How Are Whites Getting Represented in This Election?

In an interview with USA Today, Hillary Clinton cited a statistical study on the effects of race on this election. However, she transformed the analysis of how race plays a role in this season's voting habits into her motivation for continuing in this race: "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and... whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." Hillary Clinton's new argument for her superiority in this race is her ability to represent those white voters who perhaps for racial reasons might not vote for Obama: "These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that."

Here we drown in the blurry line between racialism and racism. The statistical study is a clear example of racialism: the emphasis of racial categories for non-hierarchical organizational purposes. One of the more controversial racialist arguments had to do with the organization of intelligence capabilities in terms of race. While some might argue that such a study is inherently racist, racism doesn't enter into the picture until either institutions or specific individuals try to implement that information. In other words, while a researcher's interest in race as a starting point is always suspect, and while a racially biased manipulation of data is racist, a racial organization of data is in-itself not racist.

How about its implementation? If it weren't for the implementation of racialist studies in material practices, there wouldn't be the racially defined target markets that gave rise to African-American magazines, Spanglish publications, the genre of Asian-American fiction, etc. Although most current racialist studies carry out a logic that originated from (an overtly) racially divisive time in American history, such implementations of racialist studies ironically give voice to marginalized identities. They are not inherently racist.

In this case, Hillary Clinton's implementation of a racialist study appears to give voice to a marginalized white identity. The fact that the marginalized identity is white is not a problem, and to silence whites as a race would be racist. Her statement does not reveal its problems until we probe further into its implications.

Barack Obama wins over 90% of the African-American vote. Hillary Clinton wins 60% of the white vote. If Hillary Clinton were to assign equal value to these two races, then the logic of her statement falls apart.

Let's attempt to legitimize her argument further. Hillary Clinton likely is suggesting that the 90% of the African-American voters who support Barack Obama will in turn support Hillary Clinton. In other words, when it comes to the general election, the African-American vote is really one of "insert Democratic candidate here." (One of the problems with this logic is that it ignores the role of voter turn-out, but for the time being, we'll let this logical fallacy slide.) Clinton likewise is suggesting that the 60% of white voters who support her will not in turn support Barack Obama. Even the racialist statistical studies haven't been organized that way, so Hillary Clinton is making an assumption based not on fact, but on some system of reasoning.

What is this system of reasoning that encourages Hillary Clinton to refer to a single racial category of voters as unlikely to vote for a candidate who is not of the same racial category? There's only one possible answer: Hillary Clinton believes that the majority of whites will not vote for a non-white candidate for the presidency, and she wants to give voice to her imagined representation of whites who are marginalized on the basis of their inability to vote for a non-white Democratic candidate. In other words, Hillary Clinton more or less covertly struggles to define herself as the last recourse for marginalized racist logic.

As I've tried to emphasize here, Hillary Clinton fabricates the predominance of this racist logic. The statistics aren't organized to support the way she's representing white voters. This is why Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded by saying, "These statements from Sen. Clinton are not true and frankly disappointing."

The question that "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" have to ask ourselves is, Do we want to be represented in this way?