POLITICS JANUARY 16, 2012
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Martin Luther King Day is supposed to get us thinking about how black people have come a long way but still have a long way to go. Okay, but what MLK Day has me as a black person thinking about is Lee Siegel.
Specifically, what’s on my mind is Siegel’s idea, broadcast in the paper of record on Sunday, that Mitt Romney’s appeal is based on his being the “whitest” Presidential candidate in a long time. It’s a hit-generating proposition, to be sure. But it’s also a sign of how very far we've come on race. Apparently, racism has so diminished in salience that it no longer demands treatment as an empirical phenomenon, but can merely serve as speculative fodder for smart writers at serious publications to gesture at in order to demonstrate their own goodly enlightenment. Siegel’s article serves as an unfortunate object lesson.
Let’s take Siegel’s basic proposition, that Romney has signaled that he is an alternative to Obama’s blackness. We are to made to believe that this charge—and it is an accusation, that Romney has performed this signaling—is based on empirical evidence of some kind.
But if asked at gunpoint to identify a single way that Romney has signaled that he is an alternative to Obama’s blackness, we would have to submit to being shot. Romney himself would be baffled by the charge that he has done any such thing, one suspects. But Siegel insists that Romney is “telegraphing” this notion of himself as anti-black, and then later hedges that Romney is doing this “whether he means to or not.”
In the end, apparently Romney “knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president.” But how do we know he “knows”? Just because it might be fun to think he does? How is this different from a schoolyard taunt?
Siegel’s implication that voters will be especially open to Romney’s purported maximal whiteitude is equally weak. For one, there’s the little problem that even Republicans have never liked the man much, white or not. Never mind the squeak-by victory in Iowa; even in New Hampshire he couldn’t keep Ron Paul from cracking the 20 percent ceiling.
It also doesn’t work to pretend that Obama's victory was merely a fluke—that the economic meltdown in late 2008 caused Americans to temporarily disregard their misgivings about his race. One hears this theory occasionally, but this kind of glibly pessimistic take on modern American social history is distorted by melodrama and sentimentality. Siegel has it that “the Republican ticket was ahead of Obama by several points in September 2008,” but it’s more like that out of 42 national polls in September of 2008, McCain was ahead, usually by a mere bit, in 9 of them. Obama had momentum long before October, and there’s a very good chance he'd be President even without the catastrophic economic meltdown of late-2008.
Siegel, moreover, clearly senses the infelicity in terming Romney the “whitest” in a field of decidedly un-ethnic Republican candidates. His attempts to cast the others as somehow less “white” than Romney don’t stick. Let's face it, Jon Huntsman could take Romney on in a white-off any day, and his speaking Mandarin hardly gives him an air of the subaltern—it’s cosmopolitan in a thoroughly Stuff White People Like way. And Ron Paul is also a rather utterly “white” individual. If we define “white” the way that White Studies academics would prefer us to—as, above all, a sense of superiority to those less melanin-challenged—Paul's dicey take on race would seem to render him the quintessence of whiteness.
And that's just it—it’s Siegel, one suspects, who finds Romney’s Wonder Bread quality off-putting. Siegel is hardly alone in that take on whiteness as backwards and devoid of flava, of course. That perspective is now deeply seated among Americans, and increases with education level. The phrase “That’s so white,” now leveled regularly by highly white people, would have made no sense to even the most sophisticated and enlightened young people of 1962. Culturally, America is a much browner place in all ways than it was even twenty years ago. It’s what would most forcefully strike a Mad Men character transported to 2012 after they got used to computers and cell phones.
If anything, Romney’s “whiteness” is part of what has kept him from lighting a real flame among Republicans. Aside from his perceived lack of conservative convictions, Romney inspires no love for being “stiff” in ways that are unmistakably “white.” The high-WASP fifties blandness that would have made him seem quintessentially “Presidential” 50 years ago comes off as juiceless and almost ridiculous today to a great many Americans, Republican or not.
But is Wonder-fully white Romney signaling that he is “not black”? There’s no case for that in any meaningful sense, other than to allow Siegel to flatter himself and his readers as sophisticated enough to be immune to the racism that is still “out there.” The only other justification for an editorial making such a baseless argument is the titillation of dumping on Romney for not being able to, so to speak, bust a move.
But the intellectual returns on that kind of exploitation are limited. Siegel’s piece is titled “What’s Race Got to Do With It?” But the answer to that question, when it comes to Romney, should already be clear: Nothing whatsoever. This may confound Siegel, but it would make Martin Luther King very proud indeed.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly suggested that Siegel used the word "signaling" when describing Mitt Romney. Also, the word "September" was left out of the quote referencing Barack Obama's poll numbers in late 2008.
12 comments
Great piece.
- seattleeng
January 16, 2012 at 1:54pm
I am pleased that racism no longer exists in America, especially among Republicans. I understand that the Mormon ban on full membership of blacks ended in 1978, though teachings about the "curse of Cain", that blacks descended from Cain, are still prevalent, with blackness associated with evil and whiteness with righteousness. Why anybody would identify with Romney for his whiteness is beyond me.
- rayward
January 16, 2012 at 2:05pm
Entertaining terms: "whiteitude"--"white-off"--White Studies. Very good article. I, too, have seen Romney as Wonder Bread--spongy, tasteless, and whiter-than-white. Greatest Americans by Century: 18th: George Washington, for giving up military control of our new nation. 19th: Abraham Lincoln, for keeping our union from fragmenting into warring nations. 20th: MLK, for being a true revolutionary who was willing to give his life, but not to kill, for what he believed in. 21st: The verdict is already in. Forget about any other candidate for the next 88 years. The guy's a giant in his time--a beacon of reason (okay, intuition) and compassion (okay, for the rich). You guessed it. The Greatest American of the 21st Century is...George W. Bush! Unleash the fanfare! Long Live the Court Jester!
- magboy47.
January 16, 2012 at 2:19pm
The digital MLK archives open today: http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive
- magboy47.
January 16, 2012 at 2:34pm
I think John McW takes down Siegel's piece very effectively, leaving not much there but a brief depression in the earth and a wisp of smoke. That said, however, there IS something deeply odd about that short-back-and-sides gee-whiz 1950s vibe that has something of a uniform about it -- Paul Ryan is perhaps even more noticeable for his retro look. The characters in Mad Men are more genuine, because their appearance was the standard one for the time (liberals had it as well), but they are widely varied, gnarly, uncomfortable characters underneath. But that appearance is definitely not the standard one for 2012, so it baffles me why a look that e.g. Bobby Kennedy had appears now to be some kind of cultural comfort blanket for the GOP electorate. To me, they all appear like screechy fakes when contrasted with Obama, who at the very least has a kind of a genuine smile that doesn't judge. I'm looking forward to the debates, Obama vs. Mittbot, who I firmly believe will be as awkward in his joviality as a white Ivy League student congratulating the sax player in a late 1950s mixed-audience jazz club.
- ironyroad
January 16, 2012 at 4:37pm
much as I hate to agree with Sprezzatura but I do. "But is Wonder-fully white Romney “signaling” that he is “not black”?" You have got to be kidding me. Romney has never addressed race during this run, and the last race he blatantly lied saying he saw his father march with MLK, when it never happened. He was also 34 when the Mormon church got rid of its offical racist creed that blacks were unfit for priesthood. 34! And there is zero evidence of his working to get rid of that policy. Look at Romney's campaign speeches, there is absolutely no effort to get any people of any minority to stand behind him, he is also not making any effort to go to any minority areas. He does not address any minority concerns, instead he is going out of his way to alienate latinos and is strongly against affirmative action. I am absolutely convinced that Romney would be happy to win without a single minority vote and he is making no efforts to attract any of them. by the way, Huntsman played in a rock and roll band which is by definition not white, he also adopted a Chinese and Indian girl.
- blackton
January 16, 2012 at 5:39pm
and go to mittromney.com and see his comments on minority uplift and outreach, oh wait, there is NONE. And the only mentions of homosexuals is how he fought so hard to prevent gays from being able to get married. The man is a nightmare from the 1950's, maybe the reason he is so full of shit is his anal sphincter is so tight the only place the shit can come from is his mouth.
- blackton
January 16, 2012 at 5:48pm
I'm with Blackton on this one in part but with a few twists. First, I think McWhorter's reading of Seigel's piece is too blunt. Siegel isn't arguing that Romney is purposely presenting himself as the white alternative to Obama. Therefore, Siegel doesn't need the empirical "evidence" McWhorter faults him for not presenting. Siegel's argument is that in certain Republican precincts there is a considerable swathe of people who see Obama as as the embodiment of the loss of their white, Leave it to Beaver America, resonating in a kind of fifties' sensibility. That sensibility had Mom home with the kids, dad at work, God in his heaven, church on Sundays, with minorities knowing their place and the thought of a black American president beyond imagining. Siegel's argument is that for the reasons he cites, apparent in the way Romney comports himself, quite an astute reading of Romney it is, Romney is the Republican candidate who best embodies and feeds that anachronistic nostalgia and best promises a return to the America they once knew. This has nothing to do with Romney purposefully signaling anything. It has to do with Romney simply being who he is. When Romney presents two visions of America, the return to American economic and military greatness, the revivification of American exceptionalism and so on as against Obama's putative turning America into Europe, turning it into unexceptional dismissiveness, those nostalgic for a former white bread time will read their dream into Romney's offer. This is how I read Siegel's argument and how McWhorter misconstrues it. Where I think Siegel goes wrong, and McWhorter is right to call him on it, is when Siegel says, " And let’s be clear: Mr. Obama’s election was not destiny, but a fluke" and then goes on to argue for that. America is better than that proposition and the argument in support of it; and it's at this point that I read Siegel to have lost sight of his own argument. Siegel also loses sight of the thread of his own argument when he says, "Mitt Romney knows this. He knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president." Here as well McWhorter has a point that tells against Siegel: here we can ask the ground for asserting that Romney is purposefully pitching himself as the white alternative to Obama, as opposed to him being that by virtue of who and how he actually is. To invert McWhorter's reading of Siegel a little: this is Siegel, as noted, losing sight of his argument, and not Siegel backtracking from his central point.
- basman
January 16, 2012 at 10:38pm
If Siegel had only phrased his argument as accurately and succinctly as blackton does, Mr. McWhorter's thoughtful rebuttal would not have been necessary. Romney is an amoral souless replicant who is incapable of relating to those outside of his socio-economic tribe.
- appleton
January 16, 2012 at 10:55pm
But Obama's family life is certainly as traditional as Mitt's, right? The president goes to work, Michelle stays at home (mostly), the kids are well-behaved and do well at school etc etc. Indeed, the president doesn't have the Mormon thing to manage, which may take some interesting turns over the next few months. But apparently it doesn't matter if you're not white.
- ironyroad
January 16, 2012 at 11:05pm
.... Romney is an amoral souless replicant who is incapable of relating to those outside of his socio-economic tribe.... Harsh words for someone clearly you disagree with. Why not leave it as a disagreement rather than infantalizing it with thinly disguised school yard name calling? I've heard that when people meet Romney, one on one! they find he's quite warm, empathetic, caring and personable, i.e. a nice guy. I suppose your own one on one meetings with Romney yielded a different perception of the man. I say later for all the name calling and now for the differences in both policy and vision and the reasons why.
- basman
January 17, 2012 at 10:19am
Does Siegel actually use the word "signalled"?
- jcampbell36
January 17, 2012 at 12:28pm