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Onward,
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November
2, 2006
Old Times There Are Not Forgotten
Smearing
Harold Ford in Black Face
By JEFF BIRKENSTEIN
If that anti-Harold Ford ad--the
one with the white bimbette saying "Harold, call me"--was
"playing to racial fears" about interracial dating,
was it intended to stir up whites who might fear miscegenation--or
black women who might resent it if they thought
Ford habitually went out with white women? ... [Both?-ed
Sure--a twofer. But the MSM only brings up the "appeal
to racist white voters."] ... P.S.: Does anybody
still buy the idea that the reaction against this ad is
going to save Ford?
-Mickey Kaus, Slate.com
Apparently, the white naked woman is
the real problem.
And the white man with the
blackface? A non-issue. Invisible, even.
By now, you've probably heard
about the ruckus in Tennessee, otherwise known as the "United
States Senate Race." In an ad paid for by the Republican
National Committee, a white woman, with no visible adornments
except for a gold necklace and a bad dye job, explains to the
camera, coquettishly, that she met Democratic candidate Harold
Ford at "the Playboy party."
Well, I doubt he met this "actress,"
there, but he did go to a Playboy party. Not at the mansion,
but at the Super Bowl. Explaining this, Ford the bachelor said,
"I like football, and I like girls." Prime food for
red meat America. Throw in his ease discussing his Christian
faith and it's no wonder he has a real chance to win in Tennessee.
The ad concludes with the same woman saying, while winking and
holding her pinky and thumb extended phone-like, "Harold,
Call me."
This ad has stirred up a hornet's
nest of either indignation on one side or, on the other, protestations
of innocence and even mock disdain (for the ad, not Ford). Everyone,
in fact, is covering the white naked woman and her appeal to
miscegenation. Even Harold Ford's opponent, Bob Corker, claims
to be against it, though he said he was powerless to do anything
about it in the face of the new campaign laws. Never mind that
the ad was paid for by the RNC. You can hear long-winded explanations
on talk radio and cable news "proving" there is nothing
they can do about it, but methinks the political hacks doth protest
too much.
Not content to be the talk
du jour of the hated MSM for telling Michael J. Fox to
keep his Parkinson's symptoms in the closet, Rush Limbaugh weighed
in, saying that Ford has, in fact, dated a white woman in the
past. Rush's obvious conclusion: "I'm just telling you
that there's an ad that was pulled because Republicans got cold
feet, and it turns out there's a basis for it. I'm not criticizing!
I am not."
What the pundits seemed to
have missed-or conveniently ignored-is that this ad features
a white man in blackface. True, it is not the blackface of Al
Jolson or the faux-studio audience in Spike Lee's Bamboozled.
But it is blackface.
Though the man wearing blackface
is only seen from the shoulders up, he is not naked like the
woman, but wearing hunting camouflage. A jacket, shirt and baseball
cap, all camo'ed. What does he say? "Ford's right. I
do have too many guns." But he has not gone completely
unnoticed; he has not "passed" entirely. No, in an
excellent skewering, Slate critiques it in its "Remixed
Campaign Ads" feature. But about our blackfaced hunter
friend, they say only, sarcastically, "This hunter has never
hunted a day in his life."
But, to me, the alleged hunter's
face screams blackface. Maybe this is because I teach African
American literature and just finished reading Nella Larsen's
1929 novel Passing, in which a light-skinned African American
woman passes for white. But we live in a curious time, a time
when many people both acknowledge that America still grapples
with issues of race and yet thinks we live in a post-race period.
"Sure, we have problems," my students have been telling
me for years, "but it's time people were responsible for
themselves." Besides, I have enough problems of my own,
we all think.
Looked at the ad yet? If you
haven't, you're missing a beaut'.
There are, in the end, only
two possible explanations for the man in blackface. He is there
either deliberately or accidentally. While both Max Blumenthal
(in The Nation) and Taylor Marsh (in The Huffington
Post) expose the ad's creator, Scott Howell, for being a
well-proven race-baiter, neither of them mention the blackface.
But it's there. No mistaking
it. Yes, yes, I know. "He's a hunter," O'Reilly will
scream, "Of course he's wearing blackface!" Well,
he wouldn't use the term blackface, of course. "Birkenstein,
you are just seeing things that don't exist!" Indeed.
But this man's face is
blackened-regardless of what you call it-and this hunter is
in the ad. So we cannot honestly ignore it. We are forced to
examine him as he exists.
The first possibility is that
he is there intentionally with full awareness that his blackened
face is calling attention to Ford's own complexion. After all,
the ad ends with this text:
Harold Ford. (in strong white
on black script)
He's just not right. (in a
weaker white script)
Meant to be both obvious and
not too blatant, this is classic language used to expose Ford
as being the Other. He's not one of "Us." Not one
of us, the whites, the ad tells us.
But, OK, I will give Scott
Howell the benefit of the doubt and run with the idea that the
blackfaced hunter is not in there maliciously. He is,
however, very definitely in there deliberately. After
all, there are only a handful of people in that ad. And they
are surely not actual people-on-the-street interviews. Or man-in-the-woods,
as the case may be. So, at some point, Howell made a deliberate
choice to dress this man in these clothes and paint
his face black and film him. The "hunter" did
not fall out of the sky into the ad.
But.
Even if he is in there as a
"genuine" hunter with camo on his face, problems abound.
In a political race which could make Harold Ford the first African
American senator from the South, the blackfaced hunter's mere
presence represents ignorance of hundreds of years of racial
oppression and violence. Ignorance of the long history of "passing"
in a segregated America. Ignorance of the fact that the United
States government has still never apologized for becoming a world
power on the backs of slaves, a heritage of wealth division that
we continue to feel in every segment of our society to this day.
Yes, in the very best of circumstances, the blackfaced hunter
in this ad represents only (only?!) ignorance of America's own
history.
But not to worry. For in the
end we have a wealth of talking heads saying that there is no
problem with this ad (though none of them I have found have yet
to address the blackfaced hunter). Their evidence? Their own
experience. So long as they are comfortable in their knowledge
that they are not racist, that the ad is not racist, then the
collective history of this country is of little importance.
Such solipsistic evidence is exactly what I try to get my freshman
to move away from when making an argument. Yes, individual experience
counts, but this can only be the beginning and never the end
of a mature, well-reasoned argument. For one person is but one
person and we are country with upwards of 300 million people.
Surely we alone cannot be the evidence for or against
something which affects so many. Allan G. Johnson writes about
this in his troubling little book Privilege, Power and Difference:
"Individualistic thinking, however, assumes that everything
has only to do with individuals and nothing to
do with social categories, leaving no room to see, much less
consider, the role of privilege."
When Ken Mehlman, chairman
of the Republican National Committee, used the solipsism strategy
he even upped the ante. Because he didn't see the ad as racist
it was actually those who called the ad into question who were
racist. Here's what he told Tim Russert:
I think that there is nothing
more repugnant in our society than people who try to divide Americans
along racial lines, and I would denounce any ad that I thought
did . . . I happen not to believe that ad does.
He also explained the ad away
to Steve Inskeep on NPR:
I looked at that ad. I didn't
see [the racism]. Other folks have said they saw it. I don't
believe that this ad makes the Republican party look like racists.
I don't believe this ad makes anybody involved look like it.
His evidence? Solely his own
worldview. The box in which he lives.
The list of experts who don't
personally see the ad as offensive goes on. Fred Barnes of Fox
News and The Weekly Standard claimed on-air: "The
ad was fine. You have to be living in the 50s or 60s to think
it's racist." No explanation, no evidence; just his own
belief that we live in a post-racialized present. His buddy
Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call, said on
the same show that the ad was "cute up to the point of 'Harold,
call me.' After that, it was designed to stir up the rednecks."
And since this part of the ad is the last actor on screen, this
means Kondracke thinks the blackfaced hunter is "cute."
As for the offensive term redneck, well, I'm not sure who he
means, but I'll bet whomever Mort had in mind did not vote for
Kerry in the last election.
These pundits and many more
prove that, yes, ignorance may be bliss. The problem, of course,
is that willful ignorance is something else entirely, something
for which we cannot escape responsibility. So I wonder which
type of ignorance is behind the ad with the white shoulders and
the black face.
Jeff Birkenstein is a professor of English at St. Martin's
University in Lacey, Washington. He can be reached at: jbirkenstein@stmartin.edu
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