Sirotablog
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. David writes about political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties.
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May 14, 2008 8:48 AM
"Gritty" vs. "Athletic" - How Racism Is Structural, Not Individual
As regular readers know, I've been doing a lot of writing on race lately, and in that light, I wanted to forward on this terrific column from the Rocky Mountain News by Paul Campos. It uses sports language to show how racism really is a structural - rather than individual - problem. Here's the key point:
A mistake people make about racism is to think it's primarily a personal flaw which some people have and others don't, as opposed to something that distorts our society at a structural level, whatever particular individuals may believe or say.
One of the easiest places to see this is in the sports world, where certain racial cliches and stereotypes get expressed in relatively unself-conscious ways. These stereotypes reflect the sort of language we are now seeing from Clinton and her advisers, about "blue-collar" voters.
Just as in Clinton's special political language, in the world of sports "blue-collar" is a code word for "white." A bunch of other terms - "gritty," "gutty," "hard-nosed," "lunch-bucket ethic," and of course "intelligent" - work in the same fashion.
The idea is that white players must overcome their lack of God-given athletic talent (which is apparently conceptualized as God's version of affirmative action for black players) through good moral character, and in particular the classic Puritan virtue of hard work.
As I said, read the whole column here.
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About David Sirota
David Sirota is a political journalist and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist at Creators Syndicate. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Hostile Takeover. He lives in Denver, Colorado. His daily blog can be found at CREDO Action. He contributes regularly to the Denver Post's Web site, is a senior editor at In These Times magazine and is working on his second book. He has been profiled in Newsweek and the Rocky Mountain News and is widely known for his reporting on political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties. Sirota serves as co-chair of the Progressive States Network, a 501(c)3 organization that supports state legislators and that is a partner of CREDO.
You can subscribe to Sirota's e-mail newsletter by going to davidsirota.com and signing up in the lefthand corner. To find out more about Sirota, download his official biography or see his recent media appearances. You can e-mail him at sirota@credoaction.com.
The views expressed on this blog are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of Working Assets (publisher of CREDO Action) or the institutions Sirota works for.
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Discussion
Demographical terms are used so much in any political analysis that for someone to insinuate (per the article cited) that Clinton was attempting to be racist by her trying to identify a strong constituency of hers (working and middle class whites who tend to be populist in ideology) is simply absurd. I actually think that the constant reiteration by Obama's surrogates describing Obama's supporters as being more intelligent, more affluent, and less populist (populism now becoming a veiled term indicating racism) is a tactic much more political in nature than what Clinton happened to say about one of her constituencies.
In the end I think it will be much more the elitism of the Obama campaign as well as its seeming intolerance toward other viewpoints, as well as its anti-populism, that will doom the candidacy much more than the race issue.
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