The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (review)

As long as race continues to divide Americans, politicians will try to use the issue to their advantage. In the post-civil-rights era, politicians have tended to rely on more subtle appeals to voters' racial prejudices, using code words like crime, welfare, and affirmative action to inject racial issues into campaigns without being explicitly racist. The conventional wisdom has been that these subtle appeals are effective, prompting the opposing party to use similar symbols or attempt to avoid the issue altogether. Mendelberg agrees, but with an important twist: These appeals are only successful while they remain implicit. When whites are made aware that racism is driving the political strategy, they are reminded of their egalitarian beliefs and reject the strategy. Mendelberg argues that progressives ought to be more aggressive in challenging campaign efforts to race-bait because they will be successful when doing so.

Mendelberg's book is wide-ranging, providing a historical overview of the use of race in campaigns from the 1800s to the present, comparing anti-black sentiment with prejudice toward women and gays and lesbians, and contrasting the experience of the United States with that of Austria and both Nazi and post-Nazi Germany. Much of the book focuses on political psychology and provides extensive evidence from controlled experiments that show how whites sometimes maintain and sometimes change their views about blacks and racial equality within the context of electoral gamesmanship. A particularly interesting chapter examines the role of politicians and the media in initially avoiding and then highlighting the racism of the Willy Horton ad in the 1988 U.S. presidential election. Mendelberg skillfully provides behind-the-scenes calculations by campaign leaders and a content analysis of the media's handling of the ad, finding that the media was slow to criticize the Republican efforts at race-baiting. Only when Jesse Jackson called the ad race-baiting did it become national news.

Historical scholars will find Mendelberg's overviews of the nineteenth and twentieth century interesting, if not entirely new. Her historical method relies on a few secondary sources (some of which themselves rely on secondary sources) to cover a great deal of ground in relatively few pages. This strategy can lead to problematical conclusions, particularly with regard to her use of the term "norm." Mendelberg defines norm as "an informal standard of social behavior accepted by most members of the culture and that guides and constrains behavior" (17). Norms, she argues, ultimately determine whether politicians make explicit or implicit claims about race. When norms promote racial equality (such as in the post-civil-rights era), politicians resort to implicit appeals; when norms promote racial inequality (such as prior to the civil-rights era), politicians can be explicit. Mendelberg argues that white racial attitudes determine whether or not politicians rely on racial appeals. However, she does not clearly articulate how deeply rooted these norms are; nor does she explore their complexity and inconsistency. Hence, she does not examine whether politicians and institutions can determine their importance.

Historical scrutiny reveals that norms fluctuate wildly according to their historical and political context. By underplaying the degree to which these norms are complicated (especially in her short discussion of pre-1945 Germany), Mendelberg downplays the importance that historical context, institutions, and social actors play in determining whether they manifest themselves in a manner of political significance.