Race Appeal: How Candidates Invoke Race in U.S. Political Campaigns

1. Producing Race Appeal: The Political Ads of White and Minority Candidates

1 Producing Race Appeal The Political Ads of White and Minority Candidates W IllIE Horton’S ImagE achieved iconic status during the 1988 presidential campaign. His darkened, menacing Black visage came to represent an amalgam of visceral associations: Black brutality and unbridled sexual appetite; White innocence and vulnerability; and “liberal ” crime policy run amok. The Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, became entangled in the conglomeration of associated fears produced by the political ads, by news media ad watches, and by social commentary and political speeches that invoked Horton’s name or likeness. The fierce debate that followed over the nature of the race appeal involving Horton was largely motivated by widespread public recognition that something was questionable—if not wrong—with this form of political rhetoric. It made some political stomachs churn because, though the racial component appeared to many to be subtly deployed, this race appeal summoned the basest form of White voters’ racial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about African Americans (particularly Black men). Initial scholarly attempts to understand race-based appeals were motivated by this uneasiness, not only with negative advertising trends in general (Copeland and Johnson-Cartee 1991; Garramone, Atkin, pinkleton, and Cole 1990; Jamieson 1992; Kaid and Johnston 1991; Merritt 1984), but with racialized political communication more specifically. It represented an attempt by researchers to understand the negative ramifications such appeals might have on the American democratic system , not to mention what it might reveal about the state of American race relations and social life more generally. 1 The empirical evidence on Race Appeals This concern notwithstanding, we argue that Willie Horton’s race appeal— in both campaign politics and political scholarship—is but one of many forms of race-based persuasive messages political candidates have employed and continue to employ. This is to say that the Horton appeal represents but one of many particular types of race-based appeals that are tailored to a specific set of electoral circumstances, motivations of candidates, political strategies, and both anticipated and unforeseen consequences. The potential offensiveness of such appeals—firmly rooted in America’s embarrassing, brutal, and oppressive racist history—led scholars to focus on this single form of racialized communication. This myopic focus, however, blinded us to the myriad other forms of race-based appeals that played out in American political campaigns , before and after we were introduced to Willie Horton. If we are to fully understand how race has served, and continues to serve, as a persuasive platform on which to mount strategic communication campaigns, we must look more broadly at this wider variety of race-based appeals. yet when we start down the path to investigate the broad landscape of racialized communication by political candidates, we immediately hit a roadblock . That is, we are forced to ask: What is a race-based appeal? Despite more than twenty years of scholarship about the racial discourse candidates employ in U.S. political campaigns, scholars and lay people alike approach discussions about race-based appeals using the same I-know-it-when-I-see-it logic that Supreme Court Justice potter Stewart used in a 1964 case involving pornography. As with obscenity, however, the problem is that we all “see” different things in political advertisements, because we bring multiple cultural perspectives to our interpretations. Despite the scholarly rush and empirical attempts to determine what effect race-based appeals might have on the electorate, scholars never have seemed to be very concerned with answering the most fundamental question: What exactly is a race-based appeal? That is, there is little empirical evidence enabling a viewer to make specific, reasonable determinations about whether a given message constitutes some form of a race-based appeal. Tali Mendelberg (2001) offers the broad distinction that implicit race-based appeals— those with which scholars generally concern themselves—are constructed through oblique, racially coded language, images, or (more effectively) some combination of the two. But deciphering code is tricky—racial codes, in particular . We have few guideposts for interpreting certain messages other than our own personal and private points of view. We might consider some recent examples. In television ads and Internet messages used during the 2006 U.S. Senate campaign in Tennessee, the republican national Committee (rnC) persisted in attaching the label “slick” to the African American Democratic party candidate Harold Ford Jr. The rnC used the term to refer to everything from Ford’s speech to his choice of Producing Race...