the entire LGBTQ community. Lurking under the moralism is the conjoining of those with defenses of school segregation through the defunding of public schools in the mechanism of school vouchers, the first halfway house being public charter schools, and the second being publicly funded private charter schools.
Racism gets you George Wallace, but racism and a billion (or the legend of a billion) dollars gets you fascism or an authoritarian cult of personality with personal grudges against those who offend the majesty.
It seems we mostly agree. Your argument that the other moral social causes of the Right were a ‘diversion’ from segregation, which was indefensible, clearly have merit. But to me I think we are missing the donut for the hole; we are witnessing the fascist experiment our historical racism has inflamed and enabled. Not created. This is something new and it is equally terrifying to CEOs and SNAP recipients.
What did you mean by Trump’s ridicule of corporations is ‘personal’; do you mean for his supporters?
It is his personal animus against CEO’s he personally knows and who might have snubbed him or otherwise crossed him.
Right, personal for Trump. I have a slightly different interpretation, more of a professional wrestling context, in which the corporations are the heels and Trump is the face. Trumpkins know when to boo and when to cheer and go home happy. Everyone else is terrified.
I agree with you. If it was only about racism, you really have to wonder how Obama ever won a second term (and it wasn’t even very close), or why nearly 60% of registered Democrats are white.
The other thing is, not a word about what the Democrats did (or failed to do) to create this situation.
I hope people will support Keith Ellison for DNC chair, because he absolutely understands this and means to fix it. He’s a good man and a real leader.
You make the fatal assumption that Democrats do not also support the institutions of racism and benefitted more from the voter for Obama in 2012 who flipped to Trump in 2016.
I would suspect a large bunch of Jay Nixon supporters were among those in the Missouri River valley bunch of counties that flipped most to Trump.
I would suspect a bunch of Ed Rendell voters in Pennsylvania flipped to Trump and Toomey.
Those voters might not have been bigots but they continued to support institutions that propped up discrimination in a clinical way.
Your hope for Keith Ellison seems to be being unwound by Tom Perez and his establishment supporters hidebound and determine to amputate both the left and the future.
“. . . seems to be being unwound by Tom Perez . . . “
How do you know my hopes are unwound? When did this unwinding take place? Did I miss something? Yes, I know there’s this guy Tom Perez who is supported by someone who, whatever his other accomplishments, did very little for the party — Mr. Obama.
As for your other point, yes I understand there are voters who are, let’s say, moderately racist, who would vote for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, but could not bring themselves to vote for a white establishment re-tread like Hillary Clinton.
It seems to me the GOP was playing with matches; undermining and sabotaging the institutions of liberal democracy much as a fascist regime would when a genuine demagogue came along and unexpectedly rolled them.
From Trump’s behaviour since the election it seems clear we are in for a shockingly disruptive time. Weasels like Preibus may have joined the new ruling ‘family’ but the captains of industry, the civil service, the titans of tech and all of the rest of us are discovering we are equally and suddenly disconcerted. Sure, some of us have resources to ‘buy’ our way into Trump’s favour and will eagerly do so, for that is the offer in this con. But we really need to be looking around for potential allies in what might seem to us unexpected places.
Every time some expert disclaims knowledge of Trump’s intentions I am reminded that in the strong man doctrine the rule of law always defers to the leader’s whim. “Keep ’em guessing” may be a winning negotiating strategy but it is also the blueprint for autocratic rule when “them” is the whole damn country.
” … we really need to be looking around for potential allies in what might seem to us unexpected places.”
Yes.
Easily one of the best statements I’ve seen on this blog in a while. The question then becomes, will we do so?
Hope so. Just leaving this here:
If an effective resistance to Trump emerges the rest of the world will be ready to assist also.
Good. We’re going to need all the help we can get. And I do have that document bookmarked and am sharing to those in my own personal sphere of influence.
When I read a Trumpian statement like this:
I hear:
“You’re a bunch of nobodies who are tardy starting the endless fawning struggle for influence with me. Go disrupt yourselves.”
“What this line of thought misses is that this sort of racism recedes in more prosperous times…”
Nailed it.
Having spent a lot of time racing in the rust belt I truly believe that the defection of folks that have seen their futures be slowly traded away flipped this election. They voted for the “outsider willing to take on the elites and blow things up” vs the “insider aligned with Wall Street that wanted the status quo”.
I have no trouble believing this outcome at all.
“He hates the same people I hate. Hand me the goddamn ballot.”
I think you are describing his base and not the folks that flipped, but let’s assume you are right. If you are in charge of the Democratic Party – what do you do to get these voters back?
It’s almost certainly not what you are after, and I would never answer for Davis, but please read this article
at Lawyers, Guns, and Money.
My first ‘solution’ is don’t go to the dupes for advice. They have shown a habit of going after shiny pennies.
.
Hillary may have lost those Rust Belt states by only a few thousands, but the SHIFT to Republicans since 2012 has been as much as 7%. This loss was predictable.
Dems are STILL not recognizing what they have done to their brand in the states.
Methinks it is fascism which is enjoying a comeback; racism has been with us always but seems more a chronic affliction than an existential threat.
Future electoral and societal situation refarded as ‘transfer of power from one group to another’. Who constitutes one group or the other? Colored people or people of color are a group? Well blow me over. Blacks and Hispanics form a group? But if I misunderstand and the other group does not include African Americans and Hispanics who does it refer to? Tell that to African Americans and Hispancis that and see what you reaction you get. Do Indians (subcontinent ones, of course the indigenous ones never even get a nod) belong to the prospective power brokers. This is racism gone insane, obsessional and perverted identity politics. The expected prospect is a divided population of many self-identifying groups (ethnicity, skin color, sexuality, political conviction, economic status, etc.) that will need to work together to get anywhere. There will be no transfer of power from one to the other: alliances between the contrasting and conflicting categories are the only answer and the Democrats don’t get it: to judge by their reaction to the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States, Democrats are lost. The whole Russia thing is a hoax, as much as the chitchat about the Electoral College torpedoing his election Just plain childish, emotional crap.
I wouldn’t call it a “comeback.” We’re a racist country. Some areas are just more so than others.
Pinned it!!!
Thank you.
ASG
No, we are a sadist country, and there are places where blacks are a more convenient target than in other places. But the targets are always targets of convenience and can always change in a blink.
Saying “racist” does two things.
Well, yes.
Trump voters will gladly kick the shit out of a homeless person if they are bored.
But if a white homeless person is sleeping under the bridge next to a Mexican/black homeless person, the white person gets a pass. Or at least goes last.
.
This piece has a map of the US showing the %shift per county to Trump.
To be persuasive that this was racist backlash, I think you need to show that economic stress was not significant in those shifts to account for the variance, no?
We’ve spent 30 yrs destroying that part of our nation by our deliberate choice of policies. It is just catching up to where the race-to-the-bottom South has been for generations.
http://www.nbcnews.com/specials/donald-trump-republican-party/presidency
The symbolic head of the Democratic Party that did nothing for the economic welfare of those counties was a black President.
Separating out racism from economics under that historical condition if very difficult.
The other side of the white reaction is this:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic: My President Was Black
As for this:
The economy in the South has not been about one thing for 50 years. And it has not exclusively been a race to the bottom as many people relocated to places like Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Charleston SC, Greenville-Spartanburg SC, Birmingham, Nashville, Knoxville or Northern Virginia can attest. And in the mid-2000s, the race-to-the-bottom areas were Florida and California and lots of Midwestern small towns. A lot of those folks moved to Southern cities and did much better economically. A lot of my new neighbors have been from those areas that shifted to Trump. They did not come close to tilting this Democratic stronghold to Trump.
There is a race-to-the-bottom South; it used to be represented by Blue Dogs and is currently represented by Republicans.
And there is an always-at-the-bottom South that also shows up as strongly Democratic because it comprises minority-majority counties and elects representatives like James Clyburn and G. K Butterfield.
Another example of that economic anxiety the republican commentators are always talking about;
where could they have learned this?
.
I dunno. Did Mary Fallin take Barron Trump there?
I think it may be worse than “Southification.” It may be “Baathification.” In other words, the creation of an autocratic state to maintain (what will ultimately be) an ethnic minority in very tense control, with a violent regime of elite kleptocrats at the top.
The subject of race and politics in America is vast. I find myself thinking though that it’s not just race. I won’t possibly express this adequately, but here goes.
It’s a whole culture based in shame, which expresses itself in denying, degrading, and destroying basic human worth and dignity. Of course, the culture of racial superiority makes this culture of degradation possible, because we can say “it’s happening to them, they deserve it.”
It’s a culture that believes, as an axiom of faith really, that the poor are 100% responsible for their poverty, and the rich are 100% responsible for their wealth. A corollary of this, is that the systematic impoverishment and disenfranchisement of entire communities is literally unthinkable. It can’t be conceived. If you’re rich, you deserve it. If you’re poor, you deserve it. There is an intense desire, a whole cultural apparatus (or hegemony) that instructs us that your worth as a human being is measured by the amount of money you have.
So, there is a worship of money, a worship of “winning”.
This is the attitude that, if you get arrested, if you are in jail, you ipso facto have no worth and no rights. We are familiar with this in the more punitive guises, the passion for punishment, for torture even of murderers, rapists. But it’s everywhere.
The point is, in America, there is a widespread, I would say dominant belief, that human worth and dignity is highly contingent. In other words, there is a belief that human dignity must always be “earned” or “proven.”
There is, in other words, a belief that no one has intrinsic worth. It’s a vicious neurosis on a cultural level.
And that lack of dignity uses skin tone as a class marker for abuse. Except when class and riches exempt that treatment on an inconsistent basis. See Trump, Donald, and West, Kanye.