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Harvard sociology prof Orlando Patterson sees racism in Hillary's 3 a.m. ad.

By Ann Althouse

He says:

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.

The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father ? or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black ? both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.

I thought the child with the letters "NIG" on his/her pajamas was black, but then Patterson isn't seeing ? or talking about ? the letters. I don't know if Patterson considered talking about those letters and decided his piece would be stronger without pressing that point. If he did, he was probably right. In any case, he detects a substantial racial message, and he suspects it was intended:

It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass to which we may have come ? that someone could be trading on the darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to transcend.

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