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What?s Black And White And Red All Over?

According to eminent Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson in a New York Times OpEd today, it?s the red phone in Hillary?s 3 a.m. ad. After ?[r]epeated watching of the ad on YouTube,? Patterson writes,

I realized that I had only too often in my study of America?s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.

I am not referring to the fact that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be answered by someone who was ?unsure, unsteady, untested.? Why do I believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear.
....
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad?s central image ? innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger ? it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn?t help but think of D. W. Griffith?s ?Birth of a Nation,? the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad ? as I see it ? is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

Patterson?s OpEd is a good example of the lunacy of today?s overheated, hair-trigger racial sensitivity. (Oops! Will Patterson think that ?hair-trigger? a ?racist sub-message? reference to black crime?) If we continue to go down this road pretty soon people will be bring charges of racist workplace harassment against co-workers who bring books to work with titles they don?t like.

Oh, wait

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).