In one of my first pieces for TAP, I tried to explain the cultural and political forces between the arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate. The New York Times obliges with another example of the double standard set merely because of race.
However forceful and passionate Mr. Obama can be, his speeches and public appearances this week have underscored how he is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs and homes. He often talks about growing up on food stamps and about having paid off his student loans only recently, yet his tone and volume, body language, facial expressions and words convey a certain distance from the ache that many voters feel.
As Jamison Foser points out at County Fair, this analysis is contradicted by all available polling information. Foser also accuses the Times of "injecting race" into an article where it doesn't belong with this paragraph:
For Mr. Obama, the financial crisis poses different risks. He wants to appear fired up over the economy, but he has written before about wanting to avoid appearing like a stereotypical angry black man. Unlike Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black leaders whose fulminations could scare white voters, Mr. Obama is not from and of New York, Detroit, or the segregated South; he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. To some degree Mr. Obama faces the opposite challenge from fiery black leaders who came before him: Is he too cool for a crisis like this one?
This isn't injecting race into the article, because race is the very reason this article was written. This is an example of journalism reinforcing the very trends it purports to examine. It's what can be called "Goldilocks Racism" -- the idea that black people are always too hot or too cold and only white people can be just right. If Obama were showing a great deal of populist anger on the stump, we would be treated to reams of analysis about how he is "too hot," regardless of what the polls said.
We've been down this road before. In the beginning of the campaign, Obama was too professorial. Later, there was too much high-flying rhetoric. Is he too smart? Is he a lightweight? Too black? Not black enough? While one candidate is acting increasingly erratic and reckless, the Times runs an article about the calm and collected temperament of his rival, but as a flaw. This isn't a problem with Obama; this is a problem with us.
--A. Serwer
