In a nation with a history of slavery and its consequences, it is not surprising that there has been an element of racism in America’s political rhetoric and its political policies. After the abolition of slavery, and particularly after the federal government’s efforts to protect the civil rights of African Americans and others in the 1950s and 1960s, overt racism became less prevalent. Not only were racist policies (such as segregated public accommodations and schools, among other things) illegal, but also it was simply no longer socially acceptable to publicly denigrate or deprive someone on the basis of race, or to enact policies specifically designed to disadvantage or subjugate a racial group. As overt racism has declined, some political commentators have declared that America is now a post-racial society.
Political scientists, as well as other social scientists, are not so quick to agree. They note that merely because it is no longer acceptable to make racist statements does not mean that Americans do not still feel racial animosity toward others. Rather, they suggest, that animosity is now expressed in more subtle ways. These subtler expressions of racism constitute what is known as “symbolic racism.” Symbolic racism involves the same kind of stereotyping that marks traditional racism—that is, to assume that a racial group is morally or intellectually inferior as a result of its biological traits or its racial subculture. But rather than complain about spending taxpayer money on education for African American children, for example, a symbolic racist attack would be to criticize education spending on inner-city schools. The intent is the same; in both instances, the target of such criticism is spending on economically disadvantaged African American youth. But the second criticism does not denigrate African Americans directly; rather, it relies on stereotypes about inner-city poverty, crime, and race.
Thus critics have maintained that Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s law-and-order message in the Campaign of 1968 was in reality thinly and cynically veiled symbolic racism. Nixon wanted to restore law and order to U.S. inner cities, which had been plagued by racial unrest and disrupted by rioting in recent years. By focusing on inner-city blight and crime, Nixon was able to imply that African Americans constituted a dangerous criminal element without actually saying so; voters intuitively understood what was being implied. Similarly, political scientists argue, if media images of poverty are dominated by African Americans, then attacks on “welfare queens” (most notably, by Republican nominee Ronald Reagan in the Campaign of 1980) may also appeal to underlying racial animosity among voters. In contemporary politics, most news stories about immigrants, both legal and illegal, focus on migrants from Mexico, or from Central or South America. Thus, the public debate over immigration reform is rooted, in a large part, in Americans’ feelings about Latinos.
The conspiracy theorists who believe that President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim (he is not) and the rising public concern about Muslims in the United States have similar roots. Most Americans believe that Muslims in the United States are primarily immigrants from the Middle East (in fact, approximately half are African Americans whose families have lived in the United States for many generations) and that, as Middle Eastern Muslims, they must be a threat to national security and the American way of life. Arab Americans are generally assumed to be Muslim (although many are, in fact, Christian, or even adherents of other religions such as the Baha’i faith or, in some cases, Zoroastrianism). And immigrants from the Middle East (depending on what area of the world one considers to be “Middle East” in the popular mind) are all assumed to be Arab (although many are Pakistani or Indian, or Persian—from countries that for geographers are not even technically Middle Eastern). What most Americans do know is that the September 11 terrorists were both Arab and Muslim, and this association has generated a great amount of fear about a religion and a culture of which most Americans know little. Public support for racial profiling of Arab Americans, opposition to the construction of mosques, and attempts to ban sharia law in various states all appear to emanate from a more general fear of the potential threat to American culture posed by individuals from the Middle East.
This fear became evident in the early Republican primary debates during the Campaign of 2012. When asked if they would be willing to appoint a Muslim to a position in the White House, Newt Gingrich compared Muslims in the United States with the threat posed by Nazis during World War II; Herman Cain said he would not permit a Muslim to serve in his cabinet; Rick Santorum expressed concerns about the spread of sharia law in the United States; only Mitt Romney dismissed the claim that Muslims were less loyal to the United States than members of other religious groups, expressing his belief that the country was founded on religious tolerance. Yet again, in the Campaign of 2016, GOP hopeful Ben Carson suggested that it might not be constitutional for a Muslim to be elected president of the United States. He argued that Muslims could not separate their religious beliefs from their public actions and were thus not fit to lead. Donald Trump has most recently caused considerable controversy through his proposal to impose a temporary ban on all Muslim immigrants to the United States, exploiting distrust of Muslims based on negative stereotypes held by segments of the general population. Mr. Trump’s proposal has been met with strong condemnation in his own party. It is these issues of race, neatly cloaked by other, more policy-related concerns, that continue to divide American voters and thus continue to act as potential wedge issues at election time.
See also Birther; Race Relations Issue
Valentino, Nicholas A., and David O. Sears. “Old Times Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South.” American Journal of Political Science (July 2005): 672–688.