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Guest Post By Lee Cokorinos

The issue of race has roared back into public discourse, like Freud’s return of the repressed. The feel good moment when even Ward Connerly sent a campaign check to Barack Obama and—in an echo of Freud’s famous “what do women want?”—the late William F. Buckley anxiously struggled to grasp “what is it, concretely, that he wants?” has passed.

It’s unlikely that Connerly would write that check today. But the race baiters and silent bigots will undoubtedly be writing more checks to Connerly now as he pushes forward with his crusade to outlaw affirmative action in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

The right-wing media and think tank infrastructure—which some liberals and progressives, in a fit of overconfidence and hubris, have prematurely declared dead—has sprung into action in the wake of the controversies over Clinton finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro’s racially-charged remarks about Obama, and concerning his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

There is a feeding frenzy in the conservative movement to take advantage of this new moment of racial ugliness. Like aging hawkers desperately competing to sell Confederate Flag T-shirts at a Lynryd Skynyrd revival, Human Events, National Review and the Murdoch media (from Fox News to the Weekly Standard) instantly filled their pages, websites and broadcasts to the bursting point with sedate but cutting analysis, raw white male anger, "friendly" advice and general bloviating about racial issues with Obama as the focus.

Human Events started the ball rolling in January when it released a 33-page exposé trashing Obama’s candidacy. This was followed by a heated exchange on March 1 between Rev. Wright and Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Since then, all of the leading lights of the anti-diversity industry have weighed in with abuse, advice and glee at the spectacle of a woman and an African American Democratic candidate beating each other up in the media.

Joining the fray have been ex-Meese Justice Department spokesperson Terry Eastland (who now works for Murdoch’s Weekly Standard); Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; former Connerly legal sidekick Edward Blum (now at the American Enterprise Institute fighting for repeal of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act); and Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes (who proudly and gratuitously fit into the biotag of his article denouncing Obama that he was “a consultant on the 1996 campaign for California’s Proposition 209”).

The level of analysis has been low. Clearly Buckley’s talent for giving intellectual flair to reactionary politics is sorely missed at National Review. For instance, Linda Chavez equated the dedication by Senator Obama’s church to being “a congregation with a non-negotiable commitment to Africa” and to “the historical education of African people in [the] Diaspora” with “the promotion of a racist ideology.”

Is commitment to solidarity with the people of Africa, and supporting an understanding by African Americans of their own history now to be considered racist? If so, then it's fair to say that in its current racial fury the right-wing has blown clear past its hard-learned lessons of the mid-20th century and is now plumbing the history of the 19th century, when Black education was illegalized and American policy toward Africa consisted of the slave trade and gunboat diplomacy. 

Indeed the analysis in National Review has been so dimwitted that even Charles Murray—co-author of The Bell Curve and no slouch in the game of feeding racial tensions—was moved to blow off his colleagues’ shallow carping comments in National Review Online about Obama’s speech by calling it “just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America.” He was joined in his dissent by Abigail Thernstrom, another prominent intellectual capo in the anti-diversity industry.

Several strands have emerged out of this blizzard of conservative racial hucksterism. The Right’s first gambit was to try to get Obama to renounce his commitment to affirmative action (he opposed Proposal 2 in Michigan banning affirmative action).

“If he’s really intelligent,” writes Center for Equal Opportunity president Roger Clegg, then Obama would line up with the anti-diversity industry—i.e., him. Mickey Kaus, the conservative blogger, likewise suggests that Obama can “escape from the ghetto” and “shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy” by finding “a Sister Souljah … not a person, but an idea” and renouncing his support for affirmative action.

Richard Kahlenberg, riding his class-based affirmative action hobby horse and pointing to Connerly’s initiatives as a litmus test of Obama’s bona fides, has also weighed in with the naïve and flaccid argument that Obama could win over the white working class by renouncing affirmative action that takes account of race.

It’s as if the right-wing, elite-funded anti-diversity industry, backed by billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, is suddenly going to rally to a program of class-leveling in education. As sociologist Peter Dreier points out, upper crust whites in the wealthy suburbs have tended to vote far more conservatively on race issues than working class whites, and this goes double for conservative plutocrats.

It’s also not too much of a stretch to say that after a generation’s worth of race-baiting—by politicians from both major parties, cable TV schlock pundits and the anti-diversity academics who provide intellectual cover for them—that it will take more than a little policy tweaking on affirmative action to end the divisive role of race in the white working class and bring about the kind of new consensus that Obama was talking about in his speech.

Far more promising, as Dreier points out, would be a broad and sustained campaign—transcending election cycles and including honest discussions of race—to build unity around economic inequality and collapsing working class standards of living. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Scaife and Murdoch to fund that kind of think tank or independent movement.

A second strand of abuse to come out of the right-wing firestorm against Obama was to accuse him, as the Wall Street Journal did, of playing the race card by “detecting racial overtones where none exist” and “crying wolf on race.” Considering the drumbeat of racializing demagoguery that this candidate has endured after trying to avoid the racialization of his campaign by the media and his opposition, this is a bit like robbing a person of his clothes at gunpoint then accusing him of being poorly dressed.

But the most important question is this: What will be the lasting impact of the mainstream and fringe racist attacks against Obama on the legal and political system? It’s clearly going to have an effect on the general election and the Democratic Party. Both the McCain and Clinton camps probably see the controversy over Obama’s former pastor as benefiting their campaigns.

This will spur and sustain the feeding frenzy, with potentially lasting damage to race relations. But it will also likely produce newfound financial support for the anti-diversity industry, as it strives to raise money by keeping race issues on the boil in a negative and divisive way. The right-wing’s attack on Obama and Connerly’s statewide campaigns are two sides of the same coin. As Connerly pushes forward with his crusade to outlaw affirmative action in five states it is vitally important that he be confronted and stopped, difficult as that will be.

Moreover, if people stay away from the polls in November as a result of the outcome of the Democratic nomination process, this will harm the fight against Connerly’s initiatives. If the right can drive the wedge between the feminist and civil rights movements even deeper, this may do lasting damage. Both have important stakes in the survival of affirmative action and policies to promote diversity, and if they come together the battle can be won, as was seen in the successful campaign to defeat Connerly’s Prop 54 initiative in California. The battlefield is being shaped beyond this election cycle.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.