Law Schools, Politics, Racism

A Controversial Law Professor Predicted This Election 24 Years Ago

Clues from a famous story...

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Earth from spaceIf you’ve ventured onto social media the last week and have any friends or family deconstructing the most insane electoral mixup since Dewey defeated Truman, you’ve eventually run into two competing claims: “white racists did this” and “it couldn’t be the racists, because they voted for Obama twice.” The latter point focuses on the fact that exit polling — as well as anecdotal accounts throughout the election from embedded reporters — showed that, specifically in the Upper Midwest “Rust Belt,” the segment of voters that really swung the state comprised a whole lot of Obama voters who sided with Trump.

Of course these arguments seek to prove both too much and not enough about the state of play in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Certainly there’s nothing about voting for Obama that immunizes white people from taking an active role in promoting racism. Putting aside that racism can always be a la carte — it’s more than plausible for white people to harbor racial animus toward, say, Muslims but not other minorities — that someone might vote for Obama and then vote for Trump for motivations entirely devoid of racial animus is still, you know, definitionally “racist.” It’s not like joining the Klan, of course, but if the Klan were the font of all racism here we’d be in a much better country.

For example, two people can be equally motivated by “toss ‘em out” anti-establishment urges and the white guy can go ahead and vote for Trump and the Muslim woman can’t. No matter how anti-establishment she is, she doesn’t have the luxury to say “let’s see where this Trump thing goes!” And that distinction is what we term white privilege and fundamentally makes what happened about race even when the white guy says he didn’t vote based on any of Trump’s positions on race.

That said, don’t dismiss out of hand that these people voted for Obama. That says something important about the priorities these voters hold. It’s certainly a race matter to hold minority lives as contingent to some other issue, but the voters making this choice aren’t people who believe in selling out minorities on a whim, and that’s a useful fact.

Since the election, as more and more is coming out about what transpired in the Rust Belt last Tuesday (including reviews of data patterns and rhetoric going back to the 2008 and 2016 primaries), I’ve thought a lot about “The Space Traders.” Written in 1992, the short story by critical race scholar Derrick Bell hypothesized what would happen if a group of aliens descended upon America and offered mass sums of wealth, limitless clean energy, and a solution to the environment in exchange for all of America’s black people.

Ultimately, of course, the United States agrees and ships the black folk off to an uncertain fate aboard what appear to be alien slave ships. A cursory read of the story calls out white America for being a bunch of racists — which is, in a sense, a fair reading — but the real point of the story isn’t the swath of the overtly racist population just happy for any excuse to rid the country of African-Americans, it’s just how many of the white moderate/liberal folks slowly, over the course of days, convince themselves that it’s an acceptable trade to get a solution to problems like climate change. A whole lot of the people who were shocked and horrified on day 1 come around to sell out black people by the end.

I remember the first time I heard that story, as a white guy, I thought it was overexaggerating the extent of white racism because mainstream political discourse had me still viewing “racism” as donning a hood. It took poring over it again and again to notice that the trade is really going down because a hefty chunk of people who are loudly anti-racist today easily sell out their supposed allies the next day once the price is sweet enough.

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Or, relevant to this election, if if the promise to help the desperate is palpable enough that they feel they have no choice but to take the trade.

And that’s where we are in these crucial states. Along with the inveterate hate criminals, some well-meaning core of the population in those states specifically heard something from Trump that sold them on ignoring the rest of the Trump message and selling out minority populations. Figuring out how to avoid that next time is the mission for Democratic politics going forward: it’s not about pandering to racists, it’s about countering far-right efforts to exploit economic hardship to steal votes.

In the 2008 primary, Barack Obama told the people of Wisconsin:

It’s a Washington where politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton voted for a war in Iraq that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged — a war that is costing us thousands of precious lives and billions of dollars a week that could’ve been used to rebuild crumbling schools and bridges; roads and buildings; that could’ve been invested in job training and child care; in making health care affordable or putting college within reach.

In his last-minute swing through the upper Midwest, Donald Trump told a rally in Michigan this the week before the election:

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We need a new foreign policy that puts America first, and we are going to have it very very quickly. Hillary led us to disaster in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya… Hillary and our failed Washington establishment have spent $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East, and now it’s worse than it’s ever been before… We shouldn’t have gone into the war. And she thinks I’m a hawk… Imagine if some of the money had been spent — six trillion dollars in the Middle East — on building new schools and roads and bridges right here in Michigan. Now Hillary, trapped in her Washington bubble that’s blind to the lessons, wants to start a shooting war in Syria — in conflict with a nuclear armed Russia — that could drag us into World War III… The arrogant political class never learns. They keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

That was how he campaigned there. That’s the basket of untold riches he offered in the metaphorical space trade up there. Is it any wonder that someone who voted for Obama after his 2008 speech would be willing to jump on board with this message?

Meanwhile, to counter Trump’s message in those states, Hillary Clinton ran a Katy Perry ad.

Holy hell.

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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